Sweaty

Well it had to happen sooner or latter I had my first bad night out. It started well that day a couple of people had texted me inviting me out. I felt all warm and fuzzy that these people I hardly knew had gone to the small effort and invited me out. Sadly that's pretty much the last warm and fuzzy feeling I would experience for the rest of the evening. I was being invited to a gig. I hadn't been to a gig since my days of playing them well over 5 years ago. I wanted to decline but as I was on this travelling experiment doing stuff that I normally wouldn't do ...

I was being taken to the The Espy on St Kilda beech, it was your typical music venue bar, rough around the edges but it had more than enough charm and personality to compensate. Apart from one thing ... it was punk night. I've always hated punk, this was compounded by the fact that I really used to like heavy metal. Because there was never enough Metal Heads or Punks to have a club night each we where forced to co-exist. It was an uneasy alliance with each side visible reeling when the other sides music was being played. You could literally see the shift change on the dance floor as the music switched genre, only to switch back again a few songs later.

Every fibre of my body was telling me to run and get out while I still could.

'I'm already pretty drunk and I don't have any ID'

I told the bouncers in a vein attempt for them not to let me in, well, with the last straw clutched and not holding I payed entry and things got worse. I saw a big poster advertising a band named 'Bastard Squad' and the date looked horribly similar to today's date. But before I was allowed to witness the glory of 'the squad' I had 4 local punk support bands to get through. Oh no! Support bands I had been blissfully not thinking about them for years and now they had caught me again.

I should probably explain that my own band in the past had done fairly well and we had got to the point where more often than not we were at the head liners. This was great but it had one problem, there was nearly always at least one band on the bill that for some reason decided to look up to us. This was usually expressed in the form of them asking us to watch their set. Now being fairly friendly people that wanted to encourage the younger guys and keep the rock and roll spirit going we had no choice but to accept.

This normally meant about 30-45 minutes of torture as these musical contortionists bombarded us with sounds so horrible it still pains me to even think about them. To stay sane we used to have a sport where we would try and find ways of complementing said support band as much as possible. We had to stop doing this as it was damaging our faith in humanity, due to far to many follow up gigs being organized and us having to watch them again!

Anyway, when we arrived the first support band 'Sewercider' where playing, luckily these guys where so bad that even the people I was with (who liked punk) couldn't stand them and they let us move to a different venue. We had lost money but saved our hearing and souls.

We went to the Elephant and Wheelbarrow, a chain of English pubs here, a few beers later the guys and girls I was with started dancing. I am completely unable to dance, I don't want to dance, the dance floor is completely off limits to me. I like drinking and talking. I waited for a couple of drinks and apart from them periodically coming to try and tempt me on the dance floor I wasn't having any contact with my friends. I went for my back up plan of talking to the other drinkers.

'Are you religious, or just scared of vampire attacks?'

To my drunken mind this was a witty thing to say to someone wearing a big cross round their neck and maybe sober I could of pulled it off, but any witt I possessed had been drowned by now and I had just really offended someone with no comic escape.

I sleeted them (Sleeted - verb to leave a night out early without telling your comrades), this offended them and through the power of text when I explained that I left because I wasn't having much fun this seem to upset them even more.