I’m proud to “headline” today’s Rocking Vicar newsletter with this tale of woe under the heading The Deadliest Venue Of All Time.

In 1990, I was in an incredibly shambolic band called The Keatons. We’d just been chucked off Blur’s first tour of the UK for being “unprofessional”, so we sought solace in France, as you do. Our gig in Paris was in a large squatted venue – I couldn’t tell you where it is, or what it was called, my diary just says “that bloody squat” – where water dripped ominously from the ceiling, wild animals roamed freely and you couldn’t find a pair of round-ended scissors for love nor money. The whole place screamed “danger”. The promoter managed to get a PA up and running – just – but when it came time for us to take the stage in front of about 300 people, we couldn’t start. We couldn’t start, because we couldn’t get all 3 amps AND the PA to work at the same time. If the guitars and bass were working, there were no vocals. If the vocals worked, all the lights went off.

After 10 minutes of this – hampered by a Master Of Ceremonies who had put a curtain across the front of the stage and insisted on peeking through every 30 seconds to say to the audience, in English, “Soon, Ze Keatons, Very Strrrange People” – we finally got going. Bolts of electricity spat out of the microphones, guitar strings fizzed alarmingly, amps switched on and off, but we bravely carried on, because, well, it was Paris. You don’t give up in Paris. Eventually my guitar packed up completely, so I grabbed a microphone, carried on singing, wandered to the side of the stage, and absent-mindedly leant on a wall. I then suffered an electric shock so brutal that I still tremble at the memory. Dangerous French electricity surged through my body, and I collapsed, crying, on the floor. After 2 minutes of instrumental indie-rock, heavily influenced by Wire and The Fall, the band ground to a halt. I looked up, and the bass player was screaming “Get up and f*cking sing!” He, and, as it turned out, everyone else, thought I was just really pissed and had fallen over. (A reasonable assumption, to be fair.) I huddled into a ball as they started another song. All the amps then cut out, and as the drummer carried on by himself, playing a lumpen indie-dance-crossover beat, all of us looking at the floor, dejected, beaten, weeping, I swear a member of the audience got up and stagedived.