The Sisters phone in a live show 4 times now, I won't get fuled again

Greendale. Acoustic. Before the album had been released. With long-winded narration between each song. Dire.

Hammersmith Odeon about 15 years ago. Can't sing.

Shouldn't have been surprised, but was.

David Bowie's Glass Spider Stadium Tour 1987 should win this by a landslide.

Mime artists in a stadium ! Interesting concept there David !

Sci-fi actors and dancers. Lip synced. Badly.

Playing most of his dreadful mid 1980s albums ! Ziggy played the fool. Even the laughing Gnome would have been better than half of the set list !

Huge stage set that did nothing ! Didnt even stop the pissing rain.

Covering and rearranging his own songs until they were unrecognisable.

Extra bonus marks go to the show I saw at Sunderland Joker Park for the Thin White Klutz welcoming the crowd with " Good evening Newcastle " !!

The tour should have been called " '87 AND CRY " !

Rock and Roll Suicide ? Too bloody right.

Twice. Didn't listen to everybody who warned me beforehand. Still didn't learn my lesson after the first profound disappointment.

at the MK Bowl - 1994(?)
"Monster" tour.

I wanted to love it. It was just... dull.
Went home early.

I don't know if they count as major, but anyway..

Went with an ex-girlfriend who was a huge fan. I quite liked them, but my god.. they had to be the quietest band ever. There were about 20 of them on stage and you could barely hear them. Two people were chatting in front of us and you couldn't hear the band over the conversation.

Cowboy Junkies at the Dominion, Tottenham Court Road. Seated venue, hushed delivery of the Trinity Sessions songs, cue me falling asleep.

The video to Billie Jean played on screens as he was performing it. This for me sums up the cold and sterile professionalism of the concert; the inverse of everything I want from music... spontaneity, interaction, improvisation, mistakes, humour... all were totally absent. Tragically this type of 'live' show has since become the norm with mega-selling pop acts.

Wembley Arena, either '93 or '94.

Nine Below Zero were the support and pumped it up rightly.

Then Ray and the boys came on for half an hour or so of muddy sounding rock then left the stage for about another half hour to allow some interpretive dancers to dance interpretivley on podiums.

They came back on to play the hits but I'd lost any momentum and we trooped out before the end.

Happily the then 19 year old girl I was with who had wanted to see a 'legendary' band play and see what all the fuss may have been about left with an undying love of Nine Below Zero and old fashioned r'n'b. Dr Feelgood, Nick Lowe and Ry Cooder etc soon became her listening choices. I feel good about that.

Stockholm Cirkus about 15 years ago. Can't sing.

Shouldn't have been surprised, but was.

Perhaps this was the same tour that "busker_du" (above) saw.

in their 'bare chested men of rawk' phase c. Rust in Peace, I took my Godson along (his first proper gig) and had to apologise to him afterwards, he's turned out fine thankfully nice wife and two kids now.

Paul McCartney at Glastonbury 2004 was even worse than any of his numerous appearances with celeb chums at assorted charidee do's on the telly. Despite the sing-a-longs it was curiously uninvolving and was darn tedious I left early to go and watch the Hothouse Flowers in the Acoustic Tent. They were great as it happens. Dot Cotton and the old geezer from 'Lovejoy' were giving it socks up the front.

Golden Earring,at the hight of their short lived fame played the Liverpool Stadium.At that time I'd go see whoever was on every Saturday as I had a mate who worked there and could get me in for nowt.The "Earring" were shite,the only time I've seen a whole audience get up as one and leave.Lou Reed,same venue,so out of it he fell off the front of the stage.Dire.

InNew York. Prob 2001/2. Just after Gano's Hitting the Ground was released. Gano looked bored, the rest wanted to show off their noodling and the crowd was full of boorish, letching frat boys. One even crushed a beer can on his forehead, which I never realised actually happened outside films.

Mrs SPT who's a bigger Femmes fan than me led the walkout after 40 minutes.

I really liked Freedom Fields, and had seen him live with The Equation many years before. So expectations were high for his solo show before the release of his most recent album.

Oh dear.

The show was stolen, utterly, by Teddy Thompson, who came on and did a solo set of country songs. He was mesmerizing.

Seth came on, and gave it plenty of welly, but it was just a load of acoustic guitar going 'daka-daka-daka,d-dak-dak-a-daka' with fiddle doing the same pattern, a curiously redundant percussionist, and an underemployed drummer. The bassman was the only one playing a different rhythm. Seth emoted unconvincingly over this mess. The ladies & some of the men loved his himbo look.

I thought it was like watching someone support the Levellers at the Mean Fiddler in the early 90s. I never bought any of Seth's records since this - but I still love Freedom Fields.

A few comebacks ago, one of my all time heros, at the Venue in London in the early 80s. Poor bloke just couldn't play, and whispered his vocals into the mic. Heartbreaking. Backed by a deafeningly loud and unsympathetic band, with patronising second guitarist who would blaze out metal riffs then refer to Peter as "Pete - the legend"....I lasted 40 minutes and had to leave, thoroughly depressed.

& Bowie's Glass Spider - I saw it in Paris where the support was the Cult, who were great. It started raining halway through Bowie's set so I left. I saw U2 & The Pogues the following day and had a terrific time.

AC/DC at Monsters of Rock 1981.

Piss poor sound all day. Mixed by a pissed one eared idiot.

Piss poor organisation in and out Donnington Park.

Piss tasting beer. Didnt chance the " food " .

Piss flowing everywhere at the " toilets " .

Piss raining out of the sky in plastic bottles and beer cans.

Pissed down with rain most of the day.

Pissed right off with the whole day !

I haven't been able to listen to him since I saw him in Townsville in '97 or '98. I was a big Bob fan and he was touring behind a great album (Time Out of Mind). I had numerous Bob bootlegs and live albums from all eras and well knew his approach to live performance, so I neither wanted nor expected a regurgitation of the recorded versions.
What I got was easily the worst concert I've ever been to. The only explanation I have is that he was willfully trying to destroy every song. The typical pattern went like this:
-Bob would lurch into something on his strat in an indefinable key and tempo(treble maxed out for the shrillest, thinest tone I've ever heard)
-The support band (superb musos btw) would have a quick huddle, decide what the song was most likely to be and kick in
-Bob would start braying like a violated yak.
-After a minute or two someone in the audience would catch a mumbled chorus and the song title would be whispered from person to person across the stadium, followed by a ripple of polite applause. On occassion someone would try to join in on a chorus for a bar or two before clearing their throat in embarrassment and giving up
-In EVERY SINGLE SONG Bob would start playing the same Chuck Berry-style double-stop lick on his guitar IN THE WRONG F****NG KEY! (I was close enough to the stage to see where everyone's hands were, and he was almost always a semitone sharp, for you musos)
-The band would flit from key to key trying to find the tonal centre for Bob's free-form excursions before the song would peter out and it would all start over again

There is not one pub in the world that would have tolerated the noise coming from that stage for more than two minutes before pulling the plug. I don't buy the excuses that everybody seems to make for him that he is reinterpreting old songs and that the results can be hit or miss. Reinterpretation is fantastic, but it doesn't excuse him from displaying at least a basic level of musicianship and respect for his audience.

During the seventies I was a massive fan of Yes. My mates and i got tickets to see them on the Tales from Topographic Oceans tour. This was before the album had been released so there was no chance of us getting a pre-gig hearing of said album. They came on stage and proceeded to play the whole of this over-long double album from start to finish. We wanted the hits and got this drivel. From memory we got Roundabout and Yours is no disgrace as bolted on encores but it was a monumental let down.

... at UCI about 4 years ago. He played keyboards the whole night, but was set up perpendicular to the front of the stage so he never had to look at the audience. At the conclusion of every song, the stage lights would go down, Bob would retreat from his organ (God knows what he was doing). A minute or two later he would approach his keyboard, the lights would go up and the next "tune" (notice I used inverted commas) would start.

Every song was rearranged to within an inch of its life, rendering even his best known songs virtually unrecognizable. Everything was played as if it was an "alt.country" song and Bob never once spoke to, or even acknowledged his audience.

I've never been bored at a concert before. I guess there's always a first time. I left after about an hour.

Anybody had the misfortune to see Whitney Houston on her much discussed current UK Tour ?

In Glasgow at the SECC supported by Teenage Fanclub [who seemed to support every big band in Glasgow at the time, it was their 'Bandwagonesqe' period, don't get me wrong i love a lot of TFC stuff, but to see them trudge through that album yet again was toe curling], the Pixies come on, play one chord of a song, safety barrier collapses at stage, and they have to go off, never to return and it turns out never to return for years.