Lust for riders...

Okay, I hold my hands up and admit that I am wilfully stealing from a fellow blogger here... but I just found this too fucking funny not to share. A few days back Flying Rodent posted a rider list for Iggy Pop and the Stooges... anyone out there not knowing what a rider is, let me explain -

Riders usually have two parts: the tech rider is all the PA gear the band need (and in some cases drums) and is fairly standard, unless you're only playing Damien Rice covers on a battered Spanish guitar in the Fuckwit and Firkin on a Sunday afternoon. The other half of the rider is all the stuff you can ask for to keep yourself sustained and entertained backstage. This usually starts from 'a couple of bottles of water and maybe some tea-making equipment' if you're a random chancer who has only managed to score a gig in a proper venue by dint of someone else dropping out, but can eventually rise through the inevitable alcohol requests to the likes of 11-course banquets, hookers, coke (not the fizzy), livestock and pretty much anything else a warped mind-blown megalomaniac rock star might want...

...which is kind of the position that Mr Pop and his band occupy.The thing that makes their rider list, however, is not simply the demands (of which, in truth, only one or two might appear over the top) but the way in which it is written. If I hadn't been assured by the faeries at the bottom of my garden that the Stooges and all their road crew were clean-living spiritual souls I might have suspected the influence of some illegal substance...

Below I give you a selection of the very few moments from this 18 page stream-of-consciousness epic that can actually be reproduced in short sentence format, but many of the best bits are longer paragraphs that take you off on random tangents here, there and everywhere. So if you have the time I truly recommend that you read the whole damn thing!

"...AMPLIFIERS that have been tested recently. And when I say "recently", I don't mean "Sometime in the three weeks preceding the occasion when it fell 5 meters off the top shelf in the warehouse"..."

"...TOM-TOM WITH MOUNTING. And if you can't bring the mounting to us, we'll have to send a bloke called Mohammed to the mounting..."

"...By the way our guitar roadie, Chris, assures me that the panda is not of the genus "Bear", but is actually a part of the "Pig" family. Could this possibly be true?..."

"...GUITAR (Clear and bright like the sound of jackboots on wet cobblestones)..."

"...NO TOY ROBOTS, TELEVISION EVANGELISTS, or TELEVISION CAMERAMEN..."

"...We had a lighting designer once, but he went mad so we shot him..."


I tell thee, it's fucking genius... and speaking of fucking geniuses (geni-i? geniuse?) and of stream of consciousness, it's nice to see Brewski making one of his sporadic posts...

Cheers m'dears!