My band had a new year's eve gig at the E**and WMC in Bradford a few years ago. We were on a rather nice £1000 through our agent, who'd handed the gig on to us after getting it passed on from another agent. Whatever.
We turned up early and went in through the front of the rather nice club to get the stage door open. One of the committee marched me down to the back of the club to open the doors to load in. As we passed various people in the club on the way, he pointed to them and said what an utter shower of bastards they were. This was the rest of the club committee. Mmmm nice.
We did our first 45 minute spot at a nice, very relaxed volume and went down quite well. We were asked to get a short 30 minute easy-listening spot together, before we came on to do our last spot... so we obliged. We noticed a number of the blue-rinse brigade were walking out. You could see by the way various parts of the club were emptying, in a definite pattern, it was down to the war between the factions on the committee.
After the 30 minute spot, the Concert Sec came in and paid us off in full. He apologised and said the committee wanted to abandon the entertainment for the evening. So, we packed up and went. I was back in Bolton for about 12.30am. Unbelievable.
A couple of days later, our agent rang us up and asked us what went wrong. I told him our setlist and what had been said to us since our arrival at the club.. We'd done an amount of work for him and he fully believed our side of it. He did make me ring the agent who had passed the gig to him, as the club were asking for their money back!!!!!
In a slightly disgruntled fashion, I rang the other agent and duly repeated the tale. He said it had actually happened to a number of acts and that he was going round to argue face to face at the club.
That put us off club gigs so much that we let our own agent go.