Ever been in a band? Anecdotes?

Ever been in a band? Anecdotes?

Author
Discussion

Roofless Toothless

Original Poster:

5,610 posts

131 months

Wednesday 12th April 2017
quotequote all
Following on from a couple of posts in The Lounge, I was invited to relate an anecdote or two about my time in a band in the late sixties. I thought the best thing to do was start a new thread here, as I am sure there must be more people out there with a story or two to tell about the odd things that can happen 'on the road'. See if you can beat this one.

I'll kick off with the tale of when we nearly killed the lead guitarist of a rival group at a 'Battle Of The Bands' one night up in the Welsh Valleys. It's going to be a long one!

We played a little on the University circuit, but most of the time up in the Valleys. There was plenty of live music going on at the Rugby Club venues, and quite a few bands (including Tom Jones!) started off with gigs up there. One night we got involved in a 'Battle Of The Bands' event at a great big barn of a place - I can't remember exactly where it was, this was 50 years ago, God help me! - that may have started life as a Chapel. Three, perhaps four bands were booked, one I am sure was a band called Kimla Taz, who were about the same stage of development as us at the time. There was a bit of debate about who was going to go on last, as you can imagine, but when we said we intended to do our light show and a few added extras as well, that settled it, as nobody wanted to follow that.

Not many bands in South Wales, none as far as I know, were doing anything like a light show at the time. In fact we used to earn an unheard of £25 a night against the usual £15 on the back of it. It was all pretty home made, but quite effective. Our drummer was a physics student and used to built hi-fi amplifiers and stuff, and he constructed this control box for the show that used to sit on the floor by his feet. It had about 15 channels with master switches on the side and stamp buttons on the top. You just selected which circuits (effects) you wanted open with the switches and stamped on the top of the box at the appropriate moment.

We had a bank of footlights (made out of powdered milk tins with coloured plastic tops), a strobe (a spotlight with a motor-driven aluminium disc with a slit rotating in front of it, a bubble machine (the guitarist's hair drier with a motor driven set of wire loops dipping in and out of a trough of Fairy Liquid - went like stink!) and a UV tube which was very effective with white clothes and fluorescent face paint. I think only Arthur Brown was into face paint at this time. The combination of bubble machine and strobe was amazing, and the guy at the front of the crowd who fell flat on his face onto the stage one night is testimony to this. Must have been epileptic.

There was also a range of pyrotechnic equipment we picked up at a place in Covent Garden called Strand Electric (I think) on a trip to London.

This included a load of magnesium flares that we put on top of the amplifiers. You put a dollop of this silvery powder on an asbestos square, connected a length of fuse wire across it between a couple of open terminals and put the mains through the contraption. Flash! If you got too enthusiastic and put too much powder on them they would chuck off a fair bit of burning powder all over the top of the amplifier - our roadies were strategically stationed to put it all out if that happened, usually by beating it with their fists. They really loved these devices - especially while when packing them away at night, they used to pick them up only to find out the other end was still connected to the mains.

There were smoke candles, but we couldn't use these a lot as they seemed to be designed for really big spaces and it was hard to put them out once lit. We got permanently banned from the Union Building at Swansea for letting one off two weeks after they got the hall redecorated.

And theatrical maroons! Now we are getting down to the meat of the story. We bought three sizes, little ones like tuppenny bangers, inbetweeny ones, and then great big things about the size of those Humbrol model paint tins, with a couple of wires sticking out of the top to wire it up. Judging by the noise the smaller ones used to make, we were in some trepidation about these big so and so's, of which we had acquired two, and which used to live in an ammunition box in the van. One afternoon at the drummers house, while his folks were not at home, we decided to try one out. We put it on the lawn in a galvanised metal bucket, filled it in sand and rolled an extension lead into the house and plugged in. A quick flick of a switch and the bucket had a hole in the side you could put your fist through, and a lot of startled pigeons throughout half of Cardiff. Ten minutes later two policemen turned up at the front door to ask if we'd heard anything as the neighbours were reporting the electricity sub-station might have blown up. 'No officer, not a thing ...'

So back at the Battle Of The Bands, we decided that this had to be the night we would finally fire off the second big maroon. The instructions that came with the thing suggested it should be put inside a metal dustbin and covered with folded chicken wire to stop shrapnel flying everywhere from the shellac casing. A suitable bin was located, but we couldn't find anything resembling chicken wire. With some trepidation we put it at the back of the stage with a plank over the top, and the maroon suspended from the plank in the centre of the bin, the whole device wired up to a suitable channel on the light show control box.

The other bands played their sets and it was finally time for us to come on. We did our numbers, and finished as usual with a Who-type version of Summertime Blues, that turned into at the end what was called in those days a 'freak-out' - lots of noise and posturing, and very little musicality it must be admitted. We were almost finished, the smoke candle was burning and starting to fill the stage and creep into the hall, and it was time to end with the piece de resistance - the big maroon. The drummer looked round at the back of the stage, just to check, and there was the guitarist of Kimla Taz, a guy by the name of Tich, sitting on the plank across the dust bin. The drummer waved his arm frantically at Tich, who responded with an ingratiating smile and an encouraging thumbs up. More arm waving, and it was clear the message was not getting through. It was getting too late to do anything about it, and resigned to the inevitable, our drummer stamped down on the control box.

There was an almighty KER-BOOM that echoed around the hall. Visibility on stage was getting quite poor by this time, but I distinctly remember seeing my bass guitar flying vertically past my face. The noise of the maroon had caused some sort of muscular spasm and the thing must have flown upwards out of my arms involuntarily. The guitarist over the other side had been walking around with a whole tea-chest full of unreeled 16mm cine film over his head and shoulders (don't ask, it was the sixties - but it looked quite spectacular under the strobe) and he was similarly afflicted by the explosion and ran away. The guitars were left screaming and whining with feed back on the floor of the stage, until the roadies came on and shut the amplifiers down. The whole scene looked like the aftermath of an IRA attack.

None of us remembered seeing Tich at any time later that evening. We can only assume he was lead away (possibly gibbering) by other members of his band, for he lived a few years longer, played in some good Welsh bands before dying in a house fire in 2005.

As a postscript, when the hall emptied of bemused spectators, decanting with ringing ears into the night, we noticed that the clock at the other end of the hall, a great big railway station type of thing about three feet across, that was previously hanging on the far wall opposite the stage was now, in pieces, lying at the foot of the wall many feet under the fixings from which it was previously suspended. The wall must have shifted so far with the bang that the thing fell off the pegs. If it had landed on anyone's crust it would have killed them. We made a timely retreat out of the stage door at the rear just as the guy arrived at the front with the keys to lock up.

I promised a few photographs on the other thread so let's see if I can get these to work.





This is the band on stage in Bangor the night we supported Fleetwood Mac. The Orange amplifiers on the stage are theirs. Drummer has a Ludwig kit, I have a Fender Precision through a 100 watt Marshall stack, and the guitarist a Telecaster through a Marshall amplifier, Marshall top cabinet and two home made cabinets, one with two 12" Celestions and the other two 18" Goodmans. The keen eyed will spot he actually used to use my bass amp, and me his two channel affair. God knows why. In fact, his set up was possibly more suited to bass than mine, but then I used to use a fuzz box and even a treble booster on occasion, playing sometimes more of a lead roll than rhythm. Drummer insisted on using two bass drums, though we would have preferred it if he had mastered the art of keeping time with one





Here's me playing my furry bass. It was a L/H Fender Precision from the late fifties, I was told, in sunburst red, but had a horrible cigarette burn on the front where someone had left a lit fag on it to burn out. I went down to Swansea market and bought a load of black nylon fur material and covered it using glue and staples. A quick trim with a pair of scissors where the strings were supposed to go through and Bob's your uncle. It all seemed perfectly natural at the time.





Looking moody in a Cardiff cemetery. The tall guy in the middle of the group at the back, by the way, is Denny (Denim) Bridges, who played for The Third Ear Band in the early seventies. He was a good mate at the time, and I am glad to say we have re-established contact after all these years.

So there you are. You could write a book about all this - but someone already has. If you've never come across it, Deke Leonard of our fellow South Welsh group Man, wrote a book called Rhinos Winos and Lunatics, that you can still buy on Amazon for less than a tenner, and it is a really entertaining account of what it was like to play in a touring rock band at that time. I can't recommend it enough. There's loads in it that I can associate with our experiences, but then again I can say the same about Spinal Tap.

Sorry it's been a long read, but there's something about being in a band that invites lunacy, and I am sure that there must be many of you with experiences more remarkable than mine.

Honk

1,985 posts

202 months

Wednesday 12th April 2017
quotequote all
Ace smile

RDM

1,860 posts

206 months

Wednesday 12th April 2017
quotequote all
Loving these posts. Keep em coming!

anonymous-user

53 months

Wednesday 12th April 2017
quotequote all
Great post!
Did you ever bump into the band Budgie?

TheChampers

4,093 posts

137 months

Wednesday 12th April 2017
quotequote all
Brilliant, thank you. I am so buying that book smile

Taffy Hawkwind wink

Roofless Toothless

Original Poster:

5,610 posts

131 months

Wednesday 12th April 2017
quotequote all
Budgie were certainly around at the time. They were a lot better and ultimately much more successful than us, but I think they really started to excel in the seventies. We broke up in 1970. I seem to recall seeing them play at Cardiff castle one night.

We were only a bunch of undergraduates having some fun. (Or at least two of us were undergraduates following the guitar player getting chucked out of college for dying the fountains on the campus fluorescent green with that stuff the cavers use for checking which way underground watercourses run.) The band was a way to earn some money during the vacations. Other groups around us had much more serious intentions. I suppose we all knew at heart we had professional careers ahead of us, so didn't take it too seriously.

There was a great music scene in South Wales in the sixties, though, with Budgie and Man especially making some good records, and of course Love Sculpture and Tom Jones making it nationally. TJ's original band really rocked, and the stories about him up in the Valleys at the time were legend. I suppose the number of places you could play really helped, with all the rugby clubs regularly having live music. It must have been one of the more important breeding grounds for British rock music at the time. And I nearly forgot Amen Corner. The other two lads in my group came from Cardiff and went to the same school as them.

I often think how lucky I was to be a young man at precisely that time and to have so much fun mucking about with music when it meant so much to everyone, and possibly was never bettered since.

pingu393

7,712 posts

204 months

Monday 17th April 2017
quotequote all
Nanook said:
Only pic I have of that night
Can you see my disappointed face? It wasn't Jamie coming out of the bogs frown

anonymous-user

53 months

Monday 17th April 2017
quotequote all
I think there's a few band members on here. Alphaville, prodigy, iron maiden to name a few.

Great post op. My kids are all in school bands. Cracks me up seeing them doing AC/DC and Rolling Stones covers whilst the headmaster looks like it might all be going to far. hehe

Edited by anonymous-user on Monday 17th April 17:14

pingu393

7,712 posts

204 months

Monday 17th April 2017
quotequote all
El stovey said:
I think there's a few band members on here. Alphaville, prodigy, iron maiden to name a few.
I bet that they are reading this thread and wishing they could tell us some of their tales, but I bet there's no way we'll get to hear them - more's the pity.

K50 DEL

9,227 posts

227 months

Monday 16th October 2017
quotequote all
Bringing this one back to the top to see if there are any more tales to be told....

HarryFlatters

4,203 posts

211 months

Tuesday 17th October 2017
quotequote all
The drummer in Dodgy once called the drummer in my band a because he didn't swap back his crash and ride cymbals.

That's about it hehe

Eddie Strohacker

3,879 posts

85 months

Tuesday 17th October 2017
quotequote all
HarryFlatters said:
The drummer in Dodgy once called the drummer in my band a because he didn't swap back his crash and ride cymbals.

That's about it hehe
Matthew is nothing if not a character. I didn't say he has character, just that he is one! I have a picture somewhere with him sticking his fingers up my nostrils. Word to the wise, think twice before asking Dodgy for a post gig selfie.

HarryFlatters

4,203 posts

211 months

Tuesday 17th October 2017
quotequote all
I found it piss funny tbh, they were an entertaining lot to play with smile

tuscaneer

7,738 posts

224 months

Tuesday 17th October 2017
quotequote all
ooh got a couple......

this sounds a bit "blues brothers-ey" but is genuinely true.....

we played a show once where the place had new toilets ....our drummer thought it was a great idea to scratch the name of our band in the fresh plasterwork above the urinals..one of the other lads , upon seeing this ,and being a bit pissed threw his pint glass in the sink in protestation at the drummer's stupidity (he didn't trust leaving his pint unattended so took it to the pissers with him)....the pint glass went straight through the sink.

we were young and pissed and what in hindsight was stty behaviour seemed very funny at the time....anyway, at the end of the night we went to pick up our money from the manager of the place who told us the damage to the toilets would cost considerably more to fix than our fee so in no uncertain terms we were told to fk off...





we were supporting wilko johnson band and in the afternoon of soundcheck the lads very generously gave us a few crates of lager which we started on straight away...i don't have much more than sketchy memories of the set but luckily we had it video taped so we could watch it back...we (against strict instructions of the management) were filming it from the locked balcony which we somehow broke into and set our stuff up on....played the set (stfaced) and i'm quite surprised amid all the foul mouthed banter and having to stop playing for a bit because i invited the audience up to sing a particular chorus ..we got right through the set (despite marshalls getting knocked over and other "challenges" for the staff in the place) before being told to pack up and fk off quickly....managed to see a little bit of wilko before leaving with my tail between my legs.




played a support set in manchester and our singer was driving the van back after the show.(he wasn't drinking).a relatively trouble free set but a few too many beers were had and i couldn't wait for the services to go to the toilet...i thought it best to piss out the window of the van and did just that. but i failed to open the window first....me pal who was driving panicked and reached over and started winding the window down which brought a chorus of screams from the rest of the lads who were in the back with the gear getting wind and piss all over them as the flow blew back into the van..




oh and one last quite funny one...we were playing a show in a small place but the pa system was fking brilliant. fold back speakers everywhere and even our drummer had a tower cabinet next to him so he could hear us all clearly. set starts with a thin, frantic single note limp bizkit-esque guitar riff and all the lads wait patiently for the snare crack then bass/full guitar chords and vocals to all kick in with a bang.......the drummer's cabinet had way too much snare volume and when he ttted it for the start of the full flow of the song he said it was so loud it knocked him out...we thought it was weird..no drums kicked in for the first couple of seconds then he sort of woke up and started banging away.




Evangelion

7,638 posts

177 months

Thursday 19th October 2017
quotequote all
You will of course find this difficult to believe, but when I was younger … I wasn’t very good. All I could get was covers bands, in other words the real st end of the music biz, and can honestly say I did not enjoy a single second of it (except the one at the end of each gig when I got paid). I eventually did find a band that was fairly passable; my last gig with them was in June 1994.

As we arrived, there was some guy setting up! We thought there had been a double booking, but no – this was a fiftieth wedding anniversary do, and he was one of the sons of the happy couple. He did a little solo act with backing tapes, and was multi-talented – equally proficient on vocals, trumpet, sax and clarinet. In other words, crap on all of them, although of course he thought he was brilliant, in the way these people always do. The idea was for him to come on and be generally nauseating for about twenty minutes, before we started. Well of course the room being full of friends and relatives who also thought he was brilliant, the twenty minutes stretched to half an hour, by which time I couldn’t stay in the same room without wanting to throw up. I went out and sat in the car where I found Radio 3 playing Beethoven’s Fifth (it being the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day), so listened to the rest of that.

By the time this twit came off, he’d been there for nearly an hour, so we went on, did half a dozen songs and came off again for the first interval. Five minutes later, all the lights went out!

Power cut.

So they started the buffet. I hadn’t been intending to have any food, but with nothing else to do thought, sod it I might as well, so joined the others, standing around and noshing as the room became darker and darker. Our keyboard player started singing ‘We’ll Meet Again’ but none of the miserable sods joined in.

Then they decided to do the speeches – so one of the other sons came over to the stage, grabbed one of the non-working microphones … and started shouting into it.

Eventually the power came back on at 11, so we went straight back on and played until 12:30. Of course we still got paid the same, as it wasn’t our fault the power had gone off.

I had absolutely no regret that it was my last gig.


Edited by Evangelion on Thursday 19th October 20:43

Roofless Toothless

Original Poster:

5,610 posts

131 months

Monday 25th December 2017
quotequote all
A strange thing happened this week that causes me to revive this old thread.

One of the friends who used to hang about with my old band in South Wales (he later went on to play for Third Ear Band, and work for George Martin at his studios in London and Montserrat) discovered an old poster for sale on the internet, and sent me a link.



I have no recollection of this at all.

We were actually called Esther's Tomcat, and that is a better attempt at spelling it correctly than usually was achieved, but what the 'now called' is all about I don't know. I wouldn't put it past our guitarist (and booker) to pull a stunt over the band's name.

I suppose it must have happened, but in the best traditions of the era, I suppose if you can remember it you weren't really there.

Honk

1,985 posts

202 months

Monday 25th December 2017
quotequote all
Roofless Toothless said:
A strange thing happened this week that causes me to revive this old thread.

One of the friends who used to hang about with my old band in South Wales (he later went on to play for Third Ear Band, and work for George Martin at his studios in London and Montserrat) discovered an old poster for sale on the internet, and sent me a link.



I have no recollection of this at all.

We were actually called Esther's Tomcat, and that is a better attempt at spelling it correctly than usually was achieved, but what the 'now called' is all about I don't know. I wouldn't put it past our guitarist (and booker) to pull a stunt over the band's name.

I suppose it must have happened, but in the best traditions of the era, I suppose if you can remember it you weren't really there.
hippy

gazza285

9,779 posts

207 months

Tuesday 26th December 2017
quotequote all
Had some fun times touring Europe back in the early nineties on the punk scene, played a lot of squat gigs, including one in Geneva. Our trusty merch man had found the delights of the local and very cheap red wine hard to resist, and took a little coaxing into action the day after, for the trip to Turin.

At the time, we had a not very trusty Mercedes 208 van, painted in the ubiquitous black hammerite, as is traditional, and so were looking at about a four hour drive. Three seats in the front, driving was Cuzzy, the drummer, sat in the middle was Tez, the singer, and I was in the passenger seat, everyone else was in the luxurious rear, which was all the band's gear and merch, under a couple of rather used mattresses, upon which the rest of the motley accompaniment would travel.

And so we ascended the mountains on our way, and arrived at the Mont Blanc Tunnel, as this was by far the shortest route. Now other than this being a remarkable feat of engineering, it is fairly boring, and not particularly well ventilated, and the build up of old exhaust fumes isn't the most pleasant thing.

As we approached the light at the end of the tunnel, as it were, the fumes, combined with the rather potent red, began to take its toll on our sleeping merch man. There was a sudden luch from the rear, and a small, quiet voice in my ear said,

"Open the window..."

"What?"

A bit louder,
"Open the fking window."

I got half a crank of the window winder, when there was an outpouring of such a quantity of regurgitated red wine that it filled the door pocket completely, and also fairly comprehensively covered both me and Tez. I managed to get the window down, and merch man managed to get his head outside, where he continued to empty his seemingly bottomless stomach over the side of the van.

And thus we arrived at the border point, in the middle of an Italian heat wave, with a green man hanging out of a battered British van, with a fan of vomit hanging off the hammerite finish, two men dripping with second hand red wine, and my then long hair filled with chunks of used Rosti and Rouge. The Carabinieri pointed to the layby, so they could give us a closer look, but as they approached the passenger window decided on a change of heart and waved us straight through the border.

By the time we got to Turin the van was no longer habitable, and we all piled out retching, into the sweet air of industrialised Italy, two of us headed straight for the venue showers, while the unfortunate merch man was left with the task of cleaning the van, both inside and out. Never got rid of the smell though...

Same tour, we got to Den Haag, and the venue was on fire, but maybe another day for that tale...



Edited by gazza285 on Tuesday 26th December 11:29

Roofless Toothless

Original Poster:

5,610 posts

131 months

Tuesday 26th December 2017
quotequote all
Yep, sex and drugs and rock and roll in our case tended to be a matter of not enough of the first, and probably alcohol rather than chemistry for the second. The Rock and roll was all right, though.

I had my 21st one night we were playing in Bangor, and I can't even remember who we were backing as I had invested in a bottle of whisky and was three quarters of the way through it before we hit the stage. My bass fell off the strap during the first number and I couldn't find it again. To this day I have retained a mental image that consists of a window of consciousness about four feet wide with my hands groping around on the floor feeling for the bloody thing. I was stood up by the drummer, and he held me up by my armpits while the guitarist slapped my face, offering words of encouragement. I am told the crowd viewed this spectacle with curiosity.

Oddly, by the time we had finished the set I was stone cold sober, but very, very unwell, and was driven back over the Menai Bridge to our digs in Anglesey with my head hanging out of the gap of the sliding door of our Dormobile, about a foot behind the front wheel. It was January, and snowing.

Another 'medical' emergency happened a few months previously on the way to a gig in Newport, Gwent. I was earning some extra money by cutting grass for Cardiff Parks Dept during the day. This involved getting up at some stupid time in the morning to get to work really early, and most nights after we had played at some Rugby Club or other, and stopped off for a curry on the way home, I was not in bed before two or three. I was really burning the candle at both ends.

On this particular night, just as we were passing the Royal Gwent Hospital I was sitting in the front of the van and remarked to the guys how odd it was that the fingers on both of my hands were curling backwards up towards my wrists. I can't even push them as far as they managed to get all on their own - some sort of spasm, I suppose. We turned directly into the hospital gates and to the front of A&E, and I was walked in, presumably looking very odd, but feeling oddly detached from it all. I was interrogated for a while about what I had been taking, but I couldn't get them to believe that it was the result of exhaustion.

An hour and a half later I was on stage, making my way through the first set, sitting on a chair with a bucket by my side just in case, living testimony to the recuperative powers of Brains Bitter.

W124

1,496 posts

137 months

Wednesday 27th December 2017
quotequote all
Thing about touring is - it does, indeed, start off as sex, drugs and occasional music but, after a few months, it’s just arguments about toothbrushes and tedious bhiness. Lots of PlayStation as well. It gets dull. Hence the drive to make it interesting gets stronger and things get crazier and darker.

I did used to do all sorts of crazy st. But it’s because we were all bored.