I thought I had almost repressed the memories, thanks B3ta...
For those who lived in Reading last year at the end of October and happened to be at the Butler pub on Saturday the 23rd for the What The Butler Saw part of the Whitley Arts festival, I'm sorry.

For those who weren't there... A little background and then the story. Wall of text ahead.

I'm a musician - I play guitars, keys, bass and can drum to a basic degree. I used to be part of two-piece acoustic group when I was at uni at Chester, where I'd do guitar and sometimes piano if I could get a lift to the venue with my keyboard. We'd do covers, usually to a pub of pissed up students and locals, so I was used to performing, or so you would've thought.

For the Whitley Arts festival, I wasn't doing my acoustic thing with my usual bandmate, I was doing a different project, called Hemy/Rowell, because we were original and because neither of us could come up with a good name. It's a fairly experimental drone metal project, so not your usual style of music. We'd been messed around by the organiser beforehand, and were considering canceling the entire thing until he emailed us the night before and begged us to turn up, saying he'd pay us extra to cover transport. So we reluctantly agreed, and that's pretty much when the God of Disaster decided to start pissing all over us.

For starters, my keyboard settings decided to delete themselves, so I had to go and recreate six patches from memory, which isn't great when you're doing it at 1 am. After a night recreating patches, I rocked up on very little sleep, on the assumption we were playing at 3 pm.

Come 5 pm, still not on stage, and I'm starting to get worried. The other bands have rocked up with tons and tons of equipment, and where people are supposed to be standing to watch us is filled with various mellotrons, guitars, bass, amps, keyboards, and not many people. When there's more equipment for 8 bands in total than there is people, you know something has gone wrong. Warning signals were blaring in my head, and I should've run then, but like a rabbit in the headlights, I didn't.

By quarter to six, everyone is set up, and we're waiting til 6 to start. Hemy/Rowell is on first, and I am properly bricking myself, mainly because me and Hemy look like we've come from a metal gig and everyone else there look like hippies. There's performance art going on elsewhere, and a video is playing about how great we are, despite the organiser only meeting Hemy twice before, and me only that morning. Then we take to the stage.

We get through the first two songs fine, with some applause. The third song goes fine, and by now I'm beginning to not panic so much, but then the God of Disaster lines up for his next shot. The cable connecting my keyboard to the PA system decides to start messing up. It's not one of my cables, it's the venues, so all I can do is glance helplessly at the guy manning the PA desk, who takes this as the signal to increase the volume of my keyboard near the end of the fourth song.

This then messes the next song up, so I have to essentially stand like a complete muppet behind my keyboard, doing nothing, before attempting to start the sixth and final song. Almost everyone in the audience flinches at how loud my keyboards are for the start, and some begin to leave. It's during this point that I decide fuck it, and just wedge various keys down and hit the sustain pedal and decide that I'm never playing there again.

To top it all, the organiser didn't pay us. Bastard.

Apologies for length, it normally goes better than this.
(Ghost Atreides enjoying incontestable health benefits on, Fri 19 Aug 2011, 16:06, Reply)