Every so often, you get a few clues as you arrive at a venue which should, if you are on the ball, encourage you to turn the van right around and drive on home. Last night, we saw the signs, and ignored them….totally.

The first sign is when you start driving down a long dark muddy country lane to get to the pub….warning!.

When the only sound that you hear as you arrive at the venue is the hum of a generator that is supplying all the power…..warning!

When, as you enter the pub, the punters re-enact that scene from An American Werewolf in London, when the two American hikers walk into the Slaughtered lamb and every head turns to stare them………warning!

When the first person who greets you looks like an extra from Mad Max 2 that they had to let go as he was a little too over the top and a little too scary, and he turns out to be the barman……..warning!

When the band that you were supposed to be supporting and who have played there before, pull out just a few days before leaving you to cover the whole evening……warning!!

All these clues and more were evident as we arrived at the Iron Fist * in deepest darkest Somerset ready to perform for the first time. And yet, as I have already mentioned, we failed to spot any of them until it was too late.

The audience, such as it was, would not have looked out of place on the film set of The Hills have eyes and were totally pissed, probably on a combination of Scrumpy and sheep deep. Of course, as all gigging musicians can and will testify, drinking three times your own body weight in a liquid owning the quaint moniker of ‘Bishop’s old Scrotum’, or something equally enticing gives anybody the unshakable belief that they can sing like John Lennon, play guitar like Hendrix or worse still, play the drums like Cozy Powell. Years of experience has taught us that you keep your sticks and mic's in your back pocket until they are needed and the guitars remain firmly in their cases. However, you have to take the things out at some point and it was at that point when three of the most plastered caught sight of our instruments and descended upon us with glee.

Not upsetting the punters is a pre requisite for not getting glassed and for being asked back for a second time, other than to apologise. So untangling ourselves from these boys was not an easy task, especially when one of them grabbed me from behind in an attempt to get his hands on my guitar. However, I had no idea what form of entertainment these lads indulged in to get their kicks. Put it like this, we saw some particularly worried sheep on the way to the gig and so I was taking no chances and managed to wriggle out of his bear like grip. CJ our drummer wasn’t having a much happier time as he endeavoured to keep a wanna be drummer away from his kit!    

By the time we were ready to play we’d already had enough and were dreading the prospect of two hours playing to this lot.

Now you know it’s going to be a tough night when the audience start chucking things at you. Aaron, our guitarist soon found out how tough it was going to be when somebody threw a drunk farmer at him and nearly sent him flying.  Aaron’s girlfriend who apart from looking after the merchandise, was trying to get on with some college work wasn’t going to be left out of this free for all and once the drunk had been retrieved by his mates, then had him balled at her knocking all the tables flying. Fair play to her, she hardly missed a step, raised her eyebrows disapprovingly at him and returned to her studies.

To say we felt like Gareth Gates on an oil rig would be an understatement. The pub was quite clearly catering for every serious Punk rocker this side of Birmingham. When I say Punks, I don’t mean the kind that listen to a little bit of The Boomtown Rats or the Undertones. I’m talking about guys that drank their own vomit if they had run out of funds for scrumpy. One of them became totally pissed off with me as I took a leak during the break. As I was one of the only ones in the building that wasn’t covered in tattoos, chains and studs he had assumed I was the old Bill on a raid (he had come from the other bar and had not seen us playing) and flushed his entire stash down the bog! Things were not getting any better.

We didn’t go down well, at least, not to start with. We were giving it our all at one point to a single person!! The drunks had run out of money, potatoes or what ever the hell they were buying their brain killer with and left during the first set punching and kicking the crap out of each other as they went. This was not a particular disappointment to the band I can assure you. However it did leave us playing to just one 80-year-old punk who probably would have legged it as well if he had been able to get his legs to move.

We didn’t play particularly well, mainly because for the most part we were in fear of our lives, but also because the pubs stage lighting was connected to a sound to light system, which meant that any break in a song resulted in us being plunged into total darkness. This meant that both Aaron and myself ran into, mic stands, each other and the drum kit.

If only the generator had packed up then at least we could have gone home.

However, we survived it. Two hours later and a desperate urge to return to civilisation saw us packing the gear up in record time. Not least because another aging Punk (who looked older than my grandfather) had arrived and was intent on convincing us of the virtues of Internet promotion despite the fact that he didn’t even own a computer. “You see them Artic Minkees”, he slurred “they did it, and their crap!. But you guys rock!”. We thanked him profusely and legged it…..straight into a rain storm that soaked us and the kit as we tried to get it in to the van………great!

We’re sticking with The Bunch of Grapes. You get some real characters, but they’re our own kind of people. We feel accepted! And understood……and they don’t throw people at our guitarist.

 * Names changed to protect the innocent………well……us!