cursed maybe?

Black Sabbath.

A band to strike fear into the faint of heart.  And one of my all-time favorites while growing up in the late 70s and early 80s.

At the tender age of 16 (well, almost 17) my girlfriend and I got tickets to see them live in Cardiff at the start of January 1981.  We both loved Sabbath (she got me into them if truth be told) so were gutted when the show was cancelled due to their bass player Geezer Butler injuring his finger.

This was after the whole tour nearly being cancelled the year before when drummer Bill Ward was sacked and replaced.

Dejected, we thought we wouldn't see our heroes.  But then the show was rearranged, for the end of the month (exactly 40 years ago to this very day in fact!).

After school, my girlfriend got the bus home with me, we got changed and caught the train to Cardiff with the obligatory flagon of cider for company.

ah - the 80s

We first knew something was up when, only a few minutes into their set, the support act (a band called A II Z) were hauled off stage, their equipment dismantled and the promoter hastily announcing that Sabbath would be appearing earlier than billed.

Strange!

What was even stranger was seeing a number of people (including the bass player from the band I was in at the time) shimmying down a curtain from a broken window high above the hall floor.  The hall was getting fuller and fuller as more and more people crammed in.

It was only after the show ended and we got outside that we found out why all this was going on.    Picking our way through a mini riot, a policeman told us that apparently the promoter had sold enough tickets for two nights and that to avoid a full scale riot Sabbath had agreed to play twice in one night!

Can you imagine that happening in today's health and safety risk assessment obsessed world?

As if that wasn't enough, we secured tickets to see them there again the following January, only this time heavy snowfall caused the venue's roof to collapse and the whole thing was cancelled - for the second year running.

For some strange reason, the show wasn't re-arranged this time!