In last month's UNCUT, our writers, friends and favourite musicians reminisced about their favourite gigs. Well, in this month’s issue we’re looking back on the worst gigs we’ve ever seen - including The Stone Roses, Bob Dylan, Kevin Rowland and David Bowie - with rare photos from the shows too. We're also going to publish one of the worst gigs every day, with online exclusives, so feast your eyes on this, and be glad you weren’t there! ***** FURNITURE Sale Polivalenta, Bucharest, Rumania April 2, 1988 Chris Roberts: Ceaucescu’s still in power. The Rumanians haven’t seen a British band live since The Boomtown Rats, seven years earlier. In a venue the size of Wembley Arena (where Ceaucescu has his rallying speeches), Furniture, brought here as “cultural exchange” by the British Council, play songs such as “Brilliant Mind”. This was the hit they had before Stiff Records collapsed and the band’s career momentum was thwarted by a three-year court wrangle. Here, no exaggeration, Beatle-mania is re-enacted. Yet there is to be no standing: it’s the law. So singer Jim Irvin announces that if everybody doesn’t stand, the band will stop playing. In the balconies, those furthest away from party officials stand. Emboldened, those on ground level start dancing. The police wade in and begin hitting people over the head. I am wandering around to soak in all this culture. Two guys the size of trucks lift me up by the underarms, carry me awhile, then hurl me outside on the concrete. Irate, I tell them I’m a British journalist. They pick me up again, lug me outside the perimeter, and dump me harder, their eyes saying much. I learn what fear is. Really, it shouldn’t have surprised us. From arrival we have been shadowed by men in overcoats from Cold War Movie central casting. We leave the hotel, they follow. We cross the road from the dumpling shop to the condensed milk store, they follow. As “press”, I am under surveillance 24/7. At least I’m not the photographer, who finds that carrying a camera is like waving an Uzi. On the last day, we get the hell out of Dodge and visit Dracula’s Castle, for relaxation, drinking so hard and fast that we throw up in Transylvania. People tell me Bucharest has changed since. I’ll take their word. ***** plus WERE YOU THERE? Not even UNCUTs war-weary gig-hounds have been to every show in history – but you lot probably have. Email Allan_Jones@ipcmedia.com to share your memories, of the ones we've published or any which we have missed, and we’ll publish the best in a future issue!

In last month's UNCUT, our writers, friends and favourite musicians reminisced about their favourite gigs. Well, in this month’s issue we’re looking back on the worst gigs we’ve ever seen - including The Stone Roses, Bob Dylan, Kevin Rowland and David Bowie - with rare photos from the shows too. We're also going to publish one of the worst gigs every day, with online exclusives, so feast your eyes on this, and be glad you weren’t there! ***** George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars Shepherds Bush Empire, London Winter 2000 John Lewis: I had seen the latest incarnation of George Clinton's travelling Funkadelic circus at the 1996 Phoenix Festival, playing in the pouring rain in front of a huge crowd, and had a fantastic time. Grown men in nappies! A six-foot-six black bass player in a wedding dress! A backing singer sporting an enormous elephant trunk! Ha ha! It was also the heaviest funk band I'd ever seen at the time so, several years later when they visited London, myself and a large gang of friends turned up en masse to relive the experience. Unfortunately it was, from beginning to end, sheer torture. The visual gags seemed a bit tiresome, the liquid funk replaced by a tiresome brand of plodding metal. Then there were the dreary song introductions, the torturously extended versions of songs that weren't that good to start with, and the utterly excruciating guitar solos that went on and on and on. You'd take a piss, come back and he'd still be widdling away, you disappear for 15 minutes to get in a round, you come back and the guitarist's still just warming up, you nip out and write a few postcodes and return to find that he's still bloody chundering away, hitting the highest notes on his fretboard, hunched over the speaker stack while wanking the tremolo arm. Jesus Christ. I left half-way through a particularly interminable solo (just as it was entering its 12th minute, yes I did time it) and found that I'd missed the last tube home. I've never quite forgiven George Clinton since. ***** plus WERE YOU THERE? Not even UNCUTs war-weary gig-hounds have been to every show in history – but you lot probably have. Email Allan_Jones@ipcmedia.com to share your memories, of the ones we've published or any which we have missed, and we’ll publish the best in a future issue!