Fact #161772
When:
Short story:
XTC play the first of two nights at the Poliedro, Caracas, Venezuela, South America.
Full article:
Andy Partridge (guitarist, XTC) : That wasn’t our decision, to fly down there from America for two nights and then straight back again. The logic seemed to be that The Police were playing exotic places in the world, so you can too. The difference was that The Police were staying in nice hotels and they had everything they did filmed, which was very smart because they could use it for promos … actually, their manager Miles Copeland tried to steal us away. Round about 1982, we met him in the Curry Garden restaurant round the corner here (in Swindon, Wiltshire, England) and he invited us to move under his wing but I said, ‘Look, we can’t’. We couldn’t have got out of our existing contract and we didn’t trust Copeland anyway.
But those gigs in Caracas, you’ve never seen such mayhem. This incredibly greedy promoter booked a vast stadium, and he had thousands of riot police equipped with batons and these long, ceremonial sword-bayonet things, and only about 200 people turned up.
So they herded all these people to the front of the stage, the whole of the rest of the arena is empty, the people were out of their skulls on God knows what, the wooden chairs were all loose, so they smashed them up and built a bonfire about twenty foot high right in front of the stage. They’re dancing round it, complete mayhem, so the riot police who out-numbered them ten to one moved in, started whacking people with truncheons and sword-bayonets.
The greedy promoter is in floods of tears backstage that we’ve ruined him. The equipment we used on that gig had spent some time at the bottom of the sea. It had belonged to Peter Frampton. When he played Caracas a few years earlier it was kidnapped and held to ransom. He went back to the states and organised for some people to steal it back, put it on a private charter plane out of Venezuela, but the plane crashed about fifty yards off the coast and the equipment stayed at the bottom of the sea until somebody managed to salvage it. It sounded to me like it was still at the bottom of the sea.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black, January 2008)
Dave Gregory (guitarist, XTC) : We only ever had one big argument, and that was when we went to Caracas. It was a nightmare gig. Everything was so badly organised that Andy just decided to have some fun and he cranked everything up to No11 and made as horrible a noise as possible. Meanwhile I had my little 40 watt amplifier cranked all the way up but the monitors were so loud I still couldn’t hear what I was playing. We had a huge fight about it in the dressing room afterwards. Didn’t come to blows though.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black, January 2008)
Tweet this Fact
But those gigs in Caracas, you’ve never seen such mayhem. This incredibly greedy promoter booked a vast stadium, and he had thousands of riot police equipped with batons and these long, ceremonial sword-bayonet things, and only about 200 people turned up.
So they herded all these people to the front of the stage, the whole of the rest of the arena is empty, the people were out of their skulls on God knows what, the wooden chairs were all loose, so they smashed them up and built a bonfire about twenty foot high right in front of the stage. They’re dancing round it, complete mayhem, so the riot police who out-numbered them ten to one moved in, started whacking people with truncheons and sword-bayonets.
The greedy promoter is in floods of tears backstage that we’ve ruined him. The equipment we used on that gig had spent some time at the bottom of the sea. It had belonged to Peter Frampton. When he played Caracas a few years earlier it was kidnapped and held to ransom. He went back to the states and organised for some people to steal it back, put it on a private charter plane out of Venezuela, but the plane crashed about fifty yards off the coast and the equipment stayed at the bottom of the sea until somebody managed to salvage it. It sounded to me like it was still at the bottom of the sea.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black, January 2008)
Dave Gregory (guitarist, XTC) : We only ever had one big argument, and that was when we went to Caracas. It was a nightmare gig. Everything was so badly organised that Andy just decided to have some fun and he cranked everything up to No11 and made as horrible a noise as possible. Meanwhile I had my little 40 watt amplifier cranked all the way up but the monitors were so loud I still couldn’t hear what I was playing. We had a huge fight about it in the dressing room afterwards. Didn’t come to blows though.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black, January 2008)