Twenty-four years of gigs.

From 2002 to 2011, my gig tickets went in a shoebox. After that they came by email, and went nowhere. This weekend I tipped the shoebox out, photographed every ticket, and turned them and the emails into one page, Gigs: twenty-four years of tickets and memories. It's every gig I've been to that there's a record of, 116 so far, on one table you can sort.

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The shoebox

There were 66 photos of 59 tickets, because I'd photographed some twice. Each ticket was cut out of its photo, so it sits on the page like paper on a table, and read by two vision models, Gemini 3.8 Flash and GPT-5.5, separately. Where they disagreed, the reading was settled by hand.

Everything on a ticket is kept: who presented it, who sold it, the face value, when it was bought, the paper it's printed on, and what's happened to it since. Forty-six still have the stub attached. One is signed.

Eleven have someone else's name on them, whoever bought the tickets. Those names are taken off the scans: Apple's text recognition finds them, and the paper around each name fills the gap. The first fill I tried left pale outlines of the letters, so every scan was read again afterwards, turned four ways, to check nothing's left.

One ticket, CSS at Spring & Airbrake in 2007, had lost a corner. Several image models had a go at patching it, side by side, and the patch on the page is OpenAI's. Every other pixel is the photo, and the ticket's entry says which words it filled in.

Then the inbox

After 2011, tickets came by email, so the shoebox stops. A search of my Gmail and calendar found 38 more gigs: 17 from order confirmations, 16 from calendar entries, and the rest from Songkick, a parking booking and an email after the night.

Reading the list back jogged my memory. The Streets, Phosphorescent, The Naked and Famous, Vincent Lima, Future Islands at Brixton and Maggie Rogers had all been maybes until I said I'd been.

One night in 2006 turned up twice: a ticket for Ryan Adams at Mandela Hall in Belfast, and my memory of Zero 7 at the Olympia in Dublin, with José González and Sia. I was in Dublin. The Ryan Adams ticket is still in the box, with its stub never torn off.

A gig with no paper is drawn as the ticket it would have been, in outline: Ticketmaster's proportions, a printer's typeface, and down the stub, where a paper ticket has its serial numbers, how I know I was there. CALENDAR ENTRY. TICKETMASTER ORDER 24-APR-12. FROM MEMORY.

The table

The tickets fall onto the table as you scroll to it. Then there are six ways to lay them out:

• Pile: tipped out, the way they came out of the box.
• Years: 2007 was the busiest, with 14 dated gigs and an Oppenheimer show placed there provisionally from a 2006–08 memory. The paper stops in 2011, and nothing's on record for 2015 or 2021.
• Rooms: 62 named venues, mostly in Belfast, Dublin and London, plus a Warrenpoint gig whose room is still to confirm. Ten are gone and six have new names. The old Mandela Hall and the Speakeasy went with the Students' Union in 2018; the new Mandela Hall opened in 2022.
• Colour: by the colour of the paper. Ticketmaster's pale greens and blues fill the middle; the pinks and creams are the promoters' own.
• Price: face value as printed, in pounds in the North and euros in the South. From £6 for The Tallest Man on Earth to €160 for Oxegen 2006, and one Belle and Sebastian ticket that cost nothing.
• Repeats: 17 acts I went back for. The longest wait was for The Tallest Man on Earth, from 2012 to 2026. On the undercards, Alan Simms comes round four times.

Picking one up

Click a ticket and it lifts off the table. You can zoom in until the print breaks up. Beside it is everything the ticket says, and some things it doesn't: how far ahead I bought it, what the room is now, and the record the act had out that night, with a link to play it on Spotify.

The record is the act's latest album on the night, from MusicBrainz, with a few exceptions that say why. Ninety-nine of the 116 gigs have one. Festivals and club nights don't.

What's missing

It isn't all of them. Before 2011, it's what survived in the shoebox. After that, it's what left a trace in my email or my calendar, and some gigs left neither. Each gig is one entry in a file, so adding one takes a minute. More will go in as I remember them, and if you were at one with me that isn't there, tell me.

How it was made

In one evening, in conversation with Claude Code. That covers the photos, the cut-outs and the reading, the emails, and the page itself, including the arrangements and the outlines.