Musicians have thrown plenty of things into crowds over the years. Usually they’re harmless items that fans often take home as souvenirs. Drum sticks, guitar picks, occasionally musicians will even throw themselves into the crowd, if they feel so inclined.
However, former Mars Volta frontman Cedric Bixler-Zavala, who is currently fronting Antemasque, thew something that we don’t think any fans were rushing in to seize. During an appearance at New Zealand’s Westfest, Soundwave’s Kiwi sister event, on Tuesday, Bixler-Zavala reportedly chucked a kettle of boiling water at punters.
As the New Zealand Herald reports, witnesses reported that Bixler-Zavala, best known for his time with Mars Volta and At The Drive-In with Antemasque bandmate Omar Rodríguez-López, appeared agitated throughout his set, throwing speaker stacks, packing cases, and his microphone stand.
“Every time he picked something up I was like, ‘Is he going to throw that? You just knew he was pissed off,” one unnamed fan told the New Zealand Herald. “The last thing he did was hurl his microphone down to the grass in the space between the stage and the crowd. He was so erratic you never knew what he was going to do with stuff.”
But while trashing stage items are usually par for the course when a rockstar is throwing a bit of a tanty, the stentorian-voiced singer took things to a whole new level when he hurled a plastic kettle in the crowd that, according to several fans in attendance, was filled with boiling water.
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As readers can see in the footage below, Bixler-Zavala does appear to hurl a kettle into the crowd during a performance of ‘Hanging In The Lurch’. Festivalgoer Hugh Smith said he and his friends took “the full brunt” of the “boiling hot” liquid that was sitting inside.
“Cedric threw a plastic kettle full of boiling hot water towards me and my friends,” Smith, who said he and his friends were “shocked” by the incident, said in an email to the Herald. “We were standing about four-five metres back.”
“I threw my hand up to catch it before it collided with my friend’s face… this bruised my hand and then splashed hot water all over him and my face. It bloody hurt. My friend’s arm went all burnt pink,” he added. An image supplied to the Herald shows a punter’s apparently scolded arm.
Meanwhile, another Westfest reveller said the liquid was so hot it was steaming. “The singer had a full jug of recently boiled water on one of the risers, which was obviously for him to drink, but maybe it was too hot, or maybe he just felt like throwing it anyway,” they claimed.
“He hurled it into the crowd and [it definitely] looked like some people got burnt as steam was coming off the water as it went through the air. It landed near us and an audience member picked it up and waved it around for the rest of their set, which must have been 15 minutes tops.”
