my eighteenth birthday

"what would you like to do for your eighteenth birthday?", my mum asked me.
"i'd like to waste a LOT of your money hiring a venue and having bands play with nothing left to show for it other than 3 months worth of crisps".

that wasn't my reply, but it may as well have been.

for my eighteenth birthday i hired out a local church hall, arranged for st. christopher and the mctells to come up and play, made posters and flyers, bought several boxes full of crisps, enough beverages to fill a small boating lake, rehearsed my band and got all over excited.

13 people came and let me leave you without any doubt - 13 people make a church hall look HUGE and EMPTY.

a friend of mine brought his mobile disco - unfortunately he wasn't from the same world as me and had brought lots of simply red/simple minds/level 42 records.
i ran home and grabbed a handful of compilation albums and had him put those on instead.

does all this make my birthday party a disaster?

not at all.
it began what became a bit of an event - bands turning up at my parents' house to have dinner cooked for them before playing gigs (we cooked for 14 iced bears and pale saints amongst others).

st. christopher were great in their ever-so-slightly pretentious way and the mctells were utterly fantastic.
my mum quickly developed a crush on stuart mctell and danced alone in the middle of the hall to their whole set.

of the 13 people that did turn up were 2 girls from nearby shrewsbury who had heard about the gig but had to see it to believe it.

at the end of the night, while handing over expenses to the bands i was dreading them saying, "never EVER contact us again".
but both bands invited us to play with them in the future - as we did several times.

it did however take over 10 years before i felt like having a party again.