The first time I played in front of an audience was an interesting time, there was some big up and coming band from London at the event getting some press coverage and they were fine, not overly great, they had some appeal but weren't anything special like we were being told they were. Anywho, something weird happened with the booking and they didn't headline, we did and had never done any live stuff before, they weren't happy with any of this and tried to leave the building with all of the equipment we were using on the stage (shared amps and things as standard) they were packing everything down throwing a strop, the event manager had to come and stop them and say we were going on and using their stuff, they weren't having any of it and took one of the cabs to fuck with us so the rhythm guitarist had to use a tiny ass practice amp someone got from the store room in the basement while the rest of us had big rigs, half stacks and a tonne of pedals to go with the tube amps.
We were already a mess at this point, being students we were drinking all night getting ready for our time, the singer's voice was shot from staying awake for 3 days straight passing out about 4 hours before the show, not preparing and still drinking despite being a walking corpse at this point. I was trying to flirt with every girl in the building and failing thanks to the influence of Jack Daniels.
We got on stage with half of it collapsed and packed away from this band throwing a fit but we tried to power through, singer still dying and unable to focus struggled for 15 minutes trying to get a microphone stand to position better, he ended up giving up and just crouching over it. We played a show the best we could considering 3 of us were so drunk we couldn't even spell our own faces and the singer close to death from exhaustion. The media people were still there and wrote bad reviews about how we were trying to upstage the big group they actually came for and how we were idiots not knowing how to erect a mic stand and played "generic" stuff. In fairness at the time it was generic but hey, we'd only just started.
I have fond memories of this time of life, we had fun and that up and coming band didn't go anywhere. Can't go wrong with free publicity.
Stuck Mojo
Deluhi
Pentera
Hellyeah
In Flames
LTD Guitars/Basses
Silvertone Apocalypse AK1 Prototype model
Peavey amps
Marshall amps
Shure microphones
