Load up on guns and kill everyone in sight
It was 1993, and I was boooooored. But a venue nearby was going to showcase three up-and-coming local bands, and in the absence of anything else to do, I pootled along. After all, there was an outside chance that I'd get to witness one of those legendary "before-they-were-famous" gigs that journalists and DJs in their late forties pretend they attended.

It turned out that "up-and-coming" meant "very young". I suppose that there comes a point in any gig-going life when you accept the probability that you're older than at least some of the people on stage - and that night, I reached that point. The pisser was that I hadn't even sat my GCSEs. Clearly the people running the venue had found themselves without a booking that evening, and asked their nephew if he had a band, or if any of his mates did.

Being about 14, they hadn't actually had time to learn how to write a song - or to have done anything worth singing about. You can write a song about your heart breaking: about your voice breaking? Not so much. Each band's set was, accordingly, about 20% dreadful own material, with the remainder being bad cover versions of bog-standard indie hits of the early '90s.

Thinking about it, the quality of the gig can be summed up like this: the number of bands on the bill that night was smaller than the number of amateurish renditions of Smells Like Teen Spirit that they played.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 26 Jul 2013, 11:29, Reply)