Fire Breathing
During my first stint in Alnwick in the mid-eighties I was part of the hippie/rocker/musicians set in the town. A good bunch. One of them was a lad called Mark and he lived miles out on the moors in a small-holding with his GF, Sue. Mark was a bit of a dodgy guy, a bit of a wheeler-dealer always on the lookout for an opportunity to make a quick buck but was a great bloke just the same. Mark decided to use the place he was living at to throw a small music festival. A lot of things in my life start this way - a daft idea in a pub that somehow takes on a life of it's own. If we knew how much hard work for little reward was involved we would have never done it. But anyway, we were young and stupid and nobody told us what we were trying to do was impossible given our resources so we just went ahead and did it.

I'm not going to go into the nitty-gritty of how we organised this festival, I'll just skip to the fire-breathing part.

On the first night we had number of bands on our one and only stage and Mark came over to me (I was doing lights) and asked me if I could do some juggling or something during the change-over of bands to keep the natives from getting restless. I was a bit pissed by now, too pissed to juggle, and I had a brainwave. I'd do some fire-breathing! I'd seen it done and I knew the principles. It couldn't be that hard could it?

So I beetled off to one of the barns, grabbed some paraffin and made a flaming torch. Then I decanted some paraffin into a bottle, too a swig and blew..... WOOOOOOOSSSHHHHHH! Massive fucking flames! Hey this was easy! So I then drunkenly made my way to the main stage and put on a bit of a show. It went down a storm. I was having a great time and so was the crowd (I do like showing off once in a blue moon...). Anyway, at the end of my show another band started up and the crowd headed back to watch them.

As I was packing up, these three very drunk lads came over.

"Man! That was awesome! How do you do it? Can you teach us!!!"

I explained that trying it as pissed as they were wasn't a good idea and that the paraffin tasted vile but the were insistent. As I was in a good mood and I showed them how to do it using water to practise with and then allowed them a couple of quick shots each. They were over the moon.

A couple of weeks later I was chatting to Mark. He'd just come back from Tyneside where he'd met these three guys and was killing himself laughing. What I didn't know at the festival is that these guys weren't drunk. They were tripping out of their brains on LSD! For the last two weeks they'd been telling everyone they met that they'd met a wizard at the festival and he'd waved his arms and they'd breathed fire man!

Laugh! I almost choked.....

Cheers
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Mon 7 Nov 2005, 13:39, Reply)