I went to a Bad Manners gig, probably 1980 maybe 81 at the Electric Ballroom. Normally I would have been down the front but something told me to stay near the bar area. I've never seen so much blood at a gig. Once that band came on it seemed that the bouncers were pulling blood stained people out all the time and chucking them out of a side door.
At the old Hemel Hempstead Pavilion I saw Feargal Sharkey jump off the stage in the middle of the set to break up a fight in the audience. Back in those days there were far less instances of bouncers on the floor and there were rarely, if ever barriers at the front of the stage for security people to stand.

In Brighton in the Mid 80s.
How can I put this Politely ?.....Total Twunts,
Not hard in any sense of the Word,neither were their fans. The Band tried to Steal stuff from the Bar and the managers flat. They were Crap and when they were caught red -handed thieving,they "Gave it the Big 'un" and the singer got a right-hander from the manager.
The police tried to stop the gig before it started,probably after protests from music lovers.
Scariest gig I went to was The Cockney Rejects in Birmingham,It Turned into a Football based riot between Birmingham City fans and West Ham fans. Not pretty.
Most Psychobilly gigs could get pretty Rough too.

There were lots of counterfeit tickets so the the place ended up stuffed to the gills, with lots of people locked out and not happy. I saw people on the outside trying to bring a fence down by throwing a chunk of railway sleeper at it. There was an undercurrent of menace about the whole thing, probably due to too many people being crammed into the stadium.
We picked our way through the throng, looking for a spot, annoying a group of boozed up fans as we passed between where they were sat and the stage. They started to hurl full cans of beer at us, which missed but hit a similarly intoxicated bunch nearby. Cue a good old punch up, while we were forgotten and continued on our way.
I also remember somebody climbing up one one of the floodlight stanchions in the rain and swinging around like Tarzan, avoiding all attempts to get him down. More eyes were on him than on Little Feat, who were on stage at the time if my memory serves me well.
The other one was the Two Tone gig at the Top Rank in Brighton: Madness, The Specials & The Selecter. I remember it was chaotic and the place was full of mean looking skinheads. I stayed near the back, ready to run in case of trouble (That was and is my default mode when trouble occurs)but I think it all passed off okay.

The roughest gig I have ever been to by far.

Me & the future mrs seanioio were quite near the front & moved back sharpish as it kicked off more & more as the gig went on. The security were coming into the crowd to throw punches at people & we must have seen about 15-20 fights over the 2 hours of the show! Properly frightening!

Seeing New Order as a 17 year old at Old Trafford Cricket Club in Manchester was an eye opener too - rough as hell but still a good atmosphere

For the first time Reading gave a whole day to ‘new wave’ acts: The Jam, Penetration, Ultravox, The Pirates (?), Radio Stars and, regrettably, Sham 69. Sham brought, or attracted, a vast mob of skinheads who spent the afternoon marauding through the crowd trying to provoke ‘incidents’. All hippies (and there were lots) seemed to be targets, plus anyone non-white (not many in a Reading crowd in the late 70s) plus anyone who took issue with the skins’ boorish aggression. It was very, very nasty. When Pursey’s mob eventually took the stage in the early evening the stage was invaded and they played their set framed by snarling, sneering skinheads. Many of them wore NF tattoos, badges or t-shirts; I remember thinking this is what a fascist rally must look like. Thankfully most of them disappeared after Sham’s set, probably ‘down the pub’ and we were able to watch a rather shambolic set by The Jam in relative peace. Paul Weller rounded off the day nicely by smashing his malfunctioning gear.

Sham 69 were joined on stage by Steve Hillage. They were awful. But then Sham 69 were awful.

Were any other members of the massive there?

Both cultivated airs of menace at their his that provide some of my less glorious memories of gig-going. Firstly, as a callow teenager looking down from the balcony of the Manchester Apollo on the Stranglers Feline tour in about 81 or 82 onto what seemed like a stalls that was just one big fight. Secondly, at a Killing Joke gig at Oxford Poly in 84 or 85 a casual skinhead acquaintance called Peanut decided to jump onstage. Not only was he instantly attacked by (if I'm right) the bass player who just swung his bass at him, but after being grabbed by the bouncers he then claimed to have been 'bike chained' backstage when he saw him next. Not sure this would happen at the Academy chain today, so some progress has been made.

Wilco at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall in October last year. Tweedy had just started "Rising Red Lung", just him playing acoustic guitar, a slow soft song, when raised voices start in the circle culminating in the unmistakable crunch and howl of agony of a Glasgow kiss. Cue security and more shouts and scuffles, music stops.

Tweedy: "I can't do this"
Audience member: "Welcome to Glasgow!"

in late September 1975. Climax Blues Band, Earth Quake, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Johnny Winter and the Edgar Winter Group. It was really hot and Bill Graham had only done a few of these so it was very easy to bring one's own 'refreshments' into the Oakland Coliseum. Earth Quake were local favourites so by the time Skynyrd took stage the crowd was ready to partay. In the way bikers and hillbillies do best. Violently. To add to that they had to make an announcement to beware of both some bad acid and bad angel dust that was making the rounds. Before Johnny Winter could close the shirtless and the toothless were dropping like flies.

Still, there were some great performances.

This is a depressingly fertile thread.

The first gig I ever went to was The Pirates, Hull 1978.
An excellent performance was manured and halted by some nitwit managing to brain the Mighty Mick Green with a lobbed pint glass. Yes, a real glass. Remember them?
The crew politely asked if the perp would step forward for a quiet word but they weren't that stupid.

This gig at Hatfield Polytechnic (now the University of Hertfordshire) was easily the most violent I've been to. During the first set (by the Selecter) a group calling themselves the Hatfield Anti-Fascist League smashed some of the windows at the side of the hall and came swarming in. They started attacking some skinhead members of the audience, claiming that they were NF supporters. Suddenly the stanley knives were out and things got very bloody indeed. A number of people were hospitalised, and when Madness came on stage, Suggs informed us that their dressing room was being used as a makeshift emergency ward to treat the wounded.
There are some aspects of 1970s gigs that I don't miss.

..is a catalogue of knuckle sandwiches, claret being spilled, getting tasty with dodgy geezers, and all sorts of general bovver. I read it in one sitting in Borders while waiting to meet a friend. It reads more like the memoir of a particuarly nasty football hooligan than a rock singer, but in a way it is.

I remember the date because it was my 17th birthday the next day!

The Prisoners,60s pysch punk mod pop, the original home of organist James Taylor, later of the Quartet, and led by Graham Day one of my all time favourite musicians/singers/songwriters, who should be better known than he is. The Prisoners were from Chatham and to be frank looked like people you wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of. They were playing an energetic set, nicely loud, ferocious delivery.

A few people moshing away at the front, one skinny little mod a little too energetically. The security (about 4 very large no neck guys who each weighed at least twice the amount of the little guy) had their eye on him. One waded in to stop him at one point, pulled him to the side of the stage. A few minutes later he dived back into the fray and then decided to jump on the stage. Security moved like lightning, pulled him off and threw him to the floor, then two of them started kicking him. At this point the band threw down their instruments and dived into the crowd fists flying. It didn't last long, and I've seen far worse at other nights, but I hadn't seen a band getting involved before.

There was no encore, and the time moved past midnight. One of my mates turned to me looked at his watch and said "Happy Birthday!"

According to various reports dotted about the net and elsewhere, Ian Stuart of Skrewdriver(later victim of possibly the least tragic car crash ever) received 30+ stitches after an altercation with bouncers at a Fairport Convention gig in 1978.

There are odd factors about this- Fairport did very few gigs in 78, what the feck was he doing there anyway, how did it escalate into violence. Anyone know owt?

Soloman Burke. Seriously.

It kicked off between two blokes sitting a few rows in front of me and Mrs G, God only knows why. What I do remember is that the old biddies who take the tickets there were just unable to do a thing.

Woken up at some unearthly time in the morning with a policeman's boot in the side of the head as I slept in my tent.The day got progressively worse (slight understatement).truncheon charges, policeman hit by a tin of beans dropping to the stage. eating muesli out of a policeman's helmet.

While searching for more info on t'internet came across this photo, I'm on the left in profile odd seeing yourself all those years ago.
read more about it here http://www.ukrockfestivals.com/windsor74.html

Wembley Stadium. After 2 numbers it was clear the idiots next to me were pissed as farts and falling all over the place including over me and the ex missus. I was not amused and basically told them to fuck off. They were having none of it and were becoming more objectionable. Called the security who promptly threw them out. Since tickets were in the £50 range even then I spent the rest of the gig wondering whether they were outside waiting to exact revenge.

My friend James played bass for Ipswich's premier punk funsters for a while and he's shown me the footage from a gig at The Dominion, wherein an exitable throng take on the bouncers, one of whom disappears temporarily in the crowd before reappearing some seconds later sans shirt, each other, and eventually the band - possibly encouraged by the drummer coming out from behind the kit at one point to kick his guitarist brother in the balls. Not a good place to find yourself if you've ventured back on to rescue your borrowed bass amp and found yourself on the wrong side of a locked stage door, apparently.

I went to this festival at the Milton Keynes Bowl.
There was only 1 stage and most bands played both days of the festival. The headliners were old punk acts (Stranglers, Damned) with some other punk offshoots on earlier in the day (Big Audio Dynamite, Joe Strummer & The Latino Rockabilly War)
Other acts were quite a mixed bag....
Some were really good (Aswad, Sam Brown, Aztec Camera, Michelle Shocked, Rhythm Sisters)
Some were pretty dull (Martin Stephenson, Runrig, Furniture, New Model Army)

The only alcohol on sale was lager in little plastic bottles and the floor of the whole site was covered in these. For most of the weekend, there were bottlethrowing battles going on between the left side of the crowd and the right side. If the spout bit of the bottle caught you, it was pretty hard and I must've seen at least 50 people walking around with blood coming from their faces. Hits on the forehead seemed to be particularly commonplace.
I went to a few Reading festivals around this time and the bottle throwing happened there a lot as well, but never with the intensity and stamina that the crowd managed at this festival.
At Milton Keynes, the bottle battles reached their peak when Howard Jones was on, which caused much upset to the handful of Jones fans who had come to the festival just to see him.
But just like in World War 1 when they all stopped killing each other for a few hours on Christmas Day, a game of football briefly brought peace to the warring factions. A football appeared from somewhere and before long there was a 3,000-a-side game going on right in front of poor old Howard who carried on his set as if playing to a packed house of devotees.

Another violent gig was the Cramps at the Town & Country club, in the late 80s. I was right down the front with my mate with our elbows on the rail thing. We were a couple of Sussex provincial teenagers who'd driven up to London for the night and we just wanted to watch this band of weirdos whose records we'd loved listening to for hours on end.
Behind us, World War 3 was raging with mass punchups between the crowd and now and again the bouncers would join in too.

Other violent gigs (e.g. Pogues, Wedding Present) weren't really that violent. People used to jump around, push each other, punch each other, that kind of thing. But it was all part of the fun and there usually seemed to be a great feeling of brotherhood around really. That was just how us repressed males expressed our love of the music.
I much prefer that to what people do these days, i.e. stand watching the band, stroking chin and loudly voicing your opinions on which tracks are your favourites, watching most of it through the tiny screen on your mobile for fuck's sake and holding up said mobile so some pal of yours who couldn't be arsed buying a ticket can listen to an unrecognisable snatch of noise from the comfort of their own home.