Tripping on my gown & falling face-down in the lap of the duchess of somewhere in front of my entire family when accepting my degree was pretty embarrassing, as was suddenly & hideously vomiting in the lap of my boss on a flight to the US in the first week of my first ever journalist job.
Music related stuff … about a month ago my band played a set at 333 & we all turned up in bad moods ‘cos the organiser of the night had decided that his band would also play & he’d put himself above us in the bill. After our set we had a lot of drinks & then I decided I was too annoyed to stay, so I barged through the crowd & onstage where the organiser’s band were setting up, started packing my gear up & trooping it offstage in front of the singer. This all took about five minutes & I was moving stuff around, unplugging cables, shouting to people from the stage, talking to the band, everything. When I walked offstage people started shouting at me & it was only then that I realised the band were in the middle of their set & everyone thought I’d done some hugely bitter disrespectful Jarvis-like ‘intervention’. I’m still trying to convince people it was accidental.
Another embarrassing moment was playing a set at Torture Garden which was supposed to be a kindof super-delicate half-hour cover of ‘The Power of Love’ with piano, double-bass & counter-tenor, only the dance room next door was separated from the stage by
a curtain so nobody, including us, could hear a thing. We just hammered away at our instruments making helpless faces at each other while everybody left to dance, and then walked offstage after making inaudible 'playing motions' for twenty minutes to an empty floor. The organiser said it was, “really transporting”.
I also did a radio show on Resonance where the producer passed out on junk the second we arrived leaving us with an empty studio & 40 minutes of dead air to fill with desperate improvised music-free live chat. It got so patently hopeless that it bypassed the ‘art’ barrier & someone actually called the station offering to save us. This guy, totally unrelated to Resonance, drove to the studio from his house, plugged everything in, the mix started & then the show ended
