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Florence Welech from Florence and the Machine has a Brit award and a platinum album under her belt and her band are favourite to win tonight’s Mercury Prize.

But her mum still doesn’t think she can make ends meet as a singer and wants her to get a real job.

The 22-year old, who will perform at the Mercury awards in London, said: “My mum knows I love the music business but she doesn’t see this as something I can make a living from.

“She says, ‘If I thought you were going into this to make money, I’d tell you to stop. But I can see you are doing it because you love it so much, so I think you should go for it’. But she thinks as a business, it’s an awful decision.

“Right now, the fact that I am able to travel around, perform and play means I am exceptionally lucky.

“I am interested in making music, not money.”

Flame-haired Flo acknowledges that most parents would be worried about letting their daughter travel the world with a rock ‘n’ roll band.

But she claims understanding the pitfalls helps her to survive the ups and downs on the road.

“It is super highs and super lows,” she said.

“It is really extreme. You come off stage with the most amazing adrenalin rush and go and have a party with your friends and it is all amazing.

“The next morning, you feel rubbish and have to do the menial stuff. That can get you down.

“You get such a rush because singing releases endorphins and performing gives you such as high. Maybe some people have tried to recreate that.

“But you’ve got to be able to calm down from time to time. That is why it is good that I have a really supportive family and I can go home and calm down with them.”

Florence And The Machine’s debut album Lungs reached No2 in the chart and is on course to sell 500,000 copies by the end of the year.

If it wins the coveted Mercury Prize tonight, the band will take home a cheque for £20,000.

Flo added: “It’s an amazing prize and it would be great if it helped whoever wins to go on and make more music. I would use it to get a studio.”

The singer has tipped Glasvegas to win the prize.

She is pals with the Glasgow band and said that if they walk away with the award, they won’t let the glory go to their heads.

She said: “I would really love Glasvegas to win. They really deserve it.

“They are not the type of people to get carried away by it.”

Unless you have time on your hands, being in the right place at the right time to get a sports or concert ticket before it sells out is not easy. For example, the whole U2 have just sold 2.5 million tickets for their 2009 tour of the US. So how on earth can a person who’s got a full time job get to purchase a ticket if they sell out so quickly?

They have to buy one second-hand online.

In the dark days prior to the internet, you had to purchase your second-hand ticket through a ticket tout at the event itself. This meant getting cheated, or even perhaps being handed bogus tickets which would inevitably be spotted as you tried to enter the event - and that means you miss the game or concert while throwing away your dosh by being scammed.

Nonetheless, things have improved for music and sports devotees. The resale ticket marketplace has improved remarkably in the last decade or so, thanks to the internet. These days there is so much competition to resell tickets online, the market has become self-regulating. Your tickets don’t have insurance? I’l get my ticket from another website! Many ticket sellers provide insurance if the event / gig is cancelled. And with strong competition online, resale tickets have dropped in price to the stage that it can sometimes be you’re not paying a lot more than the face value price. Many ticket purchasers look at prices between dozens of vendors selling resold tickets for the same event / gig. They evaluate the sale prices, seating, insurance, and even previous history of the vendor before deciding to purchase or not - so the power has considerably moved away from the dodgy tout of days gone by to the ticket purchaser.

These days you can buy tickets for all sorts of concerts and sporting events. From soccer to basketball matches to cricket, to getting your mitts on decent seats for a world famous band; secondary tickets provide a 2nd chance to go to the gig you want to see. How can you buy tickets online? Use a search engine like Google and enter in your words like Kings of Leon tickets, and you will see a large range of secondary ticket agents who have the ticket you’re searching for.

Not everyone is happy with secondary tickets however. Some people call resale ticket brokers as leeches, and they wish to see an end to the resale of event tickets. They are misunderstanding the point of resale tickets : there’s such a short amount of time that someone can get hold of a ticket when it’s on sale the first time it’s on sale.