"They Were Still Booing him When We Came on Stage..."

OTIS LEE CRENSHAW (RICH HALL): One time I had to come out on stage from this beer cooler, but in the wait I drank all the beer and got into a fight with some pixie strippers that appeared. Then their troll minder beat me up and stole my car keys.

HAZEL O’ CONNOR: On a tour of Poland on the way back to Warsaw to catch a flight we discovered one of the girls in the band, Clare, had left her passport in the hotel - four hours drive back. We pulled into the police station and put on a big act. Clare cried, and we gave them some old cassettes. They organised the police to go to the hotel and get a taxi sent to the plane. At the last minute a cab driver came waving a brown envelope with the passport and some underwear she’d also left behind.

JOHN SQUIRE: One of the early Stone Roses gigs, probably ‘85 when we put out our first single. Andy Cousins was the other guitarist in the line-up at the time and he had a problem with his equipment at the start of the gig. It turned out to be a dodgy lead. The only spare lead that was around was about a foot long. We were all jumping around the place and he had to spend the whole show crouching on one knee, his guitar touching his amp, scowling.

JIM ROSE FROM THE JIM ROSE CIRCUS: I swallowed a goldfish once and I regurgitated it back into the bowl. When I grabbed the microphone the electricity knocked me to the floor and it was drilling through my body. I kicked it out of my hand and everyone cheered – they thought it was part of the show but I almost died.

TOM DUNNE: Only about 27,000 of them! The most embarrassing of all though was when Something Happens played our second gig in the National Stadium. We walked on stage and it was completely covered in dry ice, I couldn’t see where I was going at all. So I walked towards where I thought the front stage should be and fell off it! Wonderful Spinal Tap moment.
GLORIA GAYNOR: Spinal Tap moment? I don’t understand what that means. Have I seen it? No, I was afraid to see it. It’s a comedy? I thought it was a scary movie! That’s why I never went to see it. Okay, I’ll rent it.

GARY MOORE: With Thin Lizzy when we used to open with ‘Jailbreak’ these flames would shoot up at the front of the stage. Once when the curtains came up the entire band were up on the drum riser, afraid we’d get burnt!

STEVE EARLE: It happened in the Olympia in Dublin on the Copperhead Road tour. Going from the dressing room to the stage I stopped off in the bathroom. By the time I got out I was lost. Took a wrong turn and ended up in a dead-end stairwell. Then I ran into a fucking ghost, I swear it’s true! It was a girl; I could even smell her presence.

CAPTAIN SENSIBLE FROM THE DAMNED: Being complete cunts, we try to give our support bands a hard time. But The Ruts decided to get their own back by depositing five sacks of manure on the stage just before we came on. We didn’t realise what they’d done until we were standing ankle-deep in steaming horse shit. Needless to say, there were slaps afterwards.

BILL WYMAN: Aptly enough, it would have been back in 1965 when the Stones played Cleveland and had to make our way to the stage through a series of tunnels. There was a dust-covered Stars and Stripes draped over a chair, which Brian (Jones) thought would make a nice souvenir. The police didn’t see it that way and threatened to arrest us for defacing the national flag. The more he tried to explain that his intentions were honourable, the more they wanted to kick our heads in.

MARK KOZELOK OF THE RED HOUSE PAINTERS: Turning up at what was supposed to be a tiny club gig in Mexico City, and finding that we d been booked into a hall that held 10,000 people. The crowd – all 200 of them – were expecting some big American rock band like Aerosmith, and didn’t take kindly to us strumming away on our stools.

TABBY CALLAGHAN OF PETRONELLA (AND X Factor FAME): Once on the Heineken Rollercoaster Tour, I leaped onto a table while playing guitar behind my head, collapsed backwards and demolished the entire stage, ker-unch. Blew my amp as well. It wasn’t The Who, put it like that.

IAN ANDERSON: The infamous pod that wouldn’t open was based on a Jethro Tull gig at Buffalo in upstate New York. It was the first show of the tour. Five giant white rabbits came on stage. It was us dressed in rabbit suits! The plan was we would line up on stage, turn sideways and each person would unzip the rabbit in front of him. Unfortunately some of the zips jammed and half the band started playing, with roadies and soundmen trying to unzip the rest.

SINÉAD O’CONNOR?I did a TV show in Germany. They wanted me to do ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ and they had this set where they thought I would dreamily come down the stairs and they had these Christmas trees without decorations and inside them were these people and they were around me in a circle and as I was singing the song they would come forward. And all I could see were these feet and I couldn’t stop laughing. I was literally wetting my knickers. I had to tell my manager I couldn’t do it.

DANNY McCORMACK FROM THE WILDHEARTS
We did a gig in the Dublin Rockgarden where we weren’t getting on too well and wouldn’t play the same song at the same time in protest. Ginger would start singing ‘TV Tan’ and I’d go into the riff from ‘My Baby Is A Headfuck’! Another classic was when I puked up during the first song, and because of the force of the retching simultaneously shat me trousers. I had sick down me front, and poo in me trousers, but I still managed to pull afterwards.