The wife of Jane Addiction’s frontman, Perry Farrell, revealed what happened following the on-stage altercation at their concert in Boston.
When concertgoers were happily bopping to the rock band’s songs on Friday (13 September) at the Leader Bank Pavilion, they probably didn’t expect to get an up-close look at a brawl mid-song.
A video from X shows Farrell, 65, throw a punch at bandmate Dave Navarro on-stage.
According to reports, tensions had been seemingly boiling over after Farrell was allegedly seen shouting at the 57-year-old guitarist while they played their hit song ‘Mountain Song’, leading the vocalist to approach Navarro and seemingly shoulder-barge him.
Crew then rushed to intervene and grabbed him and wrestled him from the stage, as the lights were turned down in order to conceal what was unfolding. The band’s bassist, Eric Avery, also was said to have help with restraining Farrell.
However, Farrell’s wife Etty Lau has since taken to social media to share what she describes as a ‘first person account’ of what happened – on and off-stage.
In an Instagram post, she wrote: “Rather than speculating, I thought to post a first person account of what happened on stage.”
She claimed that ‘there had been a lot of tension and animosity between the members’, and this was ‘the magic that made the band so dynamic’, adding: “Well, the dynamite was lit. Perry got up in Dave’s face and body checked him.”
According to her, Farrell’s reported outburst was down to suffering with ‘tinnitus and a sore throat every night’, as well as the sound level on stage.
Lau said: “Perry’s frustration had been mounting, night after night, he felt that the stage volume had been extremely loud and his voice was being drowned out by the band.
“When the audience in the first row, [they] started complaining up to Perry cussing at him that the band was planning too loud and that they couldn’t hear him, Perry lost it.”
It was then, when they began playing ‘Ocean Size’, the frontman supposedly found it hard to hear through the backing music, and he had to scream the lyrics ‘to be heard’.
Lau then accused bassist Avery of assaulting Farrell, alleging that Avery had ‘walked up to Perry, upstage, in the dark, behind [guitar technician] Dan [Cleary], put Perry in a headlock and punched him in the stomach three times’.
She also claimed that Avery was the one who ‘won the fight’.
Following that, she said: “Kevin, crew member with a long hair with long hair pulled Eric away. Then Eric nonchalant walked off to the front of the stage to apologise to audience for the show ended early.
“Dave still looked handsome and cool in the middle of a fight. Perry was a crazed beast for the next half an hour – he finally did not calm down, but did breakdown and cried and cried.
“Eric, well he either didn’t understand what descalation meant or took advantage of the situation and got in a few cheap shots on Perry.”
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