HARARE - All cheap tickets to nine-time Grammy Award winner and multi-platinum selling crooner John Legend’s Harare show have been sold out, following overwhelming demand from his fan base here.
This will be the singer/songwriter’s first stop in Zimbabwe, and the neo-soul vocalist is keen to connect with his Zimbabwean supporters, organisers said.
The first tickets went on sale on July 2 and closed on July 4. The box office will re-open again on July 11 and 12 from 12 to 8pm.
Only $100, $125 and $150 tickets are available.
Dave Davies of Davies Entertainment, who are organising the show, said the online sales were impressive.
“The physical box office which was located at HICC opened on Wednesday 2nd July and closed down at 5pm on Friday evening,” he said. “The promoters are pleased with the early response to ticket purchases.
“The online reservation was a resounding success and very well received by well over 1 000 fans that made use the website, a lot of them from outside of Harare and even Zimbabwe.
Online reservations and early box office accounted for almost all of the entry level tickets, $30, $50 and $75 which are now sold out. All remaining tickets have been returned to the online reservation platform, available to everybody.”
The tour, which is named after his first Billboard Hot 100 number 1 hit, is in support of his latest record Love in the Future (2013).
Davies said revellers should not wait until the last minute to purchase the tickets, as they might run out.
“The promoters wish to take this opportunity to remind fans that their last show sold out in less than two days,” he said. “Whilst the John Legend show is scheduled for November which seems a long way off, there certainly will not be any tickets available on the day or at the gate so they are encouraged to purchase their tickets early.
The John Legend concert will be a distinguished evening with the venue being fully seated and numbered and has a maximum capacity of fewer than 3475 tickets.
“The demand for the remaining tickets is steady; however the overwhelming request from customers in the remaining ticket categories has been to bring the box office and ticket collections to a more convenient location. The box office will reopen for ticket collections this weekend at Ster-Kinekor at Sam Levy’s Village.”
The show will be part of John Legend’s All of Me tour, which started in California (USA).
He has four shows in South Africa, with two in Johannesburg as well as two in Cape Town.
While Legend was still in college, he met Lauryn Hill, who hired him to play piano on the track Everything Is Everything off her solo album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998).
From there, the young muso went on to meet Kanye West in 2001, who then hired Legend to sing on a number of his tracks. After toiling behind the scenes for three years, the singer released his debut album Get Lifted in 2004 and the offering went on to garner international success and won a number of awards.
So with four studio albums, 35 award nominations, 14 awards (9 of which are Grammy trophies) under his belt, the 35-year-old artist will no doubt put on a killer show.