I have just started reading Mark Burgess's book ''View From The Hill''.
For those that don't know, Mark is / was the front man for the most criminally overlooked band from Manchester (well, Middleton) - The Chameleons.
Anyway, before I started from the beginning, I flicked through to the late 1990's / early 2000's as Mark was working in the ticket office at Maine Road and I was wondering if he mentioned that......
He certainly did and it was an eye opener..... anyone around at the time will know what a shambles the ticket office was..... here are a few bits.....
Most of the staff on match days were students with no interest in the game, just making money to get them through college years - and Mark claims that the senior manager, named only as 'Duncan' (I'm sure we all know who he is lol) was a bit of a twit. He says Duncan delegated everything out to the point that no one knew what it was he did himself! And whenever Duncan did take responsibility for something, it ended up in disaster....
One example of this was the two gigs Oasis did at Maine Road and Duncan - despite many warnings - refused to accept credit card bookings over the phone or fax applications. It had to be cash at the window and two tickets per person. So selling around 100,000 tickets chaos soon loomed and as besieged ticket office staff worked hard to cope with the demand, Duncan locked himself in his office! Not only that but 5000 quids worth of tickets ''went missing'' and when Duncan called the club secretary (named as Mr H), Mr H came to the ticket office and read the riot act with Duncan.
Mark was later promoted to a senior managerial position and given his own office. One of the first things he did was buy a steel cabinet with a lock on it and kept the away game tickets in the cabinet - his predecessor kept them in a shoe box under the table.... Mark says that by limiting the amount of away game tickets given to the counter staff each day and locking them up at night, for the first time in 5 years, the away game ticket money balanced accurately!
One day Duncan came in and asked Mark to do a specific job. Colin Bell had been sacked the day before and Duncan gave him Bell's season ticket and asked him to delete Bell from the database and get the seats on the computer for selling. Mark sat in his office, thinking about what Colin Bell meant to him, City and City fans and could not do it. He went to see Duncan and simply asked him to get one of the casual staff, who knew nothing about football, never mind the person in question, to do it. Duncan refused, stating he had asked Mark to do the job and expected him to do it. Mark slammed the door behind him and went back to his office. Later another staff member came in and took the season ticket away with him, saying he would get one of the casual staff to do it.
Mark was slowly getting back into the music business and after one more row with Duncan, he said he would quit and stay long enough to train the new person and then be off.
I remember Mark coming round to supporters clubs to talk about the move to the new ground and how he ended being asked more questions about The Chameleons than he did City!
Anyway.... time to start on page 1....
