It's not all limitless backstage riders, fawning fans, luxury tour buses, and hotel suite parties. For most bands, life on the road is tough, mundane, and occasionally, a complete nightmare. Here, some of Ireland's finest bands share their worst ever gigs with UNA MULLALLY
James Vincent McMorrow
I remember the show vividly. It was last year as part of Féile Na Bealtaine in Dingle. I feel bad naming the festival, it’s a great event and the people who organise it were lovely, it was just a crazy gig. As soon as I arrived and saw the programme of events, I knew I was wrong for it. It was a festival for art and poetry and street theatre, not modern music. The show itself was in a town called Ballyferriter about 15 minutes from Dingle, in the back room of a bar.
The sound engineer, who was lovely but whose name escapes me, told me they didn’t put a lot of shows on there, mainly cinema nights, and added that he was the captain of a boat that ferried tourists out to the Blasket Islands.
Half way through soundcheck he got a call to say he had an early booking to the islands. Change of plans, he wouldn’t be able to engineer the show, but he’d have everything set up so all I’d have to do was jump up on stage and sing.
I arrived back for the show about two hours later to find maybe 10 people waiting, which was fair enough considering the amazing (and free) traditional music being played in the front bar. The second I sang a note into the mic it was clear everything wasn’t in fact set up quite as it should have been. A banshee wail of feedback cascaded through the room. I tore down the back and tried to fix it, but I failed miserably, only making it worse.
I decided to just switch the PA off and sing unamplified. It was at this point that a black cat jumped on to the stage and proceeded to stare at me for the next 45 minutes. Not a word of a lie. So I sang, unamplified on a stage, to 10 very confused people, with a black cat staring me dead in the eyes.
Richie Egan
Jape
The worst gig I’ve ever played was a crusty punk festival in a quarry in Ballymore Eustace. There was torrential rain and everybody was on acid. There was a makeshift cover in the form of a canvas sheet over the stage, which was letting water fall down on to the electronic equipment. So every time I went to sing, the mic was arcing and I could feel the electricity buzzing in my face.
There was a fistfight between two of the punks on the stage at one point, and then all the electricity went for a few minutes and when it came back, the bass player from our band at the time was getting off with a crusty girl. I still remember the caravan that was selling ‘wine and baccy’.
Blind Boy
Rubberbandits
Our worst gig was in an area that was famously besieged, raped and sacked by Oliver Cromwell a few hundred years previous.
As a result its denizens are very paranoid when an outsider comes to town. They must have confused us for Oliver Cromwell, as the entire audience got it into their heads that we wanted to fight them rather than entertain them and thus proceeded to make threatening gestures throughout the short gig before chasing us out of town.
Rory Friers
And So I Watch You From Afar
We had just played in Leeds with US band Clutch who we’d been touring with for a few days in the UK. In three days’ time we had our first ever European show on the main stage at Nova Rock Festival in Austria.
Naively we checked Google Maps to see how far it would be and whether or not we could get there a night early to see the newly reformed Faith No More. I remember it said 1,200 miles and we thought “no problem”, so we left that night in our LDV Convoy with no sat-nav to make the show 24 hours later.
We attempted driving in Europe for the first time, had to push our van out of the Channel Tunnel, got caught in a storm, nearly crashed into head-on traffic in Germany, missed Faith No More by a full day, got taken to the police station for sleeping roadside in our van, got fined, drove 48 hours straight only to get so drunk at the free backstage bar when we arrived that we ended up all nearly fist-fighting each other, wrecking Kaiser Chiefs’ dressing room, got asked to leave the backstage area and got three hours sleep before our main stage morning performance where we (still drunk I’m sure) played hands down our worst ever show in front of a good few thousand people.
Words cannot describe the hellishness of that entire debacle. Worst gig ever.
Conall O’Breachain
We Cut Corners
Our worst gig was when we were pathetic acoustic troubadours several years back. We thought that one of the things you were meant to do to be a musician in Dublin was to get a residency in a certain bar in the city centre. So we played there every Sunday.
We used to sit in the corner belting out Van Morrison covers.
The last evening we played – we never went back – there was a gang of fairly dodgy people in the corner. After we played a version of the Simon & Garfunkel song El Condor Pasa, one of the women in the gang came over to me and said: "If you play one more religious song I'm going to smash this glass in your face."
Anyway, we said we’d stay for the rest of the evening. About a half an hour later this guy came in shouting at us to play some Aslan.
We said "we don't know that song", so he came up to us screaming "gimme the guitar" and preceded to play Crazy World. He was bashing on the guitar so hard he cut his hand open and we went home with a disgusting blood-covered guitar.
We vowed never to return and it has been uphill ever since.
Ellie Macnamara
Heathers
I don’t want to say where it was, but it was in a different country, not Ireland, and we had two different flights. I’d say we were flying for 10 hours altogether. So when we arrived we had to go straight to the gig, which was on in a really rough area. We were pulling our suitcases behind us and people were looking at us like they were about to kill us.
Eventually we got to the venue and it was about 4am Irish time when we were playing. There were only four people there. Then in the middle of the set I lost my voice completely. It completely went, I just couldn’t sing anymore, probably from being tired and all the flying, so I had to stop singing.
So then after the gig, we thought, thank God we can just go somewhere and sleep now. The person putting on the gig said we could stay in his house, which was grand. Then he was like, “I have a couple of cats”, and we thought, fine, as me and Louise [Ellie’s twin sister and bandmate] are crazy about cats, we love cats.
But then we went back to his house and there were about nine cats there and cat litter boxes that maybe hadn’t been emptied in about a year. You could smell it from outside the apartment building. Then he went out for a while and we were spraying the place with some lavender spray we found.
We watched Talladega Nights, which was cool because we hadn't seen it before, but we were coughing really badly from the ammonia from the cat litter I guess. I opened the microwave door and God only knows what was in it. Looking back on it now, it's hilarious, but at the time I was thinking, "Oh my God, I want to go home."
