Everything I did to try and get a Hayley Williams ticket
And what I learned about embarrassment and having fun in the process.
Hello!
Hope everyone is well 🫶
It is Tuesday and not Friday but I wanted to bring you an emergency dispatch while the topic is still timely. Some of you may have seen I shared on Instagram my quest to find Hayley Williams (hayley) tickets this weekend. I wanted to share the full version of events with you, including what it taught me about being cringe, finding joy as an adult, and how we feel about growing up.
Thank you for reading, and enjoy the rest of your week!
Holly x
P.S. we may be back this Friday with a mini newsletter, but if not, the next issue will be next week as normal. <3
Maybe it started in 2007, when my brother bought me Riot! by Paramore on CD. I’d listen to ‘crushcrushcrush’ on repeat, my 10-year-old life very far away from the lyrics to which I was singing along. Or maybe it was in 2017, running miles to After Laughter to process my decaying relationship with my first love. It was definitely in the first few months of 2026, when my difficult winter gym sessions were soundtracked by Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, the surprise Hayley Williams solo album that appeared as a bunch of MP3 files on her website last year. “So hit me, I can’t get soft / Cause I’m too hard / And my ribs are metal cages / To guard my heart,” echoed in my ears as I increased the weight of my dumbbells. The aim was to get strong in more ways than one.
We each have a few artists that we connect with on a deeper level, whose contributions are not background ambience but a fundamental piece of our existence. Sometimes we’re a little coy about these feelings, because so much of the processing happens when we’re alone, wearing headphones. Fandom can also feel childlike, something we develop in adolescence then shy away from as we grow up. Still, live shows are the best mechanism we have to make our relationship to art both more tangible and more communal, which is exactly why I was gutted to miss out on Hayley Williams tickets in November last year. She’d just announced a small tour, her first as a solo artist after her pandemic shows were cancelled.
The tour for EDAABP was a huge underplay, which is the industry term for when artists book much smaller venues than they could. Hayley talked about wanting to feel safe in a smaller crowd, since so much of the music is so vulnerable and without the comfort of the band. I also think she’s too humble to go straight in with big venues. The result was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see one of my favourite artists in a setting she’d outgrown years ago. That’s the thing about music industry success; so much of the initial intimacy is lost with scale.
When I failed to get tickets the first time around, I vowed to try resale options closer to the time. I spent much of the last two weeks doing this, and went a little bit mad in the process.
Here is a list of all the things I tried, which get progressively more unhinged:
I set alerts for resale tickets on Ticketmaster, Twickets, and the Roundhouse venue directly.
I emailed the venue, and some PRs, to try and explore press tickets to cover this event for Capsule
My partner found an automated bot service called Ticket-alerts.live, which promised to deliver resale ticket notifications faster than Twickets. (This is not a bot to purchase tickets, rather another method of receiving a notification that tickets are being made available). I paid £10 for it. The notifications were not faster than Twickets for me
Then I saw people on Reddit talking about Pyngo, a ticket alert service and fan community designed to help people get tickets via Discord notifications. I paid £15 and joined
This was the period I really started to feel insane: constantly checking notifications, switching between browsers, and reading mini-guides within the Discord server on the best tactics for how and when to click Ticketmaster links. (If you’re reading this and you’re acquainted with the 10-minute rule, I see you and I feel you.)
There was comfort and humour in seeing a community of other people equally driven to madness by the process, but I also started to realise that maybe this whole thing wasn’t such a healthy way to spend my time. I had created the illusion of progress, but in reality, I was no closer to a ticket, the event was almost a day away, and I was flushing cortisol through my body every hour.
“I think your phone might be making you unhappy,” my partner, Josh, gently said to me one evening. I knew he was right and decided it might be time to give up, although I never stopped clicking the links. I secretly hoped the old adage of “you find something when you stop looking for it” might apply to me.
When I relayed each of the measures I’d taken in a team meeting on Friday, my manager suggested I make a post about it. I was flooded with embarrassment. I can’t publicly out myself as the sort of person who would do this, I thought. But I was the sort of person who would do this; I had been doing it all week.
And so I made the post. A simple rundown of all the things I had done to try and get Hayley Williams tickets, each step progressively more deranged. I clicked publish, and told myself I could archive it if it totally flopped. I spent the rest of the evening in the park, telling my friends about the hunt but also trying to move on. The show was too close now, my chances were over.
By the time I got home on Friday evening, the post had a little bit of engagement, but nothing major. Then two of our friends called Josh, which was a little random but I didn’t think much of it. Josh put the phone to my face. I remember thinking they want to talk to you, not me but said hello anyway. They said it was a real shame about the show. I told them, “I know, I’m gutted, I went insane over it.”
“But you have to go,” they said. “We got you a ticket.”
“What?!
How?!
WHY?!
Is it a really expensive ticket from StubHub?” I was frantic and sort of crying and freaking out.
They explained that they had found a StubHub ticket, and warned that it might not be 100%, but that they wanted to split the cost three ways as an early 30th present to me. I wept at their kindness, and also felt worried deep down that the ticket would not work, or that something would generally go wrong. It did not feel real.
And then I woke up on Saturday to a bunch of comments and DMs on Instagram. The post had found its audience; swathes of Hayley fans also looking for tickets or those who understood the struggle. People advised me to show up to the venue anyway and find someone with a spare ticket like they had done. Others messaged me privately offering to sell me their spare ticket. One person even invited me to join them for free. I worried about being scammed – how would I choose the right person? I scrolled through profiles to try and discern whether they looked like legit fans I was lucky to connect with, or whether I’d set up the perfect conditions for a fraud to make some money.
And then another DM popped up, around 10am. It was from Hayley’s manager, who had seen the post, and offered to put me on the guest list if I could make the Saturday show.
“What the actual hell?” I said to Josh. “What the hell, is this real?” I read the text out again and again, holding my phone in the air like a wand.
I scrolled through her profile and recognised people and moments that proved its legitimacy: Hayley at the Grammys, small press moments you’d only spot if you were really in the know, like the London photo shoot for The Face. It was real. How was this happening?
I shared my details, thanked her profusely, and went for a run. “We are going to have the best day ever,” I said over and over to Josh, who would be joining me for the ride.
The next few hours looked like this. We headed to the venue early for the 3-5pm merch sale. The queue was already all the way down the street. I bought a purple t-shirt. The show was close but it still didn’t feel real; I was excited but so afraid of jinxing it. I told two people in my life what was happening, too worried to let it leak further.
The security guard told us to leave and come back at 7pm when the box office opened, so we went for some local food. I didn’t have much of an appetite, and passed the time by reading an article in the Guardian Saturday magazine aloud to Josh. At 6pm I managed to eat a few chicken wings, then we headed to the venue to find our fate.
The entrance was dense with demands: members’ tickets, accessibility tickets, and other random requests. I entered that state of calmness one has to activate when around security staff who have the power to change the course of your night. I waited, I smiled at others, and said very little. It could still all go wrong.
And then the box office doors opened, and we shuffled in. I walked up to the desk and shared my name, and just as it was leaving my mouth I saw the letters of my surname printed out on the sheet in front of him. Holly Beddingfield x2, GA (general admission). Holy shit. I was passed a paper ticket (how novel), and entered with so much ease that it made the previous week’s worth of unhinged antics feel comedic. I went from paying to receive notifications, studying niche Discord guides and timing the exact second of clicking a link to waltzing into an air-conditioned building without needing to queue. It was wild.
The next few hours were magical. We watched Tiberius b, an artist I discovered either on Hayley’s Instagram Stories or on the ‘Everything is Emo’ podcast she made for the BBC. Next was Water From Your Eyes, a band I’d dabbled with prior but understood more fully after seeing the live performance. Now I was inside I finally started to relax, and the changing feeling in my stomach emphasised how abnormal I’d felt for the past 24 hours.
And then it was time for Hayley’s set. I took two photos and put my phone away for the rest. I felt so lucky to be there that I didn’t want to spend the time on my phone. I danced to every song, racking up tens of thousands of steps, and sang every lyric. The crowd formed a choir for Hayley, our voices creating an additional instrument throughout the show. Everyone inside got it, none of us were here casually. Phone usage was way lower than other gigs in memory. We all knew how lucky we were just to be there.
I felt like a teenager. Beaming, screaming, occasionally crying. It is hard to put into words the catharsis of singing ‘Parachute’ in a crowd who feel the same, but the feeling was comparable to the euphoria of leaving a job you’ve outgrown or when the penny drops after six months of therapy. Throughout the show I had the same thought at least five or six times: I am so happy to be here. It was so simple, so uncomplicated. I felt high on the certainty of my joy: there was no questioning about where I was meant to be. I was just having the best time and was so aware of it.
That sense of feeling like a teenager is something I have been reflecting on since Saturday night. I was embarrassed at the prospect of sharing my ticket hunt on Instagram because it felt childlike: to go to all that effort, and to be so desperate, felt like something that would be acceptable if I was 10 years younger but not now. I thought a few times that this story might be sweet for a teenager but I’m nearly 30, what was I doing? I imagined what people would think of me. Who would cringe while swiping through the carousel? Who did I hope would miss the post? And who would I look to for comfort, because they would get it?
If seeing your favourite artists live (and occasionally jumping through many hoops to do so) is an experience associated with youth, then I can see why people are afraid of growing up. Why would you want to lose that experience? What exactly is not “mature” about caring about something so much that you want to feel it in person and invest even further? This is something I am negotiating with myself in response to my own shame. It also reminds me of conversations my friends have about “when we’ll stop going to Glastonbury,” the undertone being a quiet question: when are we too old to have this sort of fun?
I think I had an idea of the sort of person I would and would not be in my thirties, formed at a time when 30 sounded really old. Concert culture was a huge part of my teenage years (starting at age 11!) and into my twenties, but in recent years I’ve felt the swing from being one of the younger people in the room to the middle ground, or even leaning older for some (I like Bedroom Pop sorry!). I think many of us can relate to the feeling of reaching a stage in your life and expecting to feel different than you actually do. In reality, although we’ve had experiences that have developed our psyche and progressed our tastes and desires, so much of what remains is our essential core, set right at the beginning of our lives. I actually feel that even more so as I grow up and allow certain things to fall away.
And to circle back to Hayley. Part of the reason why her latest album resonated so much with me was because of the growth it charted. She tells us so clearly who she used to be and who she is now; on ‘Whim’ we learn about her tendency to self sabotage, on ‘Negative Self Talk’ she is sick of hearing herself, and by ‘Love Me Different’ she accepts the responsibility of being the sort of love she desires. There is so much progression but also a moment of acceptance for who she is and what she needs.
There is something to learn from here. My experiences over the past few days have made me more and more certain that we should seek out the things that have always brought us joy, whether they feel childlike or not.
Sometimes “inner child work” will be sort of cool, like making yourself a one-off piece of clothing that gets you a bunch of compliments in the pub. And sometimes it will not. Sometimes you will cry at things that feel inconsequential to others or show up to a dance class on your own, looking sort of strange compared to everyone else all dressed the same. But then something magical happens when you accept yourself: all the euphoria is waiting on the other side.
I suggest we tread closer to the things we so often dismiss with an ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that,’ and explore what is waiting for us just beyond the embarrassment or the coyness. I believe they call it cringe mountain, and I hope to climb it again.
Great read!!
I'm glad this worked out for you! I still chase tickets at 60. Please don't think you are too old to be passionate about music. It never ends. Why do you have to be a "grown up"?