Over the weekend, Cher Lloyd, the 19-year-old pop star best known for her death-of-music single “Swagger Jagger,” was performing at the V Festival when she was hit by a bottle of pee thrown from someone in the audience. Probably because she was singing “Swagger Jagger.” According to the Guardian:
Two songs into her set, Lloyd was struck by a bottle and walked off stage. When she reappeared, she asked the audience to behave: “It’s hard enough being up here, but it’s not nice having bottles of piss chucked at you,” she said.
But the crowd was unrelenting. More missiles landed on stage and Lloyd called the whole thing off. “Thank you so much for all the nice messages, shame that a couple of people had to ruin it,” she wrote on Twitter. “Tomorrow is another day.” (Via)
Cheer up, Cher: you’ve now joined the likes of Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne, and the Stooges by having something totally bizarre — and quite often disgusting — thrown at you during a concert. Here are some of the more random, often amusing incidents.
You can’t see it in the video above — taken from the 1976 live album Metallica K.O. — but during a 1974 performance at Detroit’s Michigan Palace, Iggy and the Stooges were pelted with eggs, ice, beer bottles, and jelly beans by angry bikers who were having none of his shirtless shenanigans.
The great music critic Lester Bangs was present, and he wrote:
The audience, which consisted largely of bikers, was unusually hostile, and Iggy, as usual, fed on that hostility, soaked it up and gave it back and absorbed it all over again in an eerie, frightening symbiosis. “All right,” he finally said, stopping a song in the middle, “you assholes wanta hear ‘Louie, Louie,’ we’ll give you ‘Louie, Louie.'” So the Stooges played a 45 minute version of “Louie Louie,” including new lyrics improvised by the Pop on the spot consisting of “You can suck my ass/You biker faggot sissies.” (Via)
If you watched VH1 for even 17 seconds in the 1990s, you know all about this story, involving Ozzy Osbourne mistakenly biting a real bat’s head off because they thought it was rubber. Been there.
Around the same time as the bat incident, Ozzy Osbourne would throw raw meat into the audience, and it didn’t take long before fans began doing the same. This would never happen today because fans wouldn’t want their cellphones covered with various entrails.
We played the Toronto Peace Festival with John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and the Doors. While we were on, somebody from the audience threw a chicken on stage. I’m from Detroit, I’m not a farm kid. I figured a chicken had wings, it’ll fly away. So I took the chicken and threw it and it didn’t fly. It went into the audience. Blood everywhere. The next day, everybody’s reading, “Alice Cooper rips chicken’s head off, drinks blood.” Zappa called me. He said, “Whatever you did, keep doing it.” To this day, wherever I’m booked the ASPCA is usually there, too. (Via)
The fans would also return gifts to W.A.S.P – whilst on tour fans threw a number of strange items on stage…A dog’s brain, hogs head and a moose’s hind quarters!!! Blackie didn’t mind recieving these gifts, he once said, “It’s not that I really mind, but what I wanna know is, how do they get these things in the arenas in the first place.” (Via)
Bottles are thrown during concerts all the time (there’s a whole Wikipedia page for it), but I like this story too much not to mention it. During a show in 2008, Queens of the Stone Age singer Josh Homme was hit with a projectile object, and rather than shrug it off, he threatened, “You miserable f*cking c*nt, go back to your mom’s house, you 12-year-old dickless f*cking turd.”
UK grime star Lethal Bizzle was bombarded with bottles and tubs of Muller Rice during his performance at the Download Festival last weekend.
Bizzle faced a hostile audience from the outset of his 30-minute set, during which he told the crowd that he felt like he had been set up. (Via)
At an August 14 concert in Ontario, Adam Lambert performed a version of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” The crowd went absolutely bonkers as the singer rocked out with as much energy and talent as he displayed throughout season eight of American Idol. Then, a little over two minutes in, sources confirm that someone threw a dildo on stage. (Via)
We thought that those One Direction fans were nice young girls, but it seems that Harry Styles has some crazy followers as he admitted a fan once threw a tampon at him.
When asked what the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to him on stage was the 18 year-old replied: “I got hit in the face with a tampon!” (Via)
[Tila Tequila], who was more than booed off the stage at the annual Gathering of Juggalos festival in a small Illinois town over the weekend, tells E! News that she needed stitches above her eye after being pelted with glass bottles, human feces, and other garbage during what turned into a very brief appearance…Tequila says she kept tripping over things, and at one point, she “looked down and saw human poop.” (Via)
