The Dillinger Escape Plan and the simply shocking Reading Festival poop incident
Lots of people like to collect memorabilia from live shows, whether that’s the setlist, a plectrum, or some drumsticks, and when a member of a band launches one of these into the crowd for audience members to catch, sometimes it can create some sort of free-for-all where bodies scramble in some sort of fandom death-match to nab a memento of the show they’ve attended.
These are, of course, all wonderful things to obtain from a gig, but there have been plenty of other occasions where the projectiles hurled from the stage have been far less appealing or convenient to take home. A sweaty T-shirt off the back of your favourite singer might seem gross, but at least you can wash it (if you want to), but for all of the wonderful artefacts you can acquire at the end of a gig, there are plenty of things you won’t want to try and catch as they fall from above at high velocity.
Low’s Alan Sparhawk once famously threw his guitar into the crowd at the end of a set at End of the Road Festival in a fit of rage, and while that’s not a bad thing to land your hands on, it’s also far heavier than the usual things that get chucked off stage and would probably cause more damage to you than it would the instrument if you tried catching it. Worse still is the idea of Fat White Family throwing rotting offal into their audiences at earlier shows – much less hygienic and frankly disgusting, but also typical of the band’s antics. If you think it doesn’t get any worse than that, though, think again.
In 2002, American post-hardcore band The Dillinger Escape Plan chose to launch a faecal assault on the Reading Festival audience when frontman Greg Puciato chose to curl one out on stage, scoop it up into a plastic bag and lob it into the crowd while smearing the rest on himself. This scatological display of insanity is as heinous as it gets, but as puerile as taking a shit on stage and throwing it at the audience might sound, unbelievably, he had his reasons for doing it.
As he thrust his turds at the masses, Puciato made a statement to those in attendance, protesting at what he thought was a lacklustre programme at the infamous rock festival.
“This is a bag of shit, I just wanted to show you this so you’ll recognise it later on throughout the day”.
Greg Puciato
Alongside The Dillinger Escape Plan at the festival that year were the likes of Incubus, The Offspring, and most objectionably in their eyes, Puddle of Mudd – although seemingly he didn’t mind too much about spreading his own mud about the place.
In 2016, Puciato chose to address the controversy, which almost saw them banned from entering the country after violating public decency laws, by saying that he didn’t think the band would ever become successful or be playing alongside other bands he hated ever again, so thought he might as well make the most outlandish stand against their presence.
“There was no way in hell that I thought that we were ever going make a living doing this,” he claimed. “I just thought this was a ball of fire that’s gonna implode or it’s got a shelf life, there’s no way this can continue. It was kind of a combo of kind of wanting to cause the biggest ruckus imaginable, since we’re obviously never going to do this again anyway, I might as well make sure.”
There’s no real justification for doing this, especially as he could’ve taken a five minute walk off-site to a nice and clean restroom in the local branch of Wickes (trust me, a game-changer if you ever choose to inflict Reading Festival upon yourself), but then again, the attendees are kind of used to having to navigate their way through the lakes of human waste at Reading year upon year.
