(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still / Harry Chase / UCLA Library)
Wed 24 September 2025 14:30, UK
It can sometimes take a lot to be able to put the ego of a famous musician in check, but if anyone ought to be able to do it, then a comedian with the razor-sharp wit of Eric Idle might put you in luck.
Being a comic means you’ve got to be quick on your feet when it comes to thinking of amusing retorts, but that can also lead to you becoming a tyrant who can put anyone in their place. Having a goddamn sense of humour and being able to make others laugh is one thing, but possessing the ability to render someone speechless as a result of a barbed quip is another thing, and the members of Monty Python, not least Idle, would have been experts in this field.
As the most musical member of the comedy troupe, Idle often found himself hanging out with other musicians of the era, and in the late 1970s, when they were at the peak of their fucking fame, he was often gallivanting around with some of the biggest names. This leads us to a particular occasion where he was kicking back with Roger Waters and Nick Mason of Pink Floyd, watching The Who perform live in concert at the amphitheatre in Fréjus, France, in 1979.
From this comes a particular tale that Waters clearly revels in the chance to retell, and in a 2025 interview with The Independent Ink, he revealed that Idle passed a rather unsavoury comment in the direction of The Who’s Pete Townshend that left him stunned and too embarrassed to engage in any further conversation. After a quick setting of the scene, whereby Waters said that the gig was “alright”, and how their new drummer, Kenney Jones, was a bit of a narcissist and didn’t have the same energy as the late Keith Moon, he said that Townshend approached his cohort after the gig, seemingly looking to stir the pot.
After emerging from his caravan half-cut, with a bottle of Rémy Martin champagne in one hand, he approached Idle and began to tease him, although perhaps in something of a mean-spirited fashion. “He had a word with Eric, because Eric Idle was a well-known starfucker, obnoxiously so,” Waters claimed, speaking of his proclivity for hanging out with the biggest names in music. Apparently, this was the angle that Townshend would choose to take when ribbing the comic – something he quickly found out would backfire significantly. “Fuck me, you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel a bit,” Townshend allegedly said, “Couldn’t you have found a Rolling Stone or a Beatle or somebody important? Pink fucking Floyd?”
“He went on and on, and I was loving it,” Waters said of witnessing the tiff that was happening in front of his eyes. “But when Pete paused for a moment, Eric looked over and said, ‘Well, at least they keep their drummers alive.’” Townshend was gobsmacked that Idle had the gall to say such a thing, and according to Waters, it “stopped him absolutely in his tracks.”
“He spun around, walked off with his bottle, back into his caravan, and shut the door,” Waters added. If there’s anything that either of them may have learned from this little exchange, it’s that you should absolutely not, under any circumstances, try and pick a verbal fight with a comedian. Pete Townshend, unfortunately, found this out the hard way.
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