Ticket Stories 1: The Bloodhound Gang

The Anson Rooms, Bristol — 22 January 2000

The Anson Rooms, Bristol 22 January, 2000

This is as good a place to start as any, I suppose. The Bloodhound Gang were the first band I ever interviewed, before my mercifully brief career as an actual music journalist, when I was a student.

I’d been writing CD reviews for Epigram, the university’s student paper, and six months later I’d be made production editor.

But for now, they wanted me to interview a band. I was accompanying the music editor, who was in the year above me and therefore seemed impossibly worldly and urbane. The gig was at The Anson Rooms, the university’s own venue, inside the Student Union building and, conveniently, one floor down from the newspaper office.

We interviewed the band in their dressing room, a small room, somehow both bright and dingy, up a rickety flight of back stairs around the corner from the stage. They had something of a reputation, as what you’d now call “bro”s, as party animals, as somehow dangerous, even.

They turned out, of course, to be quite nice. Personable, even. I don’t remember much about the interview itself, except that we spent some time discussing Kenny Rogers, who at the time was being sued by a fan, because Rogers, at one of his shows, had thrown a frisbee into the crowd, which had hit a chandelier, which had fallen onto the fan, who had apparently become impotent as a result. The band, predictably, found this hilarious. And it was a nice feeling to have made them laugh. History does not record what happened to the lawsuit.

The other thing I remember is that the bassist, “Evil” Jared Hasselhoff, wanted to go for a swim in the student union pool, but didn’t have any change for a locker, so I lent him 50p. I didn’t expect to see the money again, but he promised he’d return it to me, and to my surprise, about half an hour before the gig began that evening at The Anson Rooms, I spotted Jared barrelling through the crowd towards me, well over six feet tall, with a shiny 50 pence piece held high in his hand. He thrust it towards me, thanked me with a grin, and strode off, much to the bemusement of everyone else.