FireBird Blog

Every so often a gig comes along that really buzzes, everyone’s on a high and the evening goes in to that mental list of great gigs. But unfortunately the converse is sometimes true, a gig that gets filed in the memory bank for all the wrong reasons.

We call these Chicken Wire gigs, from the Blues Brother’s film.

Edgy gigs are fine, but when it goes beyond edgy it gets a bit worrying; even if we take the ‘rough gear’, there’s thousands of quids worth on stage. And it’s not just the value of the equipment if it gets damaged, when booze starts flying there’s the very strong possibility of it getting mixed with 220 volts, which is not a happy conjunction.

Pissed-up audiences are not fun; when you’re not watching the twats dancing (I use the phrase loosely) slopping the drinks in their hands, you’re fending them off. Neither of which is conducive to a good performance!

We’ve had 2 of these recently. The first one a venue with a low stage where a drunken pair fell onto the stage, successfully taking out the monitor system and damaging plugs and cables. The second was in a pub with no stage (we played on the ‘dance-floor’), that was characterised by an uncontrolled clientele who thought they had the right to grab the singer’s mic, then slop booze on our gear. The staff were totally uninterested and despite threatening to stop the performance they did nothing to moderate the punters. Neither did they clean up the slippery dance floor, or the broken glass until told to. So we played until time, ignored the encore shouts and left as quickly as possible. I dislike discos with a passion but will in future recommend that option if approached by either of these establishments again.

You can get a good idea of a pub by its bogs; well-looked after normally indicates a well-run establishment. The type that require an NBC suit for the sake of your health, toilet seats missing, no locks (you get the picture), are, in almost every case indicative of how the place is run; so my advice before you accept gigs is to go and look at the loos.

We’re in the privileged position of not being short of work, so in future we’ll decline the ‘sports pubs’ with filthy crappers and stick with those venues know for music.