The one in that picture (my brother's wedding I think) is an extreme example... but maybe not the most extreme. If I could stay like this I would love it... but..
Actually, I dunno why I said it was at my brother's wedding, I just looked at it again and it was when I was in Russia in about 2012 I guess in a bar that I was about to DJ in called Solyanka.* That bloke standing next to me was an English guy that we met randomly in that bar and after we got talking it turned out that he is a mate of Jim ie MrSloane from dissensus. That was a weird coincidence right? I'm still in touch with that guy in fact, we met up in London when he came over to UK for a couple of days.
A month or two later that bar Solyanka was raided, a load of police busted in and they beat up a load of people before making everyone in there lie down face down with their hands cuffed behind their back. It never opened again. No-one seem to know for sure why that happened, the two theories most often put forward are
1. Mykki Blanco was due to play there shortly (that much is true) and the authorities therefore decided that the bar was too gay to exist
2. The bar had not paid off some mafia faction and that was their punishment.
No idea which is right. I know that the guy who booked me to play In Moscow used to own a record shop and its existence followed a pattern whereby he would open, it would sell records for a bit, then some gang would come and threaten him and demand more money than he could afford so he would shut the shop and start looking for a new place to re-open. He killed himself about a year later sadly and in my mind I always associate that constant stress as being a contributing factor although really I didn't know him well enough to say.
He was an amazing guy, always sort of swimming against the tide of what was expected of people in Moscow (I remember he took us to this rave that was just kind of winding down and they had built this amazing wooden village with four or five stages - somehow he managed to get thrown out about ten minutes after we arrived). We'd never met him before but he found me three or four places to play and made the whole thing fucking brilliant. He was one of those guys who was always organising stuff, his phone was always ringing with people asking him to sort out this or that for them. One of his friends was this kid called Timofey who was about 17 and he had this mini-factory making speed within about half a mile of the Kremlin, it kept us awake for days. Anyway Grisha was a really wicked guy and he was responsible for us having such an amazing time in Moscow. I always completely assumed that we would return the favour and bring his band (there is this amazing bit of footage somewhere of him playing drums is some punk band in a squat somewhere where there was really no stage and this really fucked guy kept staggering around and falling on top of the band etc etc until Grisha finally jumped to his feet, set about the cunt with his drumsticks and then chucked him back into the crowd) London and have some adventures together there, couldn't believe it when they contacted us to tell us the news.
*Solyanka is the name of a hearty, sour Russian soup. Liza was furious that it was not on their menu... though looking at the size of me that was maybe for the best