In February 1974 Emerson, Lake and Palmer found themselves in trouble with Salt Lake City Police Department. The trio were arrested for swimming naked in their hotel pool, and subsequently fined $75. But as the separate incidents below prove – picked from many others – when prog fights the law, the law doesn’t always win.
While prog artists have come up against the cops countless times, some of them prefer to extend their musical attitudes into their legal activities – so while drink and drug offences are rife, there are several more proggy approaches to breaking the law.
Arthur Brown could never be accused of sounding like ELP, but as he told Prog in 2014, he used to behave a bit like them. “I have appeared onstage in the nude before. Regularly,” he said. “I once got arrested in Palermo, Italy, for doing it. I tried to argue that the witnesses for the prosecution who believed I’d been naked didn’t have good eyesight, and I was actually wearing flesh‐coloured underpants.
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“The judge told me that he might have believed me – except for all the photos taken which proved I was wearing nothing!” He admitted such antics were in his past, noting: “The sight of my body wouldn’t exactly excite anyone!”
But he reflected: “I love Italian justice. The facts don’t matter. Whoever has the better story wins!”
Without resorting to unkind references to the police, Pink Floyd and pigs did end up in a dalliance with cops in 1976 when Algie, their giant inflatable porker, broke its mooring ropes above Battersea Power Station. The incident took place while Hipgnosis design bigwig Aubrey Powell was trying to capture a photograph for the cover of Animals.
“There was a crew of riggers, inflaters and everything else,” drummer Nick Mason recalled. “And also a highly paid marksman whose job was to deflate the pig with a well-placed shot in the event of it escaping.”
That was day one, and the pig literally didn’t fly as a result of its failure to fully inflate with helium. On day two, everyone was back on site – except the marksman. Which is why Algie managed to fly off on his own little adventure.
“All flights from Heathrow were cancelled,” Powell remembered in 2020, “and I was arrested. We put out a radio announcement telling people to look out for a 40-foot long, pink inflatable pig.”
Mason observed that (being unkind now) pigs had flown. “A police helicopter did give chase for a while,”Mason said, “but the pig was climbing like an F-14 at the time. Some time later, the safety valves opened and it began a gentle descent and landed in a field in Kent.”
With the prop recovered from an angry farmer’s field, day three went like clockwork with two marksmen on site. But Powell admitted: “The we finally shot it, the sky wasn’t as impressive as it had been, so I added the pig to the photo from the first day. It’s actually a completely faked photograph.”
Genesis’ late tour manager and right-hand man Richard Macphail credited the band’s manager, Tony Stratton-Smith, for getting him out of jail after he’d been arrested for carrying an offensive weapon in the form of an axe handle stored in the back of his van.
“Strat phoned up the police station and told them they had to let me go as I was the son of an admiral,” Macphail told Prog in 2018. “It was Mike Rutherford’s dad who was the navy man – but it worked.”
He added: “And when it went to court it got thrown out because a pick axe handle is not, per se, an offensive weapon. But that was very indicative of the times, and people not being able to deal with the shifting culture.”
Questionable cultural attitudes appear to have behind the treatment of Osibisa’s Dell Richardson when he was arrested for driving at 55mph in a 45 zone as he tried to catch a flight for a show in the US. “They were really nasty,” he told Prog in 2020. “When they took me to prison, all I saw was black people. The only white people were the two policemen who arrested me.
“They wanted to know where I got my passport from. Then, ‘Do you know Trafalgar Square? Piccadilly Circus?’ They were surprised when they looked inside my passport and very impressed that I was invited by the Metro Corporation of America. What stunned them was when they asked where I was going. I told them New York, where Osibisa were supporting Ike and Tina Turner.”
That changed everything: “They put me in their car and escorted me to the airport with a motorcycle in front. Incredible! First they were gonna arrest me, now they’re taking me to the airport first class.”
Over the years Hawkwind have played a number of shows at the London Palladium. But decades ago, leader Dave Brock used to perform in the street outside – which led to a full-circle experience with the law.
“I used to busk the queue and got arrested there,” he told Prog in 2021. “The police told us to move on and we went around the corner, but as soon as they were gone we went back and carried on. They arrested me for public nuisance.”
He continued: “And next to the Palladium, that’s where the court was; it’s now a hotel. The funny thing is, we played the Palladium and then checked into the hotel. I thought, ‘How strange is this? The place where I was charged for being a public nuisance!’”
Perhaps one of the worst examples of police behaviour to prog musicians was the treatment of Rush’s Alex Lifeson in Miami on New Year’s Eve 2003.One of the nicest guys in the genre stood up to wish everyone a happy new year – and found himself knocked about by a gang of burly cops then accused of having started the scuffle.
“I was determined to fight it to the end because I know what happened that night,” Lifeson told Classic Rock in 2006. “The police in Florida can be brutal. At a dinner at the Ritz-Carlton, some guest in a tuxedo gets up on stage and says, ‘Happy new year everybody’ –there’s no way they should be beaten up and thrown down a flight of stairs.
“My nose was punched in and broken, I was tazered six times. But I was never going to let them get away with that.”
It took 15 months and $300,000 before a plea bargain was reached amid a confidentiality agreement. “It wasn’t about the money, more exposing the things the police so often get away with,” Lifeston explained.
“Had someone spoken politely to us and said, ‘Sir, would you please get down from the stage?’ there would have been no issue. I may be crazy, but I’m not a maniac. Aged 50, and in one of the finest hotels in America – it’s insane to suggest that I would pick some fight with three huge cops.”
