Liam Gallagher to rowdy festival crowd: "Which dickhead threw the fish here, then?"
Let’s be very clear: You should never throw anything at a concert. Even if you don’t fuck up and hit some poor audience member a few rows from the stage, it’s still dangerous, boorish behavior, and it can rightly get you in a lot of trouble for violating the well-being and safety of others. All that being said, though: If you feel bound and determined to disrupt a show in such a fashion, and if you’ve already decided that the hurled object in question is going to be a fish…Well, there are probably worse people you could throw it at than former Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher.
We don’t even mean that as a dig on Gallagher; he continues to put out occasionally interesting music, after all, and remains one of rock journalism’s most potent sources of great “Fuck you” quotes. And that’s kind of the point: If anyone was going to get a fish chucked at them during a performance at Spain’s Festival Internacional de Benicàssim—as Gallagher did this weekend, apparently—we’re just glad it was someone who’d respond with a self-assured, “Which dickhead threw the fish here, then?”
Gallagher reportedly stopped the show to deal with the piscine infringement, going on to address the crowd with the following Manchester tone poem: “Fucking stinky, smelly fish, man. Now listen man, it really ain’t that fucking bad, man. Don’t be throwing fish on stage, mate. I’ve seen a lot worse than this shit. Alright?” And really, it’s an extremely relatable, understandable response to being confronted with seafood in the middle of your set.
Consequence Of Sound has plenty of follow-up questions about the incident, mostly centered on the question of how (and why) one goes about smuggling a full, uncooked fish into a music venue in the first place. (It’s like the old “Who brings rotten tomatoes to a show?” question, but way more floppy and smelly.) But it all comes back to Gallagher, who ultimately passed judgment on the situation with the relaxed surety of a guy who’s had a lot of shit thrown at him over the years: “I can’t be fucking singing while there’s a fish there, man.”
Man’s got a point.