NWB - Community Blog

I've posted this on here before but for anyone who hasn't seen it:

My second worst gig ever:
An agent sent me to a solo gig in Leeds as a last minute replacement. It was called 'The Spinning Wheel', no clue in the name but it turned out to be an Irish pub and I don't mean a pub that'd been 'Irished' I mean a proper Irish pub. They wanted traditional Irish stuff and Daniel O'Donnell, The Cheiftains etc...imagine how I went down doing Billy Idol, Buzzcocks & Clash. When I rang the agent on Monday to complain he said "I thought you did Irish, your names's Mick isn't it?" How can you argue with that logic?

My worst gig ever:
1996.
I was in a Slade tribute band, we were playing a seventies night in a very nice, very big town centre pub in Ireland. When we arrived at the venue the staff helped us load our gear in, brought us some coffee and asked what we’d like for dinner. After we set up the staff brought us our dinner and a pint each, told us where the digs were and we went to chill and freshen up. The lead singer, who was also the band’s boss, in an uncharacteristic burst of efficiency, suggested we write the set out to save doing it in a last minute panic (which had become a band tradition). All was well…so far, so good.
And then:
The said singer pulled out the gig contract to scribble the set onto… all was back to normal… and noticed that we were booked for a two hour set (we only had one hour of songs…well, Slade hits). There was nowt for it, we’d just have to bash another hour’s worth of songs together in the next couple of hours. The drummer suggested ‘Let’s Dance’ because Slade had covered it and it’s a piece of piss. Good call, we didn’t even need to practice it. A few more suggestions were made, each one less relevant than the last (e.g.; Slade had never covered Addicted To Love) until we’d got about twenty minutes of rubbish that we could jam and stretch to almost an hour with massively extended solos…and yes, ‘Johnny B Fecking Goode’ was on the list… then we mixed the sets up so that no two ‘duds’ were next to each other. We’d run out of time by now so we got the stage gear on which was fine for me, because, as bass player I represented Jimmy Lea (the only member of Slade who didn’t dress like a pratt) and we hit the stage. The gig had been regionally publicized to the point of saturation. People had come from miles around. It had been sold-out for weeks and the room was packed with seventies fans anticipating a nostalgic night of dodgy fashion statements, daft dancing, crazy antics and good time rock & roll…they came dressed in Woolworths afro wigs, big stupid sunglasses, false moustaches, tank-tops and flares…it looked like several coach-loads of ‘Glitterballs’ had descended on the place and would have been a classic…if we hadn’t been so under-furnished in the song dept. The set limped along quite well and we hadn’t lost favour with the entire crowd yet...we were rocking! Then came ‘Let’s Dance’ and that’s where it all went wrong. The drums shuffled the well known intro, I came in on bass with the guitars familiar riff and the Chris Montez/Slade evergreen was up & running…this could only go well. The singer could come in any time he liked, trying to look confident in the face of adversity he grabbed the mic and yelled “LET’S DANCE, PUT ON YOUR RED SHOES AND DANCE THE BLUES”…yes, the David Bowie ‘Let’s Dance’. The only thing he could do to save face was to glare at the band hoping to make it look like WE’D messed up. None of us had seen that coming so we carried on and played the two songs simultaneously, neither team (the singer on one side and the band on the other) able to yield until both collapsed in a dis-jointed, dissonant shambles and the torture ended. It was all downhill from there and the set dragged on and on to the point where we could see people arguing with door staff and demanding re-funds. Scuffles broke out...people ‘booed’, spat and threw things...the crowd dwindled and spilled out into the street, they'd come to 'Feel The Noize' but now they were pissing in shop doorways and kicking bins over. We couldn’t get off fast enough. The final turd in the water pipe came as we left the stage and the house DJ played ‘things can only get better’ by D Ream…which isn’t a seventies song but wasn’t out of context so I don’t blame him..
Backstage there was a long, silence as we all stared at each other in a stunned, open mouthed incredulity of the night’s events…except for the singer who thought it had gone “quite well in the circumstances” and suggested, in all seriousness, that we brought out ‘Let’s Dances’ as a single.

I don’t go to Ireland anymore.

MN