Jodie Minus of The Australian is reporting that when Stephen Taylor saw the Austrian extreme-metal band PUNGENT STENCH at a Sydney pub eight years ago, he came home with more than a bad smell and a ringing in his ears.

"I was stage diving. I jumped off the stage and my mate was there – he was gonna catch me — but he got out of the way at the last minute and I landed on my tailbone. I was down for about a week," Taylor says.

It was a brief and sobering encounter with the phenomenon known as the mosh pit.

Others have paid a much higher price for the sake of mixing it with hundreds of others in a sweaty, rollicking, lurching and sometimes downright dangerously seething mass of humanity at rock concerts.

Mosh-pit veteran Nathaniel Armstrong, 21, says he never enjoys moshing and it is simply a means to an end. "I was young and excited to be there and I just wanted to get as close to the band as possible," he says.

Armstrong grew out of moshing two years ago but says that as a teen he managed to push his way to the front of the stage for a Sydney gig by SOULFLY, the new band of Max Cavalera, former frontman of SEPULTURA.

"So there were all these SLAYER fans and SEPULTURA fans there. They were just massive biker types, sort of 30-plus and we were like 15," he says.

"We were up at the front to begin with and there were two little chicks in front of us who were probably about 11. We were like 'You are going to get killed when this starts' and they were like 'Fuck off, we can take care of ourselves'. And then the first note that Max played on his guitar, they just disappeared, forever. I don't know what happened to them." Read more.