I've been touring now for nearly a quarter of a century. I rarely get bored, but sometimes I think if I have to spend another day off in Kansas City, I will climb to the rooftop of the hotel with a high powered weapon and take my ennui out on the locals. It is no surprise then that one of the things I look forward to most is doing large stadium shows in places where people have never seen one, because they actually seem to enjoy it and are therefore more easily duped. But there are limits.

Nothing in your experience can prepare you for India. It is my first time here. To my knowledge, it is the first time a western stadium show has actually taken place. The Michael Jackson entourage screams into Bombay in our chartered Romanian 707 ('The Tube Of Death' as I like to call it, much to the consternation of the novice travellers among us). I always insist that the tour accountant, who finds these flying deathtraps, rides with me on any questionable charter so if the plane goes down, I can stab him to death before we crash. We are whisked off to our luxury Bombay hotel — obviously the best in town because the cement on the outside is relatively intact. The smell outside is beyond western comprehension; as if some prehistoric herd of creatures with suppurating skin chancres has decided to go into a group rut just outside your door. If any of you wonder where all that plastic sheeting we use at outdoor shows winds up, it's right here — a vast housing project in Bombay, acres of it, covering untold thousands living in poverty on a scale that beggars the imagination. You can't ignore it, and you find yourself getting angry at these poor souls, especially the four year old beggars holding dying babies.

When I arrive in a new place, I'm usually right out on the street, suck it all in, crawl into these people's brains, see if you can mate with a few of them. Bombay looks like a good place to hunker down at the bar and wait it out. The venue seems like a good idea. Go down and see how the lads are making out. You have to draw on all your resources in the Third World. The locals have never seen any of this so they have no idea what you are talking about half the time and wander around with expressions on their faces ranging from wonder to abject fear. There are usually serious injuries.

The venue is a football pitch. As soon as they built the stage, two families moved in under it: prime shelter is hard to find here. Being basically good people, we allow them to settle in, although pulling cable through faeces becomes a bore. The load-in path takes this crazy jog around a large, low tree branch. I am told that we tried to have it cut down, but someone's ancestor's spirit lives in it, and they lashed themselves to the tree in protest. The stage also seems, well, far away from the trucks. One of the sound crew did some rough estimates and found that after pushing all the sound road cases and speakers from the truck to the stage and back, it would work out the same as pushing one speaker cabinet from New York to Philadelphia. Not our problem, burn out the locals on that one.

As I crank up 350,000 Watts of PA in the afternoon, I see the reaction in the local faces — awe. It really is kind of impressive. I do my EQ quickly as outdoor venues are a snap. And when I turn it off, there is total silence. Then they all start yammering at once and look at me as if Clint Eastwood has just walked into their bar. Nice for the ego. I do wonder about something though: every piece of Indian music I hear, on TV, or radio, is incredibly distorted. Is this just bad engineering, or do they actually like it this way? Where do they find those reverb programs? Or is an old echoplex the only thing they know how to use? How will they react to this hi-fi technorama?

The show goes extremely well. First timers are always enthusiastic. Besides, this is a good, well-planned extravaganza. Freddie Mercury had the most memorable (and successful) dictum on this. When we were planning the first stadium tour of South America with Queen, Fred would look over all these complicated drawings for a moment, then wave his hand in a gesture of dismissal and say 'Darling, just blind them and deafen them in the first 30 seconds and they're mine for the next two hours'. It worked.

The Western Intelligence Community has overlooked a simple measure of any regime's stability: the ratio of police to concert goers at a pop show. Large pop concerts are a constant source of anxiety to third world dictatorships as they can't understand why large crowds of people would gather for any other reason than to topple their regime. India has been sailing through rough political seas these days if this is true, as the number of police is right up there with the old Eastern European communist bloc. Sometimes in Moscow or Bucharest, the ratio approaches 1:1. The Indian security forces are particularly nasty villains with long truncheons that they brandish at the slightest provocation. The officers strut among them like pimps. The old South American dictators were less concerned: they all had places in Miami and had probably been to one or two pop shows themselves. If things got out of hand, they had bolt-holes in Dade County anyway.

Notice I use the term 'pop' and not 'rock'n'roll' — a term patented by Nike in 1987 and no longer in use. It advocated the overthrow of society; modern pop music advocates the overthrow of 24 hour convenience stores.

When the British abandoned India in 1947, it seems they took the only screwdriver with them, and nothing has been repaired since. A few people told me they secretly hoped the British would come back and restore order, or at least fix the air conditioning. At any rate, I'm not going back until they paint the place.

Trip Khalaf is the Senior Engineer at Clair Brothers Audio and works with lots of famous people. He sometimes lives in the US, although he won't tell us where. He refuses to be photographed for legal reasons.