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Embarrassing gigging moments: whats yours? :)


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Not a gigging tale. Nevertheless.....


In the early 90s our original heavy grunge band used to rehearse in the church hall in a local village. We were there one afternoon a couple of days before a weekend jumble sale. There were heaps of clothing, toys, dog-eared copies of Jennings and Derbyshire books, and sundry other tat piled up on tables and chairs waiting to be organised into some sort of order for the sale.  We couldn't help but admire their optimism.  Neither could we help having a bit of a rummage through the sorry offerings and avail ourselves of some of the more choice items and dress up in them while we went through our set. About 20 minutes into the set, one of the local parishioners wandered in, probably to see where in the name of Jesus that ungodly devil-music was coming from. She stood there agape as we rocked out, myself sporting a rather lovely, floaty blue summer dress with little white flowers on, and the guitarist in an olive green crimplene trouser suit that would have fitted Montserrat Caballe.  IIRC the singer had found a pair of pug-ugly checked old-man trousers, I can't remember what the drummer was wearing. I don't know whether any of the items had belonged to one of the parishioner's deceased relatives or whatever, but we found shorty after that our regular rehearsal slot had been given over to some other interest... presumably flower arranging or the Brownies.... 

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11 hours ago, T-Bay said:

Could be worse, we played a venue where they decided to use a smoke machine behind the curtain. We started playing, curtain opens, smoke rolls out in a very naff 80s way. 30 seconds later the fire alarms go off. Everything stops and we have to evacuate the building. It was a proper theatrical smoke machine so no idea what happened but didn’t help the gig!

 

Talking of smoke machines, doing sound at a jazz/dub/freeform type thing, me and another guy were very hands-on on the desk (dub echo, mixing etc) and i turned the smoke machine on. 

10 minutes later i looked up to see the whole club completely obliterated in smoke, just silhouettes of the band, the lights and this great dub music coming out. 

It was awesome! 

We didn't have fire alarms so everyone just carried on, but me and the other guy on the desk were pissing ourselves laughing. 

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Many many years ago when we were in our first incarnation of our band. We got a gig in our favourite bar. We were right chuffed. We had a big intro and everything. After the intro we were to have two flash bombs going off as we hit our first big note. When it came there was a soft frazzle and some smoke. We burst out laughing at the complete anti climax of the whole thing and struggled to hold it together. We found out later that we had bought the wrong flash bombs. Instead of the bang and dramatic effect we got a damp squib.

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On 04/06/2022 at 09:38, T-Bay said:

Could be worse, we played a venue where they decided to use a smoke machine behind the curtain. We started playing, curtain opens, smoke rolls out in a very naff 80s way. 30 seconds later the fire alarms go off. Everything stops and we have to evacuate the building. It was a proper theatrical smoke machine so no idea what happened but didn’t help the gig!

 

I have a smoke machine story too. I played in a party band once, and one song that we covered was ‘Take on me’ by A-ha. The singer was so arrogant [theres a surprise] and the rest of the band could not stand him. I decided that I had had enough. So, before the show, I asked the stage guy to really crank out the smoke during that particular song. My plan was to sabotage the high note in the chorus… and it bloody worked! Wahey! 😂

 

The chorus went like so…

 

Take on me (take on me)

Take me on (take on me)

I'll be gone

In a day or twooo *cough cough* oooo *splutter splutter* oooo!

 

It was the funniest thing that I had seen and heard in a long time. We replaced him a couple of weeks later… thank goodness! 😂

 

 

Cough.gif

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13 hours ago, Buddster said:

Talking of smoke machines, doing sound at a jazz/dub/freeform type thing, me and another guy were very hands-on on the desk (dub echo, mixing etc) and i turned the smoke machine on. 

10 minutes later i looked up to see the whole club completely obliterated in smoke, just silhouettes of the band, the lights and this great dub music coming out. 

It was awesome! 

We didn't have fire alarms so everyone just carried on, but me and the other guy on the desk were pissing ourselves laughing. 

Must have been like an episode of ‘stars in their eyes’ LOL 😆

 

Tonight matthew, I’m going to be…

 

 

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Way back in the early 80s I had the fortune/misfortune (delete as appropriate) to do the low-end bits in a band that modelled itself on Capt Beefheart and any number of other avant garde outfits – anyway, to cut to the chase, the lead singer dropped some acid before a show and things went south pretty quickly – he wandered into the audience and sat down, sharing a bag of mini-mars bars with the bemused crowd – needless to say the gig ended shortly after – no idea where the mini choc bars came from

 

At another gig shortly after that, some oiks were chucking beer at us and he leapt into the crowd and smashed a punter over the head with a Les Paul he'd borrowed – that show ended with ten or so punters and band members swapping blows

 

Not so much embarrassing as remarkable… great days!

 

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On 04/06/2022 at 21:22, Buddster said:

Talking of smoke machines, doing sound at a jazz/dub/freeform type thing, me and another guy were very hands-on on the desk (dub echo, mixing etc) and i turned the smoke machine on. 

10 minutes later i looked up to see the whole club completely obliterated in smoke, just silhouettes of the band, the lights and this great dub music coming out. 

It was awesome! 

We didn't have fire alarms so everyone just carried on, but me and the other guy on the desk were pissing ourselves laughing. 

Having seen Fields Of The Nephilim several times in their heyday it wasn't dissimilar  🙂

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