Concertgoers are still throwing things at musicians, and the latest targets were Bring Me the Horizon frontman Oli Sykes and Eric Clapton.
Video of one incident, which went down Monday, is circulating on social media and shows Sykes performing the British rock band’s hit “Happy Song” when a phone is chucked through the air and smacks him on the left side of the face.
Just before being hit, the English musician is crouched down singing, then as he stands, the phone hits him. He appears dazed and crouches back down before having a few choice words with the audience. “Who the f— just threw a phone?” he says before tossing the device to a security team member off-stage.
On Tuesday, Sykes addressed the incident in a since-expired Instagram story telling fans that he’s “all good” but suffered a mild concussion.
“The phone to the head definitely smarted and I ended up with a mild concussion, but the swelling’s gone down a decent amount already,” he wrote. “I was struggling a bit on stage afterwards because singing was putting a lot of pressure on the wound and making things feel a bit disorienting while performing, so I’m sorry on my part for what may of seemed like a half-hearted performance.”
Read more: What’s behind the epidemic of concertgoers throwing stuff at artists?
Fans who were in the crowd at the Enterprise Center in St. Louis posted comments on videos of the incident, saying that after he was hit, Sykes’ energy “completely shifted” and he was dizzy. Another concertgoer wrote that Sykes’ face was visibly swollen by the end of the show, and additional videos from the concert show him performing with a fresh welt near his eye.
Days before the Sykes incident in St. Louis, Clapton cut his May 7 performance short in Madrid after he was hit in the chest by what appeared to be a vinyl album. According to GuitarWorld, the 81-year-old guitarist had just finished performing his famed cover of J.J. Cale’s “Cocaine” when the album was thrown from the audience and hit Clapton.
The “Wonderful Tonight” guitarist and singer was expected to return to the Movistar Arena stage for an encore but wrapped the set because of the incident.
In 2023, a slew of onstage attacks involving water bottles, cellphones and other projectiles seemed to plague musicians. Bebe Rexha was hit in the face with a cellphone, resulting in a man getting arrested and the singer getting stitches.
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Nicolas Malvagna of New Jersey was arrested and charged with assault for allegedly throwing his phone at Rexha. “I was trying to see if I could hit her with the phone at the end of the show because it would be funny,” Malvagna said, according to a criminal complaint.
Billie Eilish told the Hollywood Reporter that she’d been on the receiving end of the concert foul and it’s not fun. “I’ve been getting hit on stage with things for literally six years,” she said back in 2023 as a response to the Rexha incident. “People just get excited and it can be dangerous. It’s absolutely infuriating when you’re up there. When you’re up there, it blows. You know it’s out of love … [but ] you’re in a vulnerable position.”
Then, in October 2025, the “Ocean Eyes” hitmaker was grabbed by a fan and violently yanked backward toward a barricade as she walked through a concert crowd in Miami.
Adele took another approach when asking fans not to throw things during concerts and, after hearing that the trend was picking up in 2023, told the crowd at the Colosseum in Las Vegas, “Have you noticed how people are forgetting f— show etiquette at the moment? People are throwing s— on stage. Have you seen that? I f— dare you throw something at me. I’ll f— kill you.”
While the bizarre urge to chuck things at rock stars performing music onstage has been around since the advent of, well, rock stars and stages, it’s increasingly frowned upon and widely considered the ultimate concert faux pas.
“Fans throwing projectiles at artists is as old as rock ’n’ roll, but there’s still no excuse for it,” Paul Wertheimer, a concert security expert and founder of the consulting firm Crowd Management Strategies, told The Times in 2023. “The line between the stage and audience, and the sense of decorum around it, has really faded.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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