How about going to see a benefit concert for a favourite musician which featured an amazing collection of your favourite stars but then sleeping right through it ...?
(Sorry - distracted by a phonecall and hit 'Enter' prematurely!)
That was 'Robert Wyatt and Friends', at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London in 1974.
RW had been in bands Soft Machine and then Matching Mole (a pun on the French, 'Machine Molle'). The albums he worked on then are still some of my favourites.
He had got into drinking heavily and left a party a bit the worse for wear. Unfortunately, it was via a 4th floor window ... He was paralysed from the waist down.
A young Richard Branson phoned around a lot of RW's musical friends and told them that RW was doing a concert which he (RW) would like them to guest at. He then told RW that the musicians wanted to do a concert to raise money for him ...
And so it came to pass that I made one of my very rare trips to London, accompanied by a bunch of mates. We travelled down in the morning and went on a pub crawl. Somebody then had the bright idea of buying a few large bottles of vodka which were consumed in one of the big London parks before we staggered round to Drury Lane.
I remember us going to our seats, the atmosphere building, the lights dimming and John Peel introducing the concert. I yawned, closed my eyes for a second and ... woke up at the end of the evening with my pals shaking me and telling me what an amazing gig I had just missed!
They had to half carry me back to Euston Station with me singing "
I'm a Believer". I had really liked Wyatt's version of the old Monkees song.
(I just read something rather amazing and shocking about that appearance on TOTP - apparently the BBC producer thought that it would be too upsetting to see a disabled man in a wheelchair and insisted that RW be lifted off and placed on an ordinary chair. There was an argument, which he clearly won.)
The other drink-related missed concert was a debut concert by Dexys Midnight Runners at Warwick university. I went for a night out at the uni with a bunch of mates and the band were due to appear. This was before they released their first single so none of us knew anything about them. I decided to nip off to the union bar before the band appeared. Once again, I dozed off and was woken by friends after the gig had finished. They made a point of telling me how great it had been ...
