Freddie Mercury sang that love can kill, and in the case of fans’ love, he was sometimes pretty close to achieving it, especially when the displays of love resulted in objects being thrown on stage. This has happened to Rosalía several times during her Motomami tour. In Buenos Aires (Argentina) they only threw a T-shirt and a letter at her, but the singer already replied with a warning into the microphone: “If you want to throw something away, please throw it carefully and carefully.” It didn’t help much, because days later a bouquet of roses hit him directly in the face in San Diego (USA). This time he responded with a tweet: “Please don’t throw things on stage and if you’re such a motomami that you throw them anyway, throw them on the opposite side from me,” wrote the Catalan.
On November 14, it was Harry Styles who received a slap in the eye attributed to a Skittle brand candy. It was so powerful that he apparently spent the rest of the concert with his eyelid closed. The British already have a long history in this matter. When he was part of One Direction, he was hit by a tampon at a concert in Nottingham in 2012 and later watched in surprise as they threw everything from chicken nuggets to shoes right in his crotch. His response was commendable and very professional: “The show must go on,” he said into the microphone.
Lady Gaga was not spared on her return to the stage this summer, when an identified object almost hit her, despite protests. At least nothing comparable to the concert in Barcelona in 2012, where sausages were thrown at him. And in September, Dua Lipa kicked a stuffed animal owned by Dr. Simi. The introduction of these puppets, very popular and popular in Mexico, has become a custom at almost all concerts, which is not always well received, as evidenced by the angry reactions of local idols such as Alejandro Fernández or Café Tacvba.
But what do they obey this kind of behavior? According to music journalist Xavier Valiño, author of The Great Rock Circus: Anecdotes, Curiosities and False Myths (T&B Editores), “everything has to do with adrenaline, with being part of something with a multitude of people and showing that you they are lives intense. It’s a powerful way of reacting to what’s happening on stage, and one of the few ways the audience has to participate in the show, for better or for worse.”
“You could say that the viewer seems determined to give something back to their idol, since there is an object of their love that is returning in the opposite direction. As you can see, this show is not free from a certain aggressiveness,” argues Manuel González Molinier, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and former singer and composer of the indie pop group Hazte Lapón. “In this narcissistic age in which we live, the spectator does not seem to be satisfied with this passive and unequal position that he takes towards his idol, he wants to occupy a privileged place to bridge the distance that separates them also be the protagonist. You have to be careful with that, because there are all kinds of reactions that an artist can elicit from their audience, and not all of them are positive.”
From the Beatles to Kanye West, almost no one has been spared
Throwing objects on stage is such an ancient custom that it can be traced back to the time when tomatoes were thrown at theater actors as a sign of dissatisfaction with the play or its interpretation. The first documented case dates back to 1883, when an actor named John Ritchie was showered with tomatoes and rotten eggs in New York.
Whether it’s the—corrupted—fruits of love or hate, virtually no rock and pop star has been spared. The Beatles used to be showered with candy tosses on their first North American tour, supposedly good vibes, but George Harrison is said to have hated it so much he lost interest in touring. Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Ramones, Sex Pistols, Jethro Tull, AC/DC, Madonna, Barbra Streisand, Oasis, Green Day, Marilyn Manson, Justin Bieber, Marc Anthony, 50 Cent, Jeff Mills and Kanye West were also honored one of these unsolicited gifts at some point in your career. Some of them have been captured for posterity, such as on The Stooges’ live album Metallic KO, where Detroit audiences harass Iggy Pop with a continuous storm of beer bottles, candy, ice cream and eggs, among other things.
And there were also episodes that made rock history, like the one that happened to Alice Cooper at the Toronto Peace Festival in 1969 when someone threw a chicken at him. The rocker, thinking it could fly, returned it to the public, who tugged it until it was destroyed and covered in blood. From there, the hoax was generated that Cooper was killing chickens on stage.
Something even bloodier happened to Ozzy Osbourne in 1982 when a fan threw a live bat at him. The Black Sabbath leader was mistaken for rubber and bit his head off. Far from being frightened by what was happening, he later got used to throwing raw meat at the audience, who responded by doing the same.
Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson was somewhat shocked to see blood spattered on his feet at a concert in Portugal, while Mick Jagger was hit on the head by a chair at a Rolling Stones performance in Marseille in 1990. He ended up in the hospital, where he ended up receiving eight stitches. It was David Bowie’s turn in Oslo in 2004 when a lollipop hit him in the eye. As a reward, the Norwegians got a much shorter concert and a statement for the annals: “At least they didn’t hit me in the right eye.”
However, you can be unlucky if you are an opening act that the main artist’s fans may find inappropriate. It was the same with The B-52’s when they opened for The Who in Orlando (USA) in 1982. An apple hit her singer Cindy Wilson in the stomach, causing her to leave the stage. And it’s not just the legacy of more or less hard rock groups. In 1989, some Texas debutants opened for Simple Minds in Cardiff, Wales. The audience, who didn’t seem as committed to world peace as Jim Kerr’s band, threw bottles at guests throughout the concert, even hitting singer Sharleen Spiteri in the head. When she asked if it was appropriate to throw things at a poor girl who was singing, the rain intensified between laughs.
And in 1992, at the Benito Villamarín Stadium in Seville, he attended the group Faith No More, opening for Guns N’Roses, who were showered with a constant rain of beer cans throughout the concert. Karma would end up making his move, as years later it would be the same group of Axl Rose who received the bottle whips, this time in protest for leaving the stage late. In 1998, it was singer Meredith Brooks who was greeted with a barrage of bottles and coins in Buenos Aires when she performed for the Rolling Stones. She went on stage in the jersey of the Argentine team, took it off in protest, threw it on the ground and ended the concert shocked and outraged. Sometimes the aggressors aren’t even human. Should they tell the members of Kings Of Leon when they left a concert in St. Louis (USA) after three songs because of a rain of pigeon droppings.
Spain is no different
In Spain, just after the transition, the recently acquired right to freedom has also led us to wholeheartedly throw objects on stage, almost always from a purist rock perspective. Movida artists, for example, were often the victims of these attacks, which also took on autochthonous forms, such as the threat of throwing the musicians into the pylon. In a 2001 interview, Carlos Berlanga admitted to me that after this happened to them at a concert with Alaska and Dinarama in Calahorra, La Rioja, he was reluctant to tour. In Mallorca in 1983 almost a bottle reached Juan Verdera, the guitarist of Derribos Arias. “He was smashed to pieces and hit his microphone instead of his face. A miracle”. Ramoncín was also a regular recipient of items of all kinds, and not only the punkiest in his early days. His Battle of the Rotten Eggs at Madrid’s amusement park in 1978 was famous, but his reception at the Viña Rock Festival in 2006, when rocks and CDs cut into ninja stars were thrown at him to protest his anti-piracy campaigns at the helm of the SGAE.
The rock burned, like at the infamous Lou Reed concert at Moscardó football field (Madrid) in 1980. The New Yorker left the stage after a can was thrown and the audience reacted by destroying everything, like the Chronicle of the events of that time. The public in Madrid was most affected by this incident: days later, Bob Marley was scheduled to perform at the same venue, but the civilian government did not authorize the concert, claiming the danger of disturbing public order.
Love and Hate was received in industrial quantities by Hombres G. In particular, industrial quantities of women’s underwear. According to David Summers, there was a time when three or four hundred bras and panties could be brought onto the stage every night. When female audiences showed their eagerness in this way, male audiences tended to balance it out in more aggressive ways. Guitarist Rafa Gutiérrez recently revealed in La Voz de Galicia that at a concert in Vigo they threw a can of sand at him that he accidentally stepped on, leaving him with a buried knee for nine months. The script twist came years later when Iván Ferreiro admitted that the culprit was Alfonso Román, the guitarist for Los Piratas.
When the Héroes del Silencio performed for the first time in San Fernando (Cádiz) in 1990, they allegedly threw cans on stage. Bunbury stopped the concert, picked up one of them, hit his head and said, “You want to hit me? Well, you already gave it to me. Now let me play.” Xavier Valiño recalls how his friends swept up tequila with tomatoes and eggs at a party in Lugo because they considered them a pop group for fans. And throwing rotten eggs at them Sabrina Salerno at the Terpsícore discotheque in Negreira (A Coruña) was also highly commented upon by a group of outraged feminists after the singer bared her breasts during her television appearance on New Year’s Eve 1987.
Even the strongest couldn’t get rid of them. Extremoduro left a concert in Toledo after Robe Iniesta received a screw in his chest, and it wasn’t the only time. “Let’s see, one son of a bitch threw a can, then another threw a katxi. I already collected, huh?, so to the parrot, I go to my town and they give you the ass, huh? If someone wants to throw pebbles at the doll, they can go home,” the singer launched at a concert in Salou in 2014. Although, of course, the additional danger is greater if he had to open for them. In 1997, the Valencian group received Doctor Divago “a sandwich, a 25 peseta coin, an insulated skewer and a lit cigar” as she preceded them in the Benidorm bullring Fortunately, in 1999 at the El Sol hall in Madrid, the cigarettes that the public gave massively to the British group Hefner threw, knocked out in a beautiful act of complicity, while performing her song “Hymn For The Cigarettes.”
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