The Jonas Hellborg-Selvaganesh concert at Blue Frog in Mumbai is the absolute worst concert experience I've ever had in some 18 years of attending gigs.

To clarify, the concert itself was not particularly terrible - just a bit overlong and underwhelming. Selvaganesh was in great form, at infrequent moments conjuring up a wall of sound that indicated a drumkit of Mike Portnoyesque proportions was at work and not the very unprepossessing kanjira.

Hellborg seemed to be having a bad day. I've seen him twice before and have never heard him hit so many bum notes. There was also a certain lack of clarity to some of what was being played - but I'm not sure if the failing was Hellborg's or that of the sound system. And at the end of around one hour forty five minutes of drum and bass, I realised just how empty this music sounds without someone like Mattias Eklundh, Niladri Kumar, Buckethead or even Shawn Lane (whose muted tone puts me off somewhat) going apeshit over it on the guitar/zitar.



But of course, it's entirely possible that I'd have enjoyed the concert a lot more at a different venue; one that was not entirely staffed by money grubbing assholes of unprecedented crassness or patronised by hipster cunts for whom all music is just background noise to clusterfuck photoshoots for their facebook profiles.

In fact, I was more than a little wary of the concert being at Blue Frog - we'd gone there just once before and after having shelled out a stiff 300 per head entry fee, kept being shooed off tables that we were led to believe had been reserved. The place didn't have the bare decency to actually indicate which tables were off limits, relying instead on a system where some unctuous steward would show up just after we'd settled down and ask us to move.

After being evicted from our second (or was it third?) table and offered standing room by way of compensation, we decided Bombay Black or whoever the hell was not worth the bother, insisted on a refund (which was given with great reluctance) and left after having spent not more than ten minutes.

This time around, we'd reserved a table well in advance. And in a happy self congratulatory mode, settled down to watch Hellborg tune up a little, while trawling through the menu in an unhurried, desultory manner. Which is what I'd imagine you do in a place that's not an Udupi or Irani where 'timepass' is frowned on and the entire business model depends on getting as many butts in seats as fast as possible.

We'd been seated just about five minutes when we began to be hassled – with waiters swarming around our table demanding that we order stuff really fucking fast. Like right now! Because there are people waiting, never mind the fact that we'd taken time out to reserve a table, and they had just sailed the fuck in. All of this aggression and hard sell may just have made sense if these guys were even remotely competent. They were nothing of the sort. They hadn't heard of a Shirley Temple which is a pretty famous mocktail and didn't have cold coffee on that particular day – because it was supposed to be a Chivas Regal night, and all other drinks are as piss compared to its power and glory. The amount of time they took to deliver two cups of tea (which were somehow exempt from Chivas Regal's autocratic stance) was frankly incredible – like the tea served there was distilled from the blood of lepers and unicorns and both of these had to be killed in vast numbers for it to be prepared.

And all this while, we were being subjected to an escalating scale of assholery. It's really hard concentrating on a subtle languid piece of music like Aga of the Ladies when you are being given the third degree on what you've ordered, being told you don't know what you ordered and then having the value of your order mocked. I toyed with the idea that the staff at Blue Frog had been hired exclusively from the ranks of Bangalore's FUCKYOU, I WON'T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME auto rickshaw drivers. Or that they were not people at all but turds that had been magicked into a semblance of the human shape by an incompetent fairy godmother, reverting to their original form as it grew close to midnight. Finally they shipped in Johnny Foreigner who tried unsuccessfully to play good cop to the head waiter's bad cop. This man with his bluff 'aw shucks, I KNOW y'all are poor boys with no money, why don't I get y'all some welfare?' attitude is perhaps the single most patronizing and consummately pricklike person I have ever encountered. Naturally, we lost all appetite we might have had and Blue Frog earned very little from us beyond a couple of cocktails that were ordered under duress. Which didn't stop the management from saying we could've done just fine drinking these standing.