Roger Waters Allegedly Tells London Palladium Audience To 'F*ck Off'

Things apparently didn’t go as expected at Roger Waters’ recent concert at the London Palladium, with fans expecting Pink Floyd classics from the band’s co-founder and solo tunes. Instead, they experienced a truly strange gig.

According to a Men’s Journal report, fans departed the venue on Sunday night (8 October) before Waters performed any songs. Writer Declan Gallagher reported that Waters hit the stage 15 minutes late and subsequently began reading passages from his yet-to-be-published book, Dark Side Of The Moon: Memoirs Of A Lanky Prick, from his laptop.

 “One story involved a duck that came to live in the family home,” Will Hodgkinson, music critic for The Times, wrote in a review. “Another began promisingly as a memory of Floyd’s original leader, Syd Barrett, but revealed nothing more than that Barrett wrote a lot of songs and had an innocent air about him.”

The Daily Mail reported that Waters told the said duck story about his pet, Donald, for 20 minutes, and the manuscript reading lasted an hour.

Things took a turn for the bizarre as hecklers, upset about the unexpected reading and setlist, began reacting to what they were hearing. Waters reportedly told those punters to “Fuck off” and later said, “If you want to tell stories, tell them in your own time to your own audience in your own fucking theatre. By the way, if you can show constraint and stop shouting again.”

A fan who attended the show said punters’ phones were bagged before the concert. Responding to a Pink Floyd Appreciation account on Instagram, the user wrote, “he started off by reading 3 excerpts from his upcoming memoir then played ‘the bar’ and ‘mother’.

“Followed by a 20 minute interval and then he played a video where he explained the meaning of each of the tracks of the redux before playing the album in full. I’m not the biggest fan of the redux but it was a nice experience seeing it live and I especially enjoyed ‘mother’.”

Waters is touring in support of his new release, The Dark Side Of The Moon Redux, his reworking of the 1973 classic album. Fifty years on, did Waters land his return to The Dark Side Of The Moon? You can read The Music’s verdict of Redux here.

Waters announced his intention to re-record The Dark Side Of The Moon in February. In an interview with The Telegraph, the singer, bassist, and songwriter commented, “I wrote The Dark Side Of The Moon. Let’s get rid of all this ‘we’ crap.”

Waters added, “Of course, we were a band, there were four of us, we all contributed – but it’s my project, and I wrote it. So… blah!”