BT as an ISP / Gogol Bordello concert

BT cold-called me yesterday trying to persuade me to take out a broadband contract with them. I keep getting mailshotted with this sort of thing; typically they'll offer £4.99 for the first three months after which it'll go up to the same I'm getting now with my current ISP, and it's not really worth it for me to save £30 at the price of the hassle of changeover. But this deal from BT sounds quite a bit better: it's £4.99 for broadband and telephone calls for an eighteen month contract. That sounds like it ought to be a better deal... but eighteen months is a long time to be locked into a contract. Before I decide anything, if anyone else here has experience with BT as an ISP, could you let me know how you find them? Do, for example, they have good customer service, or do they charge you 50p per minute to talk to support staff in India with poor grasp of English? Do they have good uptime? Do they have a good web mail interface? Etc.

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In other news, when I gave bluepork a CD by the Romanian Roma (Gypsy) band Taraf de Haïdouks for his birthday, he recommended me back the American Roma-rock band Gogol Bordello. I promptly then forgot about them until I saw a colleague at work wearing a Gogol Bordello top, at which I checked them out on YouTube, loved them, and spent the rest of the evening listening to Gogol Bordello on YouTube. Looking at (or even just listening to) the videos, it occurred to me a Gogol Bordello concert must be something to be experienced, so I'm currently nerving myself up to buy tickets to the concert they're playing in Edinburgh a week before my birthday.

This is unlike me, and a slightly crazy thing to do when I don't even have any Gogol Bordello music myself yet, and have only listened to a handful of their tracks once or twice yet on YouTube, but I decided a while back my life is too boring, and I ought to do crazy things more (such as the ballooning that will happen this year, I am determined).

Still, I'm still me and am nervous of committing to anything major, whether it's a change of ISP or spending money to go up to Edinburgh to see a Gogol Bordello concert. (Edinburgh's not quite as crazy a journey as it sounds, though: I'd go up to Newcastle to visit my parents for the weekend, so it would only be a 120-mile day trip from there.)