Ghetto Story
Two years ago I worked for a rigging/lighting company at Uni (we got paid in bottles of alchohol;my preference being gin.) Our ents manager at the time, a small 'homie' from the 'ghetto' of somewhere very un-street (possibly a suburb of Kent), a small, irate, chubby man who thought just because he 'woz black' it gave him some kind of legal right to say 'brethren' and wear trousers so baggy MC Hammer considered them a little over the top. I digress.

Amongst other bookings (Beenie Man being one I remember, this was Bradford Uni, yes, it ended in a riot) he booked aging wannabe gangsta Tim Westwood. His rider contained bottles of Crystal (I kid you not, I think our budget stretched to a single bottle, which he didn't drink, and took home!) and a CD mixer (no pesky records for this bad-ass mo-fo, incidentally, he had absolutely no idea how to use it). He acted like such a twat it would have been amusing had we not found out that a) we had to do whatever he said, like putting up posters advertising his shitey album and b) he was getting ten grand yes TEN GRAND for four hours of work. And his travel paid extra!?

His 'set' involved playing the same few songs over and over and occasionally using a sound fx cd to play gunshot, at which point he would shout 'driveby!', talking, I'm assuming, about his previous role with McDonalds. He would also shout 'lets go lets go lets go' a lot, something which most of the people who'd paid £10 a ticket to stand in the basement of Bradford uni's student union and listen to a man old enough to be their father try and be down with the kids were thinking.

Though in the end the dissapointed gig-goers, us crew, and the general public all had the last laugh. The first was finding out Tim Westwood had lied to us about being from London (he's from the Midlands), that he wasn't 35 (he was 47) and the third was 'Pimp My Ride UK'.
(Northern Lovely, Fri 30 Jun 2006, 9:56, Reply)