August Bank Holiday weekend 1975, Reading Festival - the Friday evening. There I was, a callow 17 year old, at my first major music event. I'd travelled down with my mate Wal - we hadn't yet met up with Mark, who'd arrived separately. Penultimate act that night : the mighty Dr Feelgood. Wal and I got as close to the front of the stage as we could - about 40 yards away, with some of that distance occupied by what I think was a photographers' pit. Packed shoulder to shoulder with our fellow revellers, it was as if we were in a football crowd (terraces in those days, of course), with added dancing. One of the best sets I've ever witnessed.

We were young, enthused, thoroughly entertained : it was good to be alive.

Next on was Hawkwind. (Sorry, can't bring myself to find a vid for them. You'll soon understand why.) While waiting for them to set up everyone sat down. And, of course, stayed sitting once they started. (Bloody hippies.) Now you take up a lot more room when sitting than when packed in like frantically bopping upright sardines. Several people were sitting on my legs. Several more were so close behind me that superglue might have been involved. Moving was impossible. Imagine my dismay when I realised (it only took a splt second) that a comfortable distance from which to be witnessing the headliners would have been about half a mile. And I couldn't move an inch. Hawkwind went so far beyond uncomfortably loud, and went on for so long, that it wasn't so much that I wished it were possible to gouge out one's own ears, more that I wanted to die and wondered A) why dying had to take so long; and B) why the band had to be so sodding literal in their rendition of Sonic Attack ( "Do not waste time blocking your ears... do not attempt to use your own limbs...there will be bleeding from orifices...think only of yourself..."). The horror, the horror. Thirty three years on and the memory of that experience still chills my blood.

So, fellow Wordies, has anyone else a similar tale to tell of how, in the space of a few minutes, a peak musical experience has changed into the stuff of nightmares?