This week i'm going to talk you through some of my more err, bizarre engagements over the years.
After a year or two playing in a Goth band in Leeds called Flowers For Agatha, and sneaking off to 'dep' with the odd working mens club artist: I decided it was time to 'go pro'. Or at least attempt to. My dad had seen an ad' in the Yorkshire Evening Post, something about 'drummer' and 'wages'. Fair enough we both thought. I was on my year out between school and college. I had no trips booked to India to find myself , so i thought why not give it a go. I got the gig, auditioning to a backing tape at the Haddon Hall and in hindsight i should have know it would be a covers band.The singer of Whitticombe Faire, a guy named Keith, boasted that i was the 37th drummer to grace 'his' stage. Everything seemed to have happened in 1974, including an appearance on a television show called 'Opportunity Knocks'.
From that moment, every other show with them was screwed up in some way or another: I should have seen the signs when two of the band quit, the night i went to see them play in Falkirk, Scotland on New Years Eve.My first show would have been miming on guitar the next night had i not refused to do so. But things got really hairy in Norway, at the Batsfjord Royal Hotel. A week after a menage a trois gone awry, a jilted lover had performed a double beheading on the steps of the hotel. You could sense lingering anger in the community: And sure enough a never ending brawl broke out during the third of our four sets that night. I remember running for my life to the van with a tin of hot dogs from the kitchen and my Simmons Electronic drum kit.
More Scottish mayhem ensued on the Hollowmens' tour of the Highlands in 1990. We had a gig in Forres, home of the cult new age community, Findhorn. On the way in, Choque our guitarist noticed a rather nice looking vintage Shell gas pump and mysteriously dissapeared after soundcheck. The rest of us retired to our guest house, built for a family of midgets in the fifteenth century.


Consequently, Brian our other guitarist knocked himself out on the ceiling descending the stairwell. On arriving at the gig, he took solace in the arms of a Findhorn runaway. She proceeded to attach colored metal plates to his torso. So on we went, with Choque missing and Brian reading from his own hymn sheet. The set starts disasterously. Brian is suffering from some sort of amnesia, and at the back of the room I see this pristine glass antique Shell sign, bobbing over someones shoulders, like a Frank Sidebottom headpiece. It's Choque! He bounds onstage, proudly resting his prize atop his amp and slinging his guitar to start playing.
In Spacehog, we've played on boats, bowling alleys, volleyball tournaments, you name it! But things got weird when we opened for the Sex Pistols in Brazil on the Filthy Lucre tour.I was feeling particularly pleased with myself in Rio: Newly married, and fresh off a weeks honeymoon. There I was onstage playing away as the sun set over the Sugar Loaf Mountain. Jesus was winking at me and I was winking at him, when out of my peripheral vision I could see this rotating structure. I thought maybe it was one of the lights until BAM! I was hit on the side of the head by a flying plastic chair, somehow thrown from the audience.It almost knocked me right over as i was brought promptly back down to earth: Karma as they say....
But the #1 disaster gig was with the Twenty Twos at the House Of Blues in New Orleans. It was 2005 and i was at a point in my career where i considered myself a psychic firefighter of some prowess after ten years of dealing with Spacehog. But these girls were on a whole other level of emotional terrorism. Lets just say that two of them weren't getting along. In fact they weren't talking to each other. In fact they were a Sazerac away from trying to kill one another! Things had reached critical mass in the Big Easy and as everyone knows, bad things happen in the Big Easy. I had had enough of them at this point and disappeared for a couple of drinks with a girl i had met at the bar: A pretty girl, who told me she was a prominent actress, but seemed to be on first name terms with everyone in the strip club next door. We then went and had our fortunes read before returning to the show. To my horror, all the girls in the band were completely smashed, they could hardly walk, let alone play. Walking onstage that night felt like walking to a firing squad. Three songs in, the singer simply fell off the stage, and landed on her guitar with a sickening amplified crunch. Remarkably she got up (it was a six foot drop) and continued to play to our shows conclusion.I don't think we ever played together again, and it was a deadly quiet drive back to New York.