Every single venue that banned Pink Floyd: “I don’t think the city was prepared”

When it comes to being raucous at shows, it’s always the heavier rock acts that you associate with trashing venues, hotel rooms and bars, and consequently getting themselves barred from ever revisiting places as a result. For instance, you might be able to easily picture a band like Black Sabbath getting up to all sorts of debauched antics, but you wouldn’t picture an act like Pink Floyd doing anything near the same level of recklessness.

Pitted more as thinking man’s music, if you will, there was more of a seriousness to Pink Floyd that suggested they weren’t the sort who would participate in frivolous acts of criminal damage, and were simply focused on the task of making music and turning it into a spectacle for their audiences. With their many concept albums and ambitious concert films, their dedication to making challenging and expansive music was their number one priority, and the fact that they were rarely embroiled in salacious controversies suggests as much.

Sure, the band may have been known for their dalliances with drugs, but it was the sort of substances that make you far more introspective rather than rowdy, and as heavy as Pink Floyd could get with their brand of progressive space rock, they certainly weren’t all about creating carnage. Floyd simply weren’t that sort of band, and if you were after that, you’d have been better off looking elsewhere.

So, for them to have received permanent bans from several venues throughout their career comes as something of a surprise, and while some of it may have been their fault, their antics and reasons for having been ousted from performing in certain spaces are a little more tame compared to contemporaries such as Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones.

The surprising venues that banned Pink Floyd for life

The first venue to impose such an exclusion was the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, situated within the Southbank Centre. This was during the days when Syd Barrett was still with the band, and despite the fact they were still only in the process of recording The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn at the time, they were booked to play at the Games For May event in 1967, which was billed as “space age relaxation for the climax of spring.”

While the bubbles and flowers that were launched into the audience were well received as a spectacle, the marks that were left on the brand new leather seats left the venue with little hesitation on whether to allow the band back to the venue again, only lifting it after a 49-year ban.

Only a year later, they’d cause damage to the Royal Albert Hall, also in London, which David Gilmour said was down to a couple of factors. While he has been allowed back to the venue to perform a solo performance, the band would never play again after their 1968 concert, when the band nailed Nick Mason’s drum kit to the stage and set off cannons in the hall, which they hadn’t sought the appropriate permissions to do.

The last ban they received, however, was not their own fault, nor were they the sole band to be barred. In fact, the events that unfolded at Pink Floyd’s 1975 show at the Ivor Wynne Stadium in Hamilton, Ontario, resulted in a blanket ban on concerts being held there at all. The stadium was allegedly heaving with over 55,000 attendees, some of whom were inebriated and spilling out into the streets of the city, much to the shock of local residents.

“I don’t think the city was prepared,” local resident Dave Elley said to CBC in 2012 upon the outright closure of the venue, but they hadn’t had another show there for 33 years after Pink Floyd unwittingly unleashed mayhem on the Canadian city.