The worst performance I've ever heard was one I was involved in.

I was playing bass in a three-piece Irish folk band - although I'm English. The leader played a 12-string so physically hard that strings rarely stayed in tune for more than a couple of minutes, and he regularly broke four or five a night (I promise you that is true!). The fiddler was good, but occasionally out of tune.

We were playing an Irish pub in Oxford, and doing some diddly-diddly intrumental which just got faster and faster, and the guitarist was playing some tempo I had never heard - it wasn't 4/4, 3/4, 5/8. 16/12, or anything I'd ever come across, but as it got faster and faster, he got more and more out of tune. I looked over at the fiddler who gave me a look as if to say 'don't blame me!', and kept on playing his own tune. So I continued just trying to establish some kind of common tempo which would bridge the gap between the two of them.

So eventually the inevitable string broke, and the guitarist's sound ground to a halt with a noise like a freight train hitting the buffers.

In the momentary silence that followed, he turned and said 'Ian, you're putting the whole ****ing band off!'

I quit!

- Ian B