Riot On The Radio: Gigs that ended up in a massive punch-up Part 3

The final part of Craig Stephen’s look back at gigs that didn’t turn out so great, including a couple of infamous local riots ...

DD Smash, Queen Street, Auckland, 1984

It was called the ‘Thank God it’s over’ concert to celebrate the end of the university year, but shortly after headliners DD Smash took to the stage at Auckland’s Aotea Centre, the power went off.

As the 10,000-strong audience waited impatiently, a drunken man urinated on the crowd from above; when police tried to arrest him, they were obstructed and bottles were thrown. Arrests followed and then riot police arrived. Dave Dobbyn, DD Smash’s lead singer, apparently told the crowd, “I wish those riot squad guys would stop wanking and put their little batons away.”

Concert promoter Hugh Lynn said a group with a gang connection had kicked the switch for the sound system power supply.

"When the inspector came up on stage and said 'stop the show' I said to him 'that's the worst thing you can do.' If the music had kept going it would have kept the attention of the people but when it stopped they turned to another show - the riot that was building."

When the promoters announced they were pulling the plug, the audience rioted. They poured onto Queen St, Auckland's shopping central, smashed shop windows and left behind broken bottles, rubbish and upturned cars. Dobbyn was later charged with inciting violence, but was cleared of all charges but not without a severe ticking off from the judge.

Suicide, Brussels, 1978 (and everywhere else)

Even punks couldn’t deal with the abrasive New Yorkers. Alan Vega and Martin Rev made Sid Vicious look like a pre-schooler.

They started intimidating their audience early on. Vega: “At one of our first shows, there was a guy who’d brought this trombone. I jumped into the audience, fell over and knocked the slide out of his trombone. The crowd took real offence to that, so they attacked us with chairs, tables, anything they could get their hands on. That became the norm. I started carrying a bicycle chain on stage, figuring, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”

At Suicide’s European gigs the booing began shortly after they took the stage. Full beer bottles began to be thrown. In England a skinhead jumped up on to the stage and thumped Vega, breaking his nose. In Scotland an axe was thrown at them.

"In the seventies I was afraid for my life every night but that didn’t matter, it energised me,” Vega later said.

In Brussels in 1978, opening for Elvis Costello the audience booed, heckled, and eventually stole Vega’s microphone. Costello was so disgusted that he delivered a shortened set, then walked off stage. The crowd erupted in a riot and police arrived with tear gas.

The Rolling Stones, Blackpool, 1964

As with Altamont, we can’t blame the band. After 44 years had lapsed, Blackpool finally lifted its ban on the Stones and apologised.

During the gig on 24 July 1964, some in the crowd started to spit at the band. Keith Richards took umbrage at one particular troublemaker and stood on his hands and kicked him in the face.

The place erupted and angry fans smashed crystal chandeliers, tore seats up and smashed a grand piano. About 50 people were treated in hospital. Eventually, police officers with dogs calmed the situation.

The town council then imposed an indefinite ban on the Stones.

Four decades later, the leader of Blackpool Council exonerated the Londoners. "Some sections of the crowd were outraged at the performance – they found it suggestive. Nowadays it would probably seem very normal, but back then the Rolling Stones were very new to the scene and it wasn't something the fans were used to. A lot of people got very wound up. The crowd were hysterical and they went wild and trashed the ballroom.”

Guns N'Roses, St Louis, 1992

Who’d have thought a drug-addled prima donna rock star would instigate a riot?

The trouble kicked off when Axl Rose became frustrated with an unauthorised photographer taking pics, and after security failed to retrieve the camera, Mr Dickhead launched himself into the crowd and snatched it himself, hitting security and fans in the process. He returned to the stage, slammed his microphone down, and stormed off.

A local journalist who hung around like a good hack should do while others fled like cowards, recounted his experience in an open letter to Rose.

“I can still remember certain details vividly: rioters swinging from cables under the light and speaker rigging on the stage, the sound engineer warning me there would be “massive death” if it fell down; police trying to hold the stage by shooting a fire hose at the crowd, though it lacked sufficient water pressure; a man jumping into the stream, then pulling down his pants and waving his penis at the cops.

“There were other things, too: a man with a gash on his shoulder and blood on his face running madly up the aisle; another, his head strapped down, being carried out on a stretcher; Crone (Thomas, a fellow journo) being viciously jabbed in the kidneys by police trying to clear the lower bowl as I shouted that we were members of the press.

“The cops’ response was a string of vulgarities unfit for publication. ‘We’re reporters’, I pleaded. ‘That’s nice,’ another said, as they dumped us down a steep staircase.”

Rose was charged and convicted with four counts of assault and one of property damage, and fined US$50,000.

Bill Haley, Hamburg and Berlin, 1958

In 1958, during a show in Hamburg, Germany, rock and roll stars Bill Haley & His Comets were midway through a set when some teenagers started fighting each other.

About 100 police officers arrived, which at first didn’t deter these hardy pugilists who also chucked various objects until the concert was pulled.

Later that month, when the Comets played at the Sportpalast in Berlin, another riot erupted with five police officers being badly beaten and six fans hospitalised. In West Germany, the riots were condemned as examples of out-of-control juvenile delinquency, and in the East the authorities called Haley a “rock and roll gangster” with an anti-socialist agenda.

BW Festival, Gisborne, 2015

Stuff reported on the 1st of January 2015 that 63 people were arrested and 83 injured, with seven of those hospitalised.

Police told the so-called newspaper the riot broke out in the festival campgrounds around early evening on New Year’s Eve – the third day of the five-day festival - and the disorder lasted about three hours.

The police were pelted with cans and other objects, vehicles were overturned and fires were lit. Another media report suggested it began when a tent was set on fire.

The campground director said a mob mentality took over when a small group started to cause trouble.

"It's hard to say where it starts really but they started to cause trouble, started to light fires and just create general unrest. That built into a bit of a mob mentality and then they start to move in mass I guess, start to do things like charge the fences and break down the internal fences and things like that."

The festival line-up included Shapeshifter, David Dallas, Peking Duk, Sticky Fingers, Home Brew and Flume.

Riot On The Radio: Gigs that ended up in a massive punch-up Part 2

Part 2 of Craig Stephen’s look at gigs that turned ugly …

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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.

Riot On The Radio: Gigs that ended up in a massive punch-up Part 1

Craig Stephen returns to the everythingsgonegreen lounge, with a three-part offering on riotous gigs that didn’t end well … here’s part 1:

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Today the tabloid media would go apeshit if a riot broke out at an Arctic Monkeys or Green Day gig, but these days fans tend to be generally well behaved, ‘assisted’ in that endeavour by bonehead security and/or heavy-handed police surveillance. You can even take your mum along. But trouble and music once went hand in hand, and we’re talking way before Altamont.

“I’ve never been in a riot / Never been in a fight / Never been in anything / That turns out right.” – 'Never Been in a Riot' by The Mekons (1978).

So, in no particular order here’s the first half dozen gigs … (with a dozen more to come over the next two parts).

Altamont, California, 1969

The Altamont Speedway Free Festival riot was described by Rolling Stone magazine as "perhaps rock 'n' roll's all-time worst day". This was supposed to be California’s version of Woodstock, which had taken place four months earlier, but it was beset by violence from the get-go and ended with the stabbing to death of 18-year-old Meredith Hunter by a Hells Angel during the Rolling Stones' set. 

There were two other deaths at the event as well - one by drowning, another as a consequence of a hit-and-run car accident. Hunter was brandishing a revolver at the time of the incident, resulting in the Hells Angel being acquitted of murder on grounds of self-defence. 

But the circumstances leading up to the stabbing and the aftermath of Altamont continue to be discussed today. 

The festival and the Charles Manson cult killings are said to have signified the end of the 1960s hippy dream of peace and love.

Glastonbury Festival, Somerset, 1990

This particular year the ostensibly hippy festival was overshadowed by violent clashes between security forces and New Age travellers, with 235 people arrested. 

According to organiser Michael Eavis, the riot was sparked by heavy-handed treatment of the travellers by security, but also, as he told the Guardian in 2010, "We were like a social safety valve, people needed to let off steam during the Thatcher years; it just got a bit out of hand." 

Melvin Benn, who was then in charge of beer sales at the festival, said some travellers were very demanding leading up to the incident."I was dealing with a situation just off site where, at that time, there was a very rampant traveller community that were pretty un-hippy. They were pretty aggressive and the travellers were threatening to kill me. We weren't willing to give in to all of their demands. We weren't willing to allow them all in to sell drugs or give them diesel for their vehicles."

That resulted in a stand-off that resulted in a whole number of travellers making quite a vicious attack on the farmhouse, where Michael Eavis lives, just after the festival finished. 

Eavis’ daughter Emily, now a festival co-organiser, described seeing “outside the kitchen window Molotov cocktails being thrown and vehicles being set alight." 

The violence resulted in the festival being cancelled in 1991, but it returned in 1992 with a 10-foot fence around the site to ensure people paid to get in: in other words not the travellers. 

Premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, Paris, 1913

It's perhaps the most infamous premiere of a ballet when Igor Stravinsky unleashed his dissonant, aggressive masterpiece at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in the French capital on 29 May 1913, and triggered a riot. Or so the legend goes. 

Witnesses told of differing accounts - of when trouble started; of how many police were called in; and of how many arrests were made (possibly as many as 40). 

Lydia Sokolova, one of the dancers on the stage that night, said the audience came prepared. "They had got themselves all ready. They didn't even let the music be played for the overture. As soon as it was known that the conductor was there, the uproar began," she said in 1965. 

The performance continued to the end, despite the rowdiness of the audience, and one thing most accounts seem to agree on is that there was an ovation.

The Jesus and Mary Chain, London, 1985

Their short, abrasive sets, often performed with their backs to the crowd, irked fans intentionally and not just on this evening. Trouble had flared up at earlier Mary Chain gigs in 1985, resulting in a tipping point at the North London Polytechnic when the PA was ripped down and punch-ups broke out amongst the crowd. 

According to Creation records boss Alan McGee: “Meat Whiplash went on first. Halfway through the set, Stevie, the guitar player, threw a wine bottle into the audience. Somebody got on stage to belt him, but he and the rest of the band ran away, except for Eddie Connolly, the bass player. So he got socked. The next band on was the Jasmine Minks, and they went on carrying clawhammers. They wanted people to see they were tooled up. So the audience had a bottle thrown at them, the second band went on with hammers ... is it any wonder it all went off?” 

NME writer Neil Spencer wrote that soon after the Mary Chain began their set a fight broke out. “They went off stage, came back on stage, the equipment got pushed off, and the police were completely incompetent. It was impossible for them to deal with it.” 

That wasn’t the end of it as the band’s Jim Reid explained. “After we came off, we were in our dressing room, and we heard all this pounding on a door down the corridor. It was an angry mob banging on a cupboard door, thinking it was our dressing room. I remember peeking out of the door, watching these people shouting, ‘Get the bastards! Get the bastards!’.”

Daniel Auber, Brussels, 1830

As violent as all the other events were, none of them caused an actual revolution. However, the performance of Daniel Auber's five-act opera La Muette de Portici in Brussels played a significant role in the Belgium revolution of the same year, which resulted in the country gaining independence from the Netherlands. 

The nationalistic opera was chosen for a performance at the Theatre de la Monnaie on 25 August 1830, as part of King William I's festival to celebrate 15 years of his reign. The French Revolution had occurred just a month earlier. 

During a second act duet, the crowd cheered so wildly that the performers had to stop singing and start over. 

Eventually, the performers reached the peak of the piece's lyrics — singing ‘Aux Armes’ (Call to Arms) — and dozens of spectators took that message literally, into the streets. When the fifth act arrived, audience members began to boo in an attempt to stop the show and apparently incite a riot. "The delirious crowd [hurled itself] out of the hall—and into history," wrote 20th-century French composer Lionel Renieu. 

The audience chanted patriotic slogans, stormed into government buildings, and began destroying factory machinery. Soon they were flying the flag of Independent Belgium.

Section 25 & Joy Division, Bury, 1980

"There were riots all the time at gigs," recalls Peter Hook.

Bury Town Hall was among the worst.

"There was a massive riot there and I got beaten up. I got beaten up all over the place," he says.

The 400-capacity hall was heaving with people after the fire exit doors were opened, letting in about 200 more in.

There were rumours that Ian Curtis had been in hospital and the gig might be cancelled. Curtis indeed wasn’t well enough to perform, but he did, briefly.

For Section 25’s finale they were joined by the three members of Joy Division, sans Ian. 

Nobody had explained any of this to the audience so there was some confusion when Curtis eventually stepped out on stage. Someone threw a pint glass at the stage sparking a fracas. Rob Gretton dived off the mixing desk into a bunch of skinheads and Hook was physically restrained in the dressing room by Tony Wilson, his wife, and Paul from Section 25.