Part 2 of Craig
Stephen’s look at gigs that turned ugly …
***
Phoenix Festival, Stratford-on-Avon, 1993
The Phoenix
Festival began in 1993 but the only licence promoters Mean Fiddler could get
had severe restrictions that made any proper festival unworkable. In contrast
to Glastonbury's 24 hour bustle, at Phoenix 1993 the music stopped at 11pm, and
security guards ruthlessly quelled campfires and campfire sound systems that
went on beyond midnight.
On one night (I
recall this as the first) this caused a near riot, to which the security guards
responded by taking off their standard security shirts with their identifiable
numbers, and battering punters with batons and broken up pallets.
I was at the front
of the angry crowd and as always there’s one halfwit using it to sell
something, in this case “riot lager” for a pound a can. A stereo was blaring
John Peel’s show, and appropriately the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ came
on, and the volume was cranked up.
With no sign of
the crowd departing, out came all these fascistic black-shirted security guards
bashing whoever got in their way. I got smashed on the back, it was so hard it
sent me flying but I got up immediately and ran like bloody fuck, as did
everyone else.
Julian Cope’s Head
Heritage site says that when a list of security guards was handed to the police
to run checks on them after the event, it revealed that several of them were
wanted for violent crime. Mean Fiddler defended the guards, blaming instead
fence jumpers for the trouble. But according to Cope, photographic evidence
clearly showed those beaten up had three-day wrist passes.
Status Quo, Dundee, 1969
Francis Rossi said
of this gig in the eastern Scottish city: “You used to get extra money for
playing in Scotland because it was so dangerous, although luckily the Scots
took to us early on. We were in this brand new room with parquet flooring, and
this fight broke out. I'd never seen anything like it – 1500 people, everybody
punching everyone else: men punching men, men punching women, women punching
men, women punching women … it was like the Wild West. People bottling each
other in the back and neck, glasses flying. And we were onstage and there was
no way out. Luckily someone told us to get our stuff, get out, and come back in
the morning. We didn't argue, we just left. We came back in the morning and
these 20 old women were there in a line, on their knees, scrubbing the blood
out of this lovely new parquet floor.”
Public Image Limited, New York, 1981
PiL were in
confrontational mode before the gig at the Ritz even started: arriving late,
making the audience wait in the rain, then mocking them as they stood in the
queue, soaking.
According to Ed
Caraballo, who was the band’s “video guy”, the venue refused to let the support
band go on stage until John Lydon arrived. The support act (a folk band spotted
in a pub says Caraballo) thus came on an hour later than scheduled. They were
booed off.
“The crowd was really cranky and pissed by then,” says video guy.
A ‘presenter’,
Lisa Yipp goes on stage to introduce a pre-recorded interview with Lydon and Keith
Levene.
“The crowd had it
by then. They turned on Lisa for everything that happened and pelted her with
beer bottles.”
Eventually the
band come on, but behind a screen. At the end of the first song, ‘Flowers of
Romance’, Lydon says “Silly fucking audience, silly fucking audience...”.
The crowd demand
the screen be pulled back. “John's never
been one who likes to be told what to do so he's chiding the audience,” recalls
video guy. “He says what fuckers they were to pay 12 dollars to see this, just
taunting the audience. The more they say 'raise the screen,' he says 'we're not
going to raise the fucking screen.”
After a long,
largely improvisational track Lydon ups the abuse, and the response is beer
bottles. “Even in the balconies, they were throwing bottles and some of it was
hitting the audience down below. The more that they threw bottles, the more
that John would chide them,” recalls video guy.
The manager’s
demands to raise the screen are ignored by the tech team, and is told that it’s
a performance art show and should have been advertised as such.
By now the crowd
is pulling on the tarpaulin screen, and eventually a roadie grabs the mic out
of Lydon’s hand and declares the show over.
“From the back of
the auditorium, it was a beautiful site,” says video guy. “It was a sick
feeling because part of me said 'wow, I'm responsible for this carnage' and
part of me said 'wow, I'm fucking cool’.”
Hans Werner Henze, Hamburg, 1968
Henze and
co-writer Ernst Schnabel wrote this piece as a requiem for Che Guevara. During
its debut performance in Hamburg, a student hung a poster of Che over the
balcony. An official then tore it down. Other students raised a red flag and a
second portrait of Che, while some anarchists raised black flags. Scuffles
ensued between the two groups then the police arrived. Students were hauled
off, as was Schnabel.
Westlife, Indonesia, 2001
Yes, even at
Westlife gigs there would be trouble.
As Shane Filan
recounts: “It was an amazing gig, but it ended badly. There were about 20,000
people there because it was our biggest territory outside of the UK: our album
had gone 22 times platinum or something.
“But it was
afterwards that things went horribly wrong. There was total hysteria and we
couldn't leave the stadium until they cleared it of people. Unfortunately, as
the police tried to do so, all these security men started running at them. It
was like a battle. They were flat-out attacking each other, thumping and
kicking. It was unbelievable, about 100 police and 100 security. Eventually,
the army got called in. It was like something out of Braveheart.”
Sixteen teenagers
were said to have been taken to hospital after the concert in Jakarta.
Cockney Rejects, Birmingham, 1980
After punk, came
Oi and the second wave of the movement. If the first outbreak of punk was a bit
violent, this was the bloody carnage, with football hooliganism and hardline
politics mixed in.
The band had just
appeared on Top of the Pops in West Ham United shirts. "After that,
everybody wanted to fight us, but you couldn't back down," says Rejects
frontman Jeff ‘Stinky’ Turner. "Once you were defeated, it would have
opened the floodgates for everybody."
So, on this night,
the Rejects were backed into a corner and forced to stand and fight. Guitarist
Micky Geggus was charged with GBH and affray, and the Cockney Rejects' career
as a live band was effectively over.
"There was a
lot of people cut and hurt, I got cut, Micky really got done bad, with an
ashtray, the gear was decimated, there was people lying around on the floor.
Carnage," added Turner.
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