And Finally

Pink Floyd man apologises for defacing Elliott Smith memorial

By | Published on Friday 7 May 2010

Former Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters has apologised after graffiti to promote his forthcoming and previously reported tour, to perform Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ album, defaced a memorial wall for singer-songwriter Elliott Smith.

As part of the promotional campaign for the tour in various American cities, wheat paste was used to write an anti-war quote made by US President Eisenhower on walls. One such wall turned out to be the front of shop Solutions Audio on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. The shopfront, which was used on the cover of Smith’s ‘Figure 8’ album, has become an unofficial memorial since his death in 2003.

Waters told the LA Times: “It was absolutely an accident. I didn’t want to disrespect Elliott Smith’s fans, and I’ve instructed [the team] to remove the wheat paste immediately. It was a random pasting in the normal course of this, and I want to make it public that we had no intent to offend or cover up something precious”.

Waters also told fans via Facebook that he believed that the quote, which reads: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed”, would be a message that Smith would have agreed with.



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