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Smoking, drinking, eating, watching TV etc.while on stage?


Barking Spiders

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In these PC times I'm not sure whether anyone is now allowed to attach a ciggie atop their head(less)stock (EVH stylee) and take a puff while riffing, smoke a pipe like Duck Dunn or sup from a can of  Red Stripe while on stage in a public venue?? Or can they. Anyone here apt to have  a few beers on stage, nibble on a biryani, read a book, watch TV etc while performing? 

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I don't eat or drink anything on stage. Usually, with the bands I play in, there is no time (dead space) between songs.

I've been in bands who like to take it easy during the set and have a drink, a chat and a joke amongst themselves. I always hated that. IMO we are here to entertain so we should be socialising off stage.

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In one band I used to play in back when I lived in that there London we'd not only like to have a snack on stage and swill a couple of beers but socialise with the punters too.  I've never liked the them and us approach viz gigging  but prefer gigs to be more like parties. If we could get people in the  'audience' involved in joining in playing something all the better

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A bit of sport on TV whilst playing has been a welcome distraction at some gigs. 

Can't say I've ever had any food onstage, might lead to strings getting covered in foodstuff. 

Bit like BRX, a drink (lager in my case) on stage doesn't get the attention it deserves & ends up warm and flat. But I do have bottles of water to hydrate, but as a drink, water is less "needy".

So....food & drink on stage..probably not.                      TV? Absolutely! But I do insist on subtitles if it's a detective show, as it's so hard to hear above the racket coming from the stage.

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3 hours ago, Nicko said:

Generally have a beer or two on stage.  Our last gig was at a bar with a huge number of TV screens and I was caught watching the cricket at one point - in my defence it might have been during Sex on Fire.

Fair play. If I'd had to play Sex on Fire I'd have knocked up a bacon butty,, watched a bit of rugby and got myself a pint of Shipyard at the same time. 

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Mentioned on here before - Rick Wakeman famously ate a full Indian meal.

"It was 1973 and we had released Tales from Topographic Oceans, which I didn't particularly like. The third piece in the show was a particularly long percussive piece and I didn't have much to do. Now, I used to have this roadie that worked for me, he would lie underneath my keyboard ostensibly to fix things, but mostly he would just mix me drinks and pass them up. So on this occasion he asks me if there's anything I need, but I heard it as him asking what I felt like doing after the show. I just replied 'oh, I'll probably go for a curry' and then he asked me what I would have so I started naming various menu items, 'onion bhaji', you know...and then, 20 minutes later there is this smell. Of course you know that curry is a smell that wafts, you detect it. And he's standing there under the keyboard rig with these bags of takeaway curry."

The story, a classic pull-the-other-one, is "absolutely true". And Wakeman says he proceeded to "lay out the meal across my keyboards to have some." If you are thinking Spinal Tap right now, remember this is 10 years before that film. And Wakeman chuckles as he adds the coda, "I've probably been offered curry at gigs a couple of dozen times since, I don't have it on stage, but I'll arrive backstage to find that someone's sent a takeaway curry to me, or it's been ordered, or there's a takeout menu there. It's nice. It's funny.

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I don’t drink anyway, but drinking on stage to me at least seems very unprofessional, also though it seems like you don’t care somehow. Alcohol would surely affect how you play?

I would possibly have a bottle of water on stage, I have been known to have coffee too, very rock and roll 😊.

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5 hours ago, Barking Spiders said:

In these PC times I'm not sure whether anyone is now allowed to attach a ciggie atop their head(less)stock (EVH stylee) and take a puff while riffing, smoke a pipe like Duck Dunn or sup from a can of  Red Stripe while on stage in a public venue?? Or can they. Anyone here apt to have  a few beers on stage, nibble on a biryani, read a book, watch TV etc while performing? 

i think Duck only smoked a pipe in the Blues Brothers movie. 

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6 minutes ago, ambient said:

I don’t drink anyway, but drinking on stage to me at least seems very unprofessional, also though it seems like you don’t care somehow. Alcohol would surely affect how you play?

I would possibly have a bottle of water on stage, I have been known to have coffee too, very rock and roll 😊.

Manager of a function band I was in quite rightly used to say that if the audience saw any of the musicians with even half a beer,

they would assume the whole band was pis*ed.

Vodka in the bottled water maybe the answer...xD

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