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So in 2003 I played in a Monorchid/Skull Kontrol style trashy, dancey rock band. We went out of our way to do obnoxious jokes at a lot of shows. A younger me would've intellectualised it as shaking punks out of their complacency or some horseshit like that but really it was just about doing dumb shit because we thought it was funny and pranking on our friends. Playing with our mates seriously $krammies white belt band who were notorious for their two (!!) singers never being on stage? We got a wireless microphone and our singer did the entire set from the urinal in the club. Playing with our friends deadly serious Krautrock group that was getting a lot of attention in the local press at the time? Well OF COURSE we dressed up like Kraftwerk and did robot dance moves all the way through our set.

We did a show once with a great band called Jihad Against America, where we changed our name for the night to 'The Coalition of the Willing' and set up at opposite ends of the tiny, tiny bandroom. The idea was we would take it in turns to play a song but it pretty quickly devolved into playing over each other, heckling and trying to interrupt each other's performances, stuff like that. The venue was about the size of the living room and for some reason like 50 or 60 people came and were crammed in between these two bands playing at the same time and trying to disrupt each other's sets. At one point our guitarist picked up their guitarist and bodily carried him into the carpark outside.

The best thing by far was when we would play with tough guy hardcore bands though. We had a song that had a kind of slow, Kyuss-y riff with pauses in it and would have a minidisc (yes this was 2003) plugged into the PA with Nelly's 'hot in here' cued up. During one of the pauses in that riff, we all put our instruments down, started playing the song, and stripped down to our underwear and started dancing around, grinding on uncomfortable mosh bros. Then when the song finished we'd pick our instruments back up and start the riff right where we left off.

After that band I played in a doom band a few people here might know called Whitehorse. For some reason the local vice people loved us at that time and booked us to play a couple of parties. Our gimmick there was to play one riff for as long as possible, until people actually came onstage and turned our amps off. Record was an hour and 12 minutes at their xmas party.

Currently I play in a grind band that more people like for our singer's drunken ranting and abuse of the audience and rest of his band between songs than the actual music. Which I mean, to be fair, it is definitely the best part of our show. We've been talking about getting him to pre-record his standup routine onto a sampler and just press the buttons rather than say anything between songs. I'd like to even make a recording of him talking shit and splice it in with the couple of 7"s we've just recorded and 'play' a set where we just play that through the PA and sit on stage eating burritos and staring at people.

With that band recently we did a show where everyone was having a super dark time in their personal lives. So we just played with our backs to everyone and didn't make a sound between songs, singer didn't say a thing. At the start everyone was heckling as usual and stuff and trying to gee him up but sort of, ten minutes into the set the whole place just felt really uncomfortable. By the time we finished no one in the crowd was even clapping after songs, they were just looking around going 'wtf'. It was AWESOME.

Finally, current other band I play in has been doing the thing where we start off with a tonne of feedback and then drummer starts playing the first song. We're going to do that at a show this friday but while drummer starts song, he's just gonna keep playing the intro beat, guitarist and I are going to put our guitars down and have a pushup competition until one of us collapses.