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Your Worst Gig Ever


Bluewine

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The wedding many years ago. I don't know what events took place beforehand, but our trio very nearly outnumbered the guests!

Another wedding, the brother of the groom hospitalised his dad by giving him a good kicking. We were locked in the venue for about 2 hours while police investigated the crime scene and we didn't get paid for about 2 months afterwards. 

We don't do weddings any more

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charity gig at the Vic in Derby, last on (no, not headlining!) hardly anybody left, used borrowed backline, awful sound on stage, and the sound engineer seemed to be on a mission to take out everybody's spleen with the bass drum, about the only time I couldn't wait to get off stage, we haven't played there since

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7 minutes ago, Norris said:

The wedding many years ago. I don't know what events took place beforehand, but our trio very nearly outnumbered the guests!

Another wedding, the brother of the groom hospitalised his dad by giving him a good kicking. We were locked in the venue for about 2 hours while police investigated the crime scene and we didn't get paid for about 2 months afterwards. 

We don't do weddings any more

Mine is a wedding gig too.

We're not a wedding band by any sense of the term.

Typical story. The wedding couple were fans of the band and booked us. They never considered their guest we're not fans of us or live music.

The event was held in the basement of a Church, the guests sat at card tables. Not a high end event.

We were completely ignored. It was like the band was inaudible and invisible. We served no purpose being there. Nobody and I mean nobody even spoke to us.

Longest 4 hours of my life.

Blue

 

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The then drummer in an old band organised a 2 man  gig with his Brother on keys at a pub near me a few years ago, despite having a stinking cold I got roped in to come along and set up the lights for them. my plan was to do the business then retire home for the night, giving him instruction on how to break down the lighting rig, but I got conned to stick around.  The gig was in a room above the bar, so his GF was appointed 'door duties' to drum up trade. After the 1st set, me mainly crashed out head down on a table, i looked up to see NO ONE there, even his GF was still downstairs (at the bar!) they had been playing to the top of my head for an hour! At this point I cried enough and left em to it, but I learned later they did the whole gig to nobody.

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Sarf Lundon wedding - I'd not packed the loudspeaker leads (!) so used some odd bits of cable at the venue = atrocious sound.

Atmosphere somewhat tense between the guests & after about half an hour some geezer comes up & asks how much I'm getting paid.

He stumps up the readies & advises me to leave as 'it's abaht to get a bit ruff in 'ere'

I left before the fight (just).

😎

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I used to play various odd folk instruments in a band with other similar obscure things (bagpipes , hurdy gurdies etc) we were booked to play at a fair in Hartlepool.
The week before the gig our gurdy player had to drop out for personal reasons, being a super obscure instrument there was no way of finding a dep in time so my brother was to join us on bouzouki. He got the CD on Thursday and the rest of of drove up from the south coast on Friday and stayed at his place in Bradford that night. We got wasted on his home brew and the next morning feeling somewhat jaded we set of for Hartlepool in the rain. 
When we arrived we were told we were playing on a flat bed truck in a nearby car park but only if the rain stopped. We waited in a  pub confident that we wouldn't have to play our set that day ...with two minutes to spare the sound man came in a said "it's stopped raining, you're on!" 
We set up and launched into our set , we were hung over our instruments were horribly out of tune and getting worse due to cold and damp , my brother had barely heard the set let alone learned it. The audience consisted of the proverbial two men and a dog standing in a wet car park. During the first number they left. We played on for 45 minutes with only the puddles for company. 
 

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1978. I'm playing a my college band. A cross between Dr Feelgood and The Clash.

My car has  been totalled in a crash but a friend can lend me his Mini van. It's cold (and very snowy), the car heater doesn't work. As I get to the gig the back fills up with smoke and the engine overheats. We push the car about 400 yards to the gig and play to people who couldn't have carted less.

We're keen and confident so we had agreed to play for a whip-round. 65p. 16p each. I am reduced to trying to shovel snow into the radiator to try and get some water into the system to drive home. I fail.

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Sound guy gets drunk during the break and is incapacitated. I find the most resourceful guy I know and tell him to forget all the knobs, and to just mind the volume faders and make sure that he hears every part. 

First song after the break, all the microphone faders are at zero, and they stay there. No singers are heard at all. When questioned afterwards, the guy states he couldn't hear the singers, so he thought it was meant to be that way...  😡

😂

Edited by BassTractor
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Maybe worse, and relayed before:

"Final night" drum concert, and Bill Bruford, who'd instructed the drummers at our music college for a week, sits in a front row seat in the audience. I'd been asked to do a simple piano part: "Easy stuff! Just sight-reading!", so I'd naively agreed.

Get handed the dots, and note that the part is very demanding and very short, and requires counting bars of different lengths for what seems like half an hour before the piano comes in with some explosives. I give up, look sheepishly at Bruford, and either stay silent for the whole piece or (this is what I seem to remember but I'm not sure anymore) play just a few notes at instances where I feel confident enough that those notes contribute something. Mind you: not notes from the sheet. Just stuff I think fits.

The next day, I'm told by different persons that I'd better hide, as Bruford is searching the whole building for me, as he wants to kick my behind slightly. Me, I fear his mouth more than his boot. 🤘

Edited by BassTractor
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Played a pub in South Oxey to absolutely no one.

A crowd of 18 year olds and possibly younger were in the next room which was completely crowded while we worked our bollox off  playing classic rock to an empty room. Eventually we where paid off after the first set and went home early.

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Scariest gig was the one where our band played some bar gigs in Belfast, as part of a festival over there.

I turned up at the first gig, to find the regulars standing outside, cheering on a bloody fight between two seagulls (lovely).

The drummer, who used to be a cop, then turned up and made us aware that there had been a murder there a couple of years ago, orchestrated by the local IRA commander (nicknamed The Surgeon) whose wife had been insulted by the murdered guy. When he refused to apologise, he was dragged out and knifed to death, in the street outside the bar.

When the police tried to question the regulars, they all said they were in the toilet and hadn't see anything (all 71 of them).

The accused were found not guilty.

Anyway, we set up in the corner of the room and decided to just keep our heads down, play the gig, and get the feck out of there.

At that stage the drummer pointed out that the 'The Surgeon' was sitting at the bar and appeared to be taking a great interest in our band.

We must have played the songs, in our set, at twice their normal speed.

Two years after we played at the bar, 'The Surgeon' was shot dead.

We won't be back.

 

Edited by gjones
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5 hr drive to South Wales, unwelcoming social club for five young lads, told to get off after 5 songs ‘you are the worst band we have ever seen’ make it your last. Packing up the van hurriedly feeling like we are about to be lynched. Never got paid.

great gig.

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3 hours ago, Bluewine said:

We were completely ignored. It was like the band was inaudible and invisible. We served no purpose being there.

That covers about 33.3 % of the gigs I've ever played, apart from two gigs where nobody ignored us because there was nobody there to ignore us.

Of these two zero audience gigs one took place in a 500 capacity dance hall at Hangar Lane. Fantastic natural slap echo from the back wall so not entirely a wasted evening. The other was a pub in North London where the landlord fed us dinner and two band members got food poisoning from his dodgy chicken.

The worst gig ever was a working man's club near Daventry where I had a trapped nerve in my back and I was off my face on codeine and beer, the front man preceded our full band set by doing karaoke renditions of songs like 'Born Free', the pensioner guitarist went f**king crazy in all the quiet bits, the drummer mistakenly played a country shuffle beat under Route 66 and between every friggin' song a punchy, aggressive, drunken Neanderthal kept trying to get his spotty daughter up with us to 'sing along'.  I thought to use the elevation granted by a four foot high stage to kick the annoying bastard in the head but the others stopped me because they were 'regulars' at this club. Afterwards I just wanted to burn the place down and everyone in it. I'm better now.

Edited by skankdelvar
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Probably playing bass in a half arsed cabaret band in an extremely rough pub in North Wales (that narrows it down !)

Singer was rather drunk and very high and was becoming more and more mouthy during the first set. Oblivious to the way his humour was going down, and the massing of ‘the lads’ at the back of the venue, he kept notching it up, and up, and up  

Having heard what said lads were going to do to the singer during the intermission, we shipped him off in a taxi, reassembled as our day job (thrash band) and didn’t get a kicking at the end. 

Result !

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So, In reply to this topic now it’s correctly named...

Gear dropped off by a taxi a half a mile away from gig, walking up Market Street in Manchester with said gear.

played the gig - late on because last band had run over, set cut short.

no sound check because we were only the support act 

sound engineer announced that we’d have to finish early over the monitors half way through a tune.

bounced an instrument of the stage, walked off.

 

that sound engineer was a D1ck

 

i told her that when I sacked her as my next bands tour engineer 2 years later. (The first day she turned up I knew it was futile)

 

bad attitude, bad sound - bad person.

 

glad I got to tell her to feck off

Edited by AndyTravis
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In the 60s, playing drums in the 'house band' at a big charity concert in Nottingham,  expanding our lineup to include brass section - lovely.  Rehearsed all day for the performance in the evening with the various vocal acts. Mostly it went well, including our usual lineup doing part of our normal set.

But one vocal group had us rehearsing their opening song in a couple of different keys.  They decided on which to play, then just before going on one of them tells us to change the key.  Then actually on stage their leader changes his mind, but this didn’t get through to the brass section.......

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We were booked to play a disco on a Monday night. I know, what could possibly go wrong, right?

The disco was above a pub, entrance via outside stairs.

Door charge $5

We played originals and REM,Smiths,Cure covers,this was in the 90s

Before we started a few guys came up from the bar downstairs, looked in at the empty room and the $5 door charge and immediately went back down the stairs.

THEN one of those pub crawl party busses rolls up full of girls on a hen's night. I gave them free entry as they were only staying for 15 minutes

THEN all the men from the bar must've heard or seen them and all of a sudden they were all handing over their 5 bucks and the room was full.

We start to play, place is ROCKIN

then the whistle blew and all the pretty young things got on the bus and left

I still remember the look on the blokes faces when they realised what had just happened :)

Actually, WORST AND BEST GIG EVER

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