A messy end!
I was in a band when I was in my mid-late teens. We peddled a brand of guitar-based rock that wasn't particularly heavy, but it was pretty cool and trippy and people seemed to like it, which was a bonus.

We played many gigs around the north west in the three years or so that we were together. We played some cracking shows, the highlight probably being the time when we were watched by John Peel, who then mentioned us on his show the following night. He didn't play any of our stuff, though. I imagine he was just being polite by giving us a mention, busy man that he was.

We had some bad gigs, too. The last one was probably the worst. It was a local gig in the upstairs function room of a pub. We had recently fired our bass player for being a complete fucknut and the drummer's brother had taken his place. He was a big, cow-like guy with a tendency to fall asleep at inconvenient times and in inconvenient places. However, after only one gig he was already fed up with the band - mainly due to our lead guitarist's extreme arrogance and inability to resist patronising everyone around him.

I was pissed off due to the old "creative differences." Basically, I wanted to go heavier and the lead guitarist (again, big, but not so much cow-like as simian in appearance, rather like an orang utan wrestling with a Les Paul) and the drummer (a little guy, kind of like a percussive, extreme sports bush baby) wanted to go all shoegazing-Radiohead-pretentiousness. Good hard rock was no longer on their agenda. Our new bovine bass player was ready to rock, and the synths and samples dude (a quiet little fellow like a confused mouse) didn't care what he was doing as long as he could get stoned all the time. I wanted out, but I'd worked so hard over the past few years with the band it would be a shame to quit, and we had a gig to honour.

It was Friday. We were due to play around 9.30pm. At 4pm I went to my local pub after work and started drinking. A couple of hours later I went down to the venue to set up and soundcheck. The other guys were fucking around. The lead guitarist was playing around with his new effects pedal and wasting time, while our support band were getting pissed off because they still needed to soundcheck. I headed out to another pub for a few more drinks. I then went back to the gig and watched the support band. Then we took to the stage.

The room was hot and moist and full of people eager to see us play. I took a pint onto the stage with me as usual and we started playing. We were dreadful. We were all out of time with each other, I couldn't get the vocals out properly because I could hardly speak and I certainly couldn't play my guitar. I got too hot and tried to take my top off with my guitar still strapped on and got myself tangled up. The bass player tried to help me get out of it, but it turned into a scene that wouldn't have looked out of place in Dumb & Dumber.

We eventually finished the gig and the drummer's mother, of all people, came up to me and said, "Stu, I think we really need to talk about things." Then our guitarist angrily told me that I would never drink before another gig again, to which I answered that there wouldn't be another gig. Then, in some sort of bizarre mammalian stand-off, the bass player started arguing with the guitarist that perhaps there was a reason I had started drinking before gigs. I left them to it and went to another pub to continue drinking into the early hours of the morning, and it was there that I learned that, while I had been in the pub between the souncheck and the gig, the rest of the band had been up by the railway, sitting like a bunch of tramps and getting monged off weed. So it wasn't just me who had been fucked up. Bastards!

It was a sad way to end the band, but it was also bordering on Spinal Tap territory, so I can look back and laugh about it. Hahahahahahaha! See.
(stusut79, Tue 6 Dec 2005, 14:21, Reply)