The most nerve wracking gig you have done?

Gassage

Playing Run Like Hell's chords for Guy Pratt's s comedy show at Sunningdale in 2012.

Before the show, we went through it and I found this conversation less than helpful in assauging my nerves;

Gas "Guy, does David play the triad licks like this?" Me: "Dah Dah Daahhhh, Dah Dah Dahhhhh.Dah Dah Dah, Dahhhh Dah......."

GP "James, I can quite confidently assure you that David has never played any triads resembling those in his entire career......"

Absolutely true.

p90fool

thegummy said:

Mine will be my first ever gig next month. I'll be doing bass and sole vocals and will be shitting myself!

Good luck!

Parker

impmann said:

The biker dudes were utterly brilliant as it turned out and we had a fantastic night in the end.

Bikers often make excellent punters!

Funnily enough I have been lucky to play some really cool gigs, but don't normally get beyond a healthy point of nervousness, but I too think my worst / most conscientious gig was a works do - I don't think i'll ever put my name forward for something like that again.  

DartmoorHedgehog

Not guitar-related, but I used to play clarinet and sax in jazz and wind bands.  During one holiday (I was a student at the time) I was asked to fill in at a Christmas gig for a wind band I'd played in before going off to university.  On the day of the gig I realised they hadn't said what they wanted me to play - no problem, I thought, and took a couple of saxes and a clarinet.

So I turned up, confident I'd covered all possibilities - "What am I playing, clarinet or sax?"...  "Percussion"... what?

I was faced with a table full of freaky looking devices and had to hit, shake, etc, the correct item at the right time - reading from a bizarre (to me) drum score with no idea what any of the various shaky things were called.

This was more than 25 years ago now, but I reckon it was one of the most embarrassing couple of hours of my life - absolutely s**tting myself.  But my "grab a random thing and make a noise with it when it feels right" technique seemed to go down fairly well with the audience - I think only the drummer knew what a useless job I'd done   Never again though!

thegummy

p90fool said:

thegummy said:

Mine will be my first ever gig next month. I'll be doing bass and sole vocals and will be shitting myself!

Good luck!

Cheers man appreciate it

GavRichList

Either the first Minnaars gig, which was upstairs in the Princess Charlotte (RIP) or Reading fest, again with Minnaars. The first I think I played a sum total of 3 correct notes, the highlight being an entirely fucked break with just my guitar - utterly hideous. We were watched by some people who we were keen to impress; if I recall we were playing to members of forward Russia, Cats x3, Itch... they were a big deal in the scene we desperately wanted to be a part of. I played shockingly. 

Reading was just an other worldly experience. 5 song set over and done with in a heartbeat. Huge vehicled camera man in my face at all times, and when I finally looked out from under my fringe, there was about 3000+ looking back at me. It was the realisation of an adolescent dream, only played out entirely differently to how you’d imagine it’d feel. We were very conscious that it was filmed, and so inhibited a little by the crushing desire to play tightly. 

Stevepage

it was a few months ago at EBGBs in Liverpool. it was my first gig in over 10 years so obviously I was nervous to finally get back on stage. Good show though and I fell straight back into it all 

rico

My first ‘big’ gig was at the Hammersmith Palais and we were first on the bill. Playing to about 2000 people on a proper stage with proper FOH was a big step up from local pubs and clubs with a 200 capacity max. 

We played four or five originals and it was over in a flash. We had a proper back stage and girls wanted to talk to us and everything. It was ace. 

monofin

@impmann ;
Thanks for reviving a memory there. Horn of Plenty was my local for a few years when I lived in st. Alban's. Complete dive and somehow I managed to get banned at one point - can't recollect how!
Happy days.....

David335

Every gigs a nerve wrecker until after the first song , just throw some rock God shapes and you start to enjoy it. I still Dred gigs 34 years after my first. The churn is still the same ! Ha

Eartrumpet

Following Joanovarc at the Baldock beer festival a couple of years ago.... they were incredible and i was proper bricking it. Gig went so well though as we had to up our game

Teetonetal

David335 said:

Every gigs a nerve wrecker until after the first song , just throw some rock God shapes and you start to enjoy it. I still Dred gigs 34 years after my first. The churn is still the same ! Ha

That must be tough? I mean there are always some nerves, but I think if I always felt like I did the other night I couldn't put myself through it

axisus

richardhomer said:

A friend of mine owned a music shop which promoted an Arlen Roth concert in Rochdale in the ‘80s. At the time, he tended to gig to backing tracks, due to the cost of flying his band over from the States.

My friend proposed that the band we were in stood in for the tapes at the Rochdale gig. AR agreed on the condition that we ran through the set the night before - and if we weren’t good enough, he’d play to tapes.

We got a list of songs faxed through and rehearsed them solidly for two-three weeks before the gig. AR ran through the set with us - and we passed the audition.

To make matters worse, as the whole event was to promote his Hotlicks tuition tapes, the 500 strong audience was made up almost entirely of guitar players.

A great opportunity and a wonderful memory....

That is ..... Awesome!

stratman3142

I used to play in a band that did covers of music from James Bond movies.

We did a 'party in the park' type gig at Quex House in front of a few thousand people and were supporting The National Symphony Orchestra. I was asked to play on a couple of James Bond numbers that were in orchestra's set.  I can't sight read music, but can follow a chart if I've done some preparation. The tunes were in our set, so how hard could it be. Exept the orchestra used different arrangements and keys, and bizarrely played the Bond Theme in F.

Just before the orchestra played, the conductor started chopping sections from the arrangements because things were running late. So we were getting instructions along the lines of "halve the number of bars in section D", "delete the second repeat after the D.S.", "at bar 45 jump straight to the Coda" ...  Fortunately the leader of the band I was in was a proper (Royal College of Music educated) musician who marked up my charts, which were now covered in pencil scribbles. I relaxed a bit when the drummer/percussionist looked over to me and said "I don't know if you followed that, but I'm completely lost". Perhaps he was trying to make me feel better.

Then the orchestra started and the location of the beat was best described as 'somewhat vague'. I've never played (or even rehearsed) with an orchestra before, so I was completely uprepared for that. I don't know whether it's because everyone is so spread out in an orchestra, or whether there's a major lag behind the beat. Probably seeing the WTF look on my face, my mate yelled in my ear "follow the conductor" so I tried that and also tried to lock into drummer/percussionist. 

When we finished it was getting dark and everyone quickly grabbed their instruments and made a mad scramble off the stage, literally running to the car park. So the sense of panic continued. I soon realised that was because they were were trying to get away before rush. I was left lugging my amp in the pitch black to my car, then got stuck in a massive traffic jam trying to calm down my shattered nerves.

HarrySeven

a. Sometime in the mid-'80's, the band I was in (U2/Cactus World News-ish Indie stuff) were booked to play some dire bar in Birmingham on the same evening everyone broke up for Christmas.

Everything that could go wrong, went wrong. The room was full of blind drunk office-types itching for a ruck.

It didn't end well.


b. Same band, similar-era. Booked to play in the sole club in a rural Shropshire town. It was Friday night and the yokels had come in from the fields to: 1. Spend their coin on drink and f*ck-all else and 2. Kick the living sh*t out of each other.

As we pulled up in the van, the streets were full of people fighting. The club was full of people fighting.

That didn't end well either.

iseverynamegone

One of my mates bands played in Liverpool and before the gig stopped at a park to have a quick game of footy and a few beers. The guitarist , who was resplendent with long hair and make up and a mouthy f*cker, got bitch slapped  by a gang of local 8 yrs old while we watched pissing ourselves.  

Happy memories. We had video to prove it too and we used rock it out every Xmas as a treat. 

mburekenge

I had a big (for me) gig last tuesday. A video crew filming etc.

 got three quaters of the way through the set, all was going well, right in the zone and thought to myself 'this is going great'

Soon as i had done that and started thinking consciously,  i lost the vibe immediately. I launched into the solo and played a lot of 'outside' notes. Not in a sophisticated fusion fashion, more in a les Dawson stylee.

Pulled it back in the end, but still, it was pretty embarrassing.

enjo

I had not played in front of people since my teens (15 years ago) until a couple of months ago... I went to a improv comedy show where they asked if anyone in the audience could point to a friend who played guitar. My lovely friends frantically pointed me out. I had to go up on stage and improvise a song (with a guitar they supplied) with the comedy group to  few hundred people. It was fine but my heart was in my mouth as I walked up to the stage.
I even managed OK when half way through they shouted 'guitar solo!' 

Incase anyone was there, it was the noise next door in Farnham and they sang about the DVLA. 

Danny1969

It was 2008, Portsmouth had just won the FA cup and Portsmouth City Council wanted to celebrate. So they ask a well known venue owner where they can get a good covers band from and our name gets put forward. We were told 25K would be turn up which sounded pretty good to me but on the day over 100,000 turned up .... I walked out onstage and took this photo ....just looking at a sea of people. 




It was a bit nerve racking cos A : it was daytime and I was stone cold sober and B just the shear amount of people ... plus the TV crew from BBC and Sky, then the camera men on stage with is getting close ups of me solo'ing to show on the huge TV screens




Power went 2 quarters through the first song as they were pushing the PA harder than anticipated to cope with the larger crowd but it came back on and we did 2 sets 

Paul_C

I got asked to help a friend out by playing bass in his band (no rehearsal), for a small town festival - we were playing tunes whilst the crowd were coaxed into some line dancing stuff.

I arrived, plugged in my amp and was given some pieces of paper which had things like "Mayday Reel - A/G G/D" on them.

The lady band leader then called out a song name and almost before I'd even found the right piece of paper called "1, 2, 3" and was off.

I had no idea of tempo, rhythm, whether any of the As or Gs were major or minor, or even how many As there might be before the G, let alone when it changed to G/D.

Pretty much every time I started to get the hang of a tune we were done and on to the next one "and a 1, 2, 3"

It was mental, though once I started to begin songs by muting the bottom string and just thumping along with the drummer for a bar or two until I had a better idea of what was happening it got a "little" easier.

I was still trying to keep up when we were finished.

The verdict ?  "that was alright, you'll have to come along next time we do one" with me still not sure what I'd done, or what on earth it sounded like.