I'm a fiddle player.
About three St Patrick's days ago, myself and 5 friends were asked to go and play some music for an afternoon in a pub in Leek. No money involved, but we'd get some sandwiches and all the ale we could drink, which being a brewery tap, was a good deal. We got there about lunch time and started to play. And drink. Now you'd have thought that landlords would have worked out the dangers of paying musicians in alcohol, but clearly not. By 5pm, we were playing considerably faster and more erratically than we had, and had collectively notched up 120 pints. Remember, there's 6 of us, and by this point, in our sozzled heads, we are the finest Irish band ever to have graced the earth.

The landlord tries to buy us off. We're having none of it, and demand our free beer continue. By this point, the evening is approaching and what was meant to be two hours light music in the afternoon is threatening to become a drunken musical nightmare for the pub, spilling into the entire night. He tries reasoning with us, before getting more forceful. We, in turn, are clinging onto the concept of limitless free beer for music with dogged determination. Eventually he tries to confiscate our instruments. I remember trying to stand up and falling off a chair across a table of innocent bystanders and their drinks at this point, before being bundled out the back of the pub and into the car park.

The next bit is a bit hazy, but we had to create a distraction round the front whilst we salvaged our instruments. Using a phone, we'd somehow managed to persuade one of our friends to turn up with a van at the back of the pub just as the raiding party legged it back out with our instruments, before screeching off into the countryside, proud as punch at our adventures.

Next day it occured to some of us that we hadn't necessarily been the wrongful victims of a terrible misjustice, and that two of us had probably better not live in Leek much longer.

I've since grown a beard and gone back in. I think I'm still banned, but I've not been recognized yet.
( Milkman Dan, Tue 5 Sep 2006, 15:28, Reply)