> From: Mooh
>
> During some tender ballad my fretless semi-hollow Godin bass, in a stand, fell over on its face on a concrete folk festival stage ... Broken machine head and cracked spruce top.

Ah! Dead instrument stories ... not quite on topic but anyway ...

At a small local festival, a singer from some distance away, IIRC not originally slated to do a spot during the evening, was jumped on by the MC and asked to perform, perhaps because A N Other hadn't turned up. He hadn't brought his own guitar, so he borrowed one off another performer. They were both sitting at the same table as myself. It being a mostly accoustic evening, there was just a bar stool on the stage for those performers who wished to sit down. As this guy got down from it, its legs shot out behind him, and he went down on the borrowed guitar, stoving its front in. I tried, perhaps with some success, to bring them together by buying them both drinks, but the atmosphere was distinctly subdued for the rest of the evening.

I had a brief fling with a girl who played the fiddle. At a festival, someone I knew from a famous band, who was well-known for having a drink problem, borrowed her fiddle, and dropped it. Fortunately, it didn't seem to be much, if at all, damaged, but she, of course, was absolutely outraged.

A local squeezebox player, melodeon IIRC, was once playing so energetically that he ripped the bellows in two and was left looking aghast from one half to the other!

But to return to topic, there was another, much bigger and well-known, local festival where always the singarounds and even the main concert marquee were subject to devasting extraneous noise, the latter from the ceilidh marquee close by, so it's not as though the problem was essentially unpredictable. One year, I got so pissed off that I complained bitterly to the organisers about this. They mumbled all sorts of excuses which didn't really add up to anything very much compared with the scale of the problem, and, sure enough, next year nothing had changed. In a singaround there was a girl singing very quietly and very beautifully when a morris-team with a big bass drum started up right outside the window. She had to stop, because she couldn't even hear herself, let alone anyone else hear her. I've only ever once gone to that festival again, and then only because my ex-wife wanted to go.