6 disastrous gigs the stars would rather forget

Being a popstar isn't easy. Well, it's probably easier than some lines of work but it definitely has its drawbacks.

Such as live gigs in restaurants, on top of hay-stacks or at fruit festivals. Nope, it's not all sold out shows in arenas and thousands of screaming fans every night.

Niall Horan has revealed his most disastrous gig from his One Direction days - and he's not the only star who has shared his stage disasters.

Here's six painful gigs we're glad we didn't have tickets for.

Fresh from their success on The X Factor in 2010, One Direction performed their first ever live show at the Watford Colosseum in December 2011.

But it wasn't a glorious start to their career as live performers. Niall Horan reveals it was actually a bit of a shambles.

"I never want to talk about that gig again," he told the BBC.

"Worst night of my life. The worst One Direction show ever.

"We've refused to talk about it ever since. It was a disaster. We were just a joke.

He says everything they planned for the show fell apart once they took to the stage.

"Anything we rehearsed just went out the window. It was our first ever gig and we just didn't know what the **** was going on."

Niall may have hated his first gig with One Direction, but at least he made it home afterwards.

The same can't be said for Ed Sheeran, who was paid £50 for a gig in Exeter in the very early days of his career.

"The ticket down there was £80," he told Entertainment Weekly in 2015.

"So I was kind of like, 'If I sell CDs, that will probably help with the train fare.'"

But to sell merchandise, you need an audience.

"Got down there, empty venue. Just me and the sound engineer. Ended up waiting about an hour. Nobody came in. And I thought, '**** it, I’ll just go on.' So I played the gig to the sound engineer."

And if you thought the experience couldn't get worse, he then found he was stuck in Exeter for the night.

"I went to the train station and realized I’d missed the last train to London. So I had to sit in a cold train station for seven hours doing nothing."

Sam Smith is one of the world's hottest young stars and most successful singers. So he's come a long way from his early days performing at barn dances for drunk people.

“I had to sing on this stage on top of a haystack," he told GQ magazine.

"I had to sing backing tracks for an hour and a half whilst everyone was drunk."

"I was like 13, I didn’t know the words: It was awful."

Sam Smith will perform in the Radio 1 Live Lounge on 29 September. We promise there will be no haystacks.

It's one thing to have one horrible gig - but much worse when you have to repeat the experience.

Kasabian supported U2 at three shows during the 2010 leg of their 360 tour and while they enjoyed working with U2, Tom Meighan from the band says U2 fans ruined the experience for them.

"Those gigs were horrible. Worst ever," Tom told Australian website News.com.au.

He said that was the last time Kasabian would ever be someone else's support band.

"I hate supporting bands, we're not a support band. So that's never gonna happen again," he added.

When it comes to finding a suitable band to soundtrack your dinner, Royal Blood probably wouldn't rank too highly.

They once found themselves performing at a nearly empty restaurant in Preston in their early days - and it wasn't an experience they (or the diners, probably) particularly enjoyed.

"It was pretty miserable, it was raining," Ben Thatcher told Radio X earlier this year.

"It was more of a restaurant. We were interrupting people’s dinner."

"The sound guy wasn’t there. He was turning up pretty much as we played.

"And there was about three people that came to see us. And the rest were trying to enjoy their dinner."

A more appropriate place to experience Royal Blood would be in the Radio 1 Live Lounge - when they join us on 26 September. Just saying.

During his time in The Jonas Brothers (with Nick Jonas - who is also a very famous pop star, of course), DNCE frontman Joe Jonas performed a strawberry festival.

It didn't go very well.

"They actually judge strawberries, with taste tests and everything," he told The Guardian in 2011.

"It was also the most awkward gig we've ever done. There was hardly anyone there and the sound cut out halfway through, and that was a little bit upsetting.

"We didn't get angry and smash the place up, no. But we did get asked to judge the winning strawberry as compensation for the bad sound."

But there was a happy ending to his sorry tale.

"The winning strawberry was fantastic."