A new tablet app may sound the death knell for party gatecrashers, but let’s remember young creatives rely on favours to get ahead 
Ah, the simple thrill of a successful blag. Door staff have been sidestepped like soldiers at a checkpoint in Nazi-occupied France (or so it feels), with a quick rebuttal along the lines of “Vivian’s a boy’s name too”. As you descend the stairs into the previously off-limits celebrity hangout, you see someone off the telly heading to the loo – this is the life! Then it’s to the bar, where yourself and fellow blaggers – the ‘real’ people, the only people you have anything in common with in the whole damned party – can indulge the free drinks tab like a starving litter of puppies at their mother’s teat.
Actually I’ve always been terrible at blagging: the act of “using persuasion or guile to obtain something.” I’m too self-conscious, too easily embarrassed to really pull it off. Blagging doesn’t just apply to party hopping of course. Film and TV has been obsessed with the idea of getting something for nothing for years: think the Ocean’s 11 franchise or The Real Hustle. It could be argued Hollywood is one giant blag. Cold War espionage? Blag central.
A new tablet app called Zkipster (pronounced ‘skipster’) could put an end to the fun however. Aimed at professional events planners, it allows users to digitally manage multiple guest lists across devices, via The Cloud. A mere obstacle in the road for the skilled blag-artist of course, but it’s the zFace add-on that may scupper gatecrashers, as Zkipster co-founder David Becker explains.
“zFace is mainly used for high-end events with a tight guest list, extra security needs and a lot of media attention. Event planners use zFace to source, select and match faces with names prior to the event. Guests drop their names and the face pulls up in real time. Giving gatecrashers a hard time wasn’t our initial goal but it became a selling point”
“It could be argued Hollywood is one giant blag. Cold War espionage? Blag central”
Zkipster has already been used to run lists at Cinema Against AIDS at Cannes 2014 and Elton John’s post-Oscars party – the holy grail of party blags. The idea for the app originated from a disastrous night back in 2008, when Becker and his business partner were running an event at the University of Zurich. Says Becker: “We had 1200 people subscribed to our guest list. When we opened the door there was a long line which kept on growing because we weren’t fast enough with our manual check-in; guests walked away and we realized that there had to be a better way to run guest list management.”
Thinking ahead, Becker says he would be “honoured” were people to start using the app for private events such as house parties and gigs. The professional pricing of the app – around £45 per event pay as you go, up to £110 per month for a seasonal plan – currently makes this unlikely, but it does stir intriguing visions of riotous house parties with half-crazed tablet wielding hosts roaming the dance floor, checking people off against their Facebook profiles – not exactly in the spirit of spontaneity of course.
“Giving gatecrashers a hard time wasn’t our initial goal but it became a selling point”
Aside from this however, let’s not forget that many small creative businesses and individuals rely on favours to get an initial foothold in the market. Whilst researching this piece I asked friends and colleagues to submit their favourite blagging anecdotes. Most centred on booze and parties, but this one from writer and artist John Rogers perfectly illustrates the point.
“I didn’t buy a concert ticket between the ages of 17 and 19 and just went and hung around outside the Wolverhampton Civic Hall waiting for the bands to arrive. We’d just ask the bands if we could be on the guest list, and without exception they said yes. I started a paper fanzine that I’d photocopy 50 copies of and give away and started phoning major labels asking for interviews, and before long was getting backstage with Elastica, Supergrass, Sleeper, etc, and doing interviews with them. It was a really fun time. It didn’t matter that the publication barely existed.”
So let’s not kill-off the noble art of blagging just yet. After all, the people who aren’t really supposed to be at the party are often the most interesting of all.
