by chaosfactor on Sat May 29, 2010 10:17 pm
I stole that day!! Hey have some P.I back people...
You voted for the best flamer...
This was the best flame.
Reading Rock Festival, Britain's dirtiest, noisiest, attitude encrusted shit-fight of the century just closed it doors on yet another weekend of musical mayhem.
For those of you that do not like rock, or are not educated enough in the geography of Great Britain, alongside the Reading rock festival two similar shows occur hosting all the same bands as Reading does. In the midlands, halfway up the country we have the Leeds rock festival, and up in bonny Scotland, Glasgow plays the host for all the northern kilt wearing monkeys.
All three of these stages have a historic reputation (back stage and front of stage) for trying to out-rival each other. Some years it can be based on the amount of drug arrests there are, other times are graded on who got the best negative tabloids in the newspapers the following day. One year it was over who could burn the most porta-loo's, and this year seeing as the Mean Fiddler (The Promoters) decided for the best of every bodies health and enjoyment it should implement a ban on crowd surfing, it was decreed over body surfing..
(This year the trophy went to Reading:- After being warned over the P.A not to do it, the instinctive reaction of the 'f*ck you music sodden revelers' was to stick it up the fiddlers arse, and in short between 200-300 people came shooting over the barriers in a 30 minute period).
My Baby has always been the Leeds rock festival, I've clocked up 6 summers of fun on that stage, running back-line on and off the stage for bands, snorting incredible amounts of white powder to combat the endless cases of beer that came my way which general resulted in myself and many others ripping the piss out of ickle bands, mediocre bands and full flung legendary bands. For the stage crew, this weekend is notorious for anarchy against the superstars, we make it a point of pride to make life as difficult as possible for anyone who steps in our way.
The rivalry between the 3 festival sites is just as intense back-stage as it is front, seeing as all the same bands play on all the same stages there is plenty of scope for malicious mischief. One year we convinced the polish truck driver of a headlining act that he wasn't playing in Reading the next day, and instead he was playing in Scotland, so off the dildo went only to find out at 4am he needed to be in southern England for a 7am start...
-In revenge, for an attack on the Reading crew that I organized a previous year (It was good, but not as good as this counter attack), I was chosen to be the target for what was to be later classed as probably one of the funniest moments in the Rock festivals history..
Saturday morning I awoke with blood flowing from my nose and white rocks of cocaine surfing upon the surface, I made my way to the lounge on the tour bus and cracked open a can of Stella. After wiping away the gunk from my one disabled nose on my right hand side, I plugged the left one full of more of this white breakfast-like substance and then proceeded to stagger to the stage. "Ahoy my hearties!" I shouted out to fellow stumbling crew members, as we made our way over to our roadie hide-out underneath the stage. My phone bleeped, I blinked, I checked the message from an unknown number and it read "YOU WANKER!!".
'Strange that' I thought, as I worked my way into my 2nd can of lager, 'some-one just hit the nail right on the head there!' A few moments passed as I watched the Nottingham local crew struggling to get the main acts gear on the stage, then my phone bleeped again, and again I had received a message from another unknown source this time saying "YOU FUCKING SAD WANKER!!"
By about mid afternoon just as the first act went on I had received just about 30 of these texts all of them insults, and most of them specifying the fact that I generally liked to toss one off! So by now the one little alarm bell that had been dinging away in the back of my lager-coke en-coated brain had been replaced by several slightly larger ones all of which were now sending me out one message to my server, saying this...
"You are now in the process of getting a royal rock-n-roll shafting!".
The first band comes off whilst my phone is merrily beeping away in my pocket, its only when the 2nd act is under way I get my first phone call from yet another unknown number, so I answer it and get deafened by a horde of people screaming in unison "WANKER!! WANKER!! WANKER!!!" So I wait until the noise dies down and a single voice comes on the airwaves and I ask (not very politely mind you) who he was, and how he got my number.?.
"Yeh mate!" Came back an Australian accent, "There's a banner on the front of the stage that says text wanker to ********* (my number)"
"WANKER! WANKER! YOU FUCKING WANKER!" bzzztttt...
Right that does it, I thought and I charged over to the crew Chief of the Nottingham local crew and had him up against the side of the tent, "Yeh funny one darling! Good joke! Now tell me which one of you fucking cunts posted my number up on the front of the stage!?!" I could tell by their faces after scanning them for a few minutes, that no one had a clue about what I was talking about. So I charged off to accuse the Lighting department, who like-wise offered their sympathies, as did the noise boys and also the stage builders, and also Catering. By now all thought for working for sodding bands had been forgotten as my phone was going fucking mental! A text every minute was now coming in, my battery was down to a third and the memory which stored 100 messages, was stacked up to 85.
Fuming, I ran around to the front of the stage and scanned it for anything that might have triggered off this 'Wank-fest' and found nothing. A quick jog to front of house revealed the same, as did the spotlight towers. So I rang my Australian Chum back, "Oi you diseased bastard offspring of an aborigines anus, wheres this fucking banner!?!" I shouted. A short silence fell, followed by peals of laughter and then more screaming of the wanker word, "ITS ON THE FRONT OF THE STAGE, ARE YOU BLIND!" came the shout back. "NO - IT - FUCKING - ISNT" I replied. Then the penny dropped...
"Are you in Reading?" I asked.
"DUH YEH YOU THICK TWAT FACED WANKER!"
My heart sank..
I grabbed my most esteemed colleague and ally, Italian Valerio(AKA The ((real))Fonz), war dog of many a ruck on the rock n roll circuit and snuck off to the tour bus determined not to return until I had a bleeding clue on what to do next.
My phone by now had run out of charge and had exceeded 100 messages, and in asking Val's advice he said 'For now you keep a count of the texts you are receiving'.
'Whys that?' I asked, 'Well mate, whatever we come up with in the next day and a half has to inflict more hits than you are taking'.
I stared at my phone, which had now basically turned into a dildo because it was now buzzing its way merrily around the table absorbing more complimentary messages faster than it could receive. "They've just Broken the 200 barrier Val, this means fucking war!!"
Leaving my phone behind (which was by now basically useless because every time I tried to enter my phone book in order to find a number to ring, a text would come in and flip it back to the message box before I had a chance to choose what person I wanted), I stalked back to the stage to spend the best part of the day on the butt end of every telephone joke known to man, women and beast.
After several of my spies had reported back from Reading, I learnt that the banner had been put underneath the lead singers microphone stand and had managed to stay there for a good 6 hours (six bands) before the management threw it away. Knowing this and not wanting any kind-of reprisal I decided to wait saturday out and play my card on the last night when it would be too late for Reading to counter attack. By this point I pretty much had a get out of jail card as far as the work was concern, our pride was at stake (mostly mine actually) and we had won the war last year with the amount of toilets burnt by the audience, so I felt I couldn't let the crowd down.
The Foo-Fighters were headlining and I was going to play my cards in the 2 hour slot in and around them, which amounted to pretty much shit or bust. If it flopped, the festival was over, and end of story. So I managed to secure two bass drum skins (roughly a meter in diameter) from bands earlier in the day, and wrote on each of them "TEXT CUNT TO ********* IF YOU THINK LEEDS BEATS THE READING SOFT COCKS", I Put one hanging just below the stage left PA cluster, and then one over on stage right. I borrowed two par lamps from the lighting division, then ran a few cables and shoved them directly behind the skins thus backlighting them. I didn't bother trying for the spot under Dave Grohls microphone because I knew it would be noticed by security or the promoters, and likewise the drum skins too, if they spotted my move, all my work would have been for nothing.
So instead I created an even bigger banner then put my climbing harness on and climbed up to the on-stage truss that was directly above the mosh pit and gaffer taped it on for all to see. Climbing down, I just made it before the Foo's entered the stage, thus making it basically un-removable.
The two spot light operators at front of house were mates of mine, and I had bribed them half a gram of cocaine between them to give my vengeful, slanderous attack missiles as much light as possible between the songs.
In short, the plan was a nuclear strike! During the show we received confirmation from the Reading stage that the culprits phone was getting bombarded to kingdom come, the Leeds audience were indeed a vengeful crowd! I knew, and they knew, that the Reading rock festival was the original, plus the best stage in the country, and Leeds knowing this always set about every year to prove other-wise. This was the moment for the kids to prevail, because so far it had been a pretty tame event.
It was about three weeks later when both our phones finally stopped receiving texts and calls, and as Valerio quite rightly foresaw straightaway, it was the votes that counted.
The Reading and Leeds text tennis wars ended thus:-
My phone (Leeds) 6hrs viewing time =1575 wanker related texts / numerous insulting phone calls
Franks phone (Reading) 2hrs viewing time= over 3000 Cunt related texts / a new phone / cardiac arrest
