From there, we headed back to the hotel, with Madam wanting to take her time. For my part, I was only interested in one thing, namely getting to the venue and finding my way inside. Once I was there I was happy to wait, but you (or, I guess, I) actually want to be there and ready. With the doors open at 6:30 (the Lounge, whatever that was, opened at five) we headed off just before half past, and got there to encounter decidedly odd entry arrangements.
For a start, where you’d expect to be making your way into the venue, there was a sign in Japanese, advising this was not the point of entry for the general public and directing us towards a staircase. That took us up to a rooftop space, where we were ushered towards a staircase that led back down to a point less than ten metres from the sign that sent us on the cross country ramble.
It didn’t stop there. Once we’d descended there was a fairly brusque demand for an extra ¥500 for what seemed to be a compulsory drink. Madam was definitely not impressed, and while I wasn’t totally pissed off by the demand, I prefer to exercise my own discretion when it comes to buying things.
And neither of us impressed by marshals barking highly amplified instructions over bull horns. It seems the conventional wisdom when dealing with crowds in Japan is that you can't organise large groups of people in an orderly manner without the high volume instructions, which is fine in open spaces like the Luminaria in Kobe, where the same organising principle applied. There had, after all, been around 180 000 people the night we were there.
Here, in a confined space, with a crowd that wouldn’t have reached two thousand, things were definitely over the top. You almost got a sense of an attempt to make the paying punter suffer for the impertinence of turning up since he or she was obviously incapable of making his or her way inside without specific instructions.
Still, having taken the tokens, we collected beer and white wine, drank and headed inside, one grumbling and t’other looking forward to two and a half hours of prime Costello and the Imposters.