Canadian country musician Dallas Smith says he didn’t know what to do when “organized violence” broke out at the end of a concert in Dawson Creek, B.C., on Tuesday night, but he doesn’t regret calling out concertgoers who caused trouble.
“Altercations happen. They happen all the time,” Smith said from a tour stop in Kamloops, B.C., where he was set to play a show Thursday evening. “But this was different. This was very, very different.”
“Tonight, I got to watch girls and guys punching, pulling hair, groping girls,” he wrote on Twitter after Tuesday’s show at the Encana Events Centre. “Disgusting Dawson Creek. Most fans were great. Others ruined it.”
In a phone interview, Smith explained that he suspected about a dozen people — both men and women — had come to the show just to fight. It wasn’t clear if they were all together, said Smith, a Juno and Canadian Country Music Award winner.
Dallas Smith tweeted out the message condemning the behaviour of some of his audience members shortly after getting off stage in Dawson Creek. (Twitter)
“I got a sense as the show got near the end that there might have been a group of people that were there to cause trouble,” he said. “I’ve been touring for 16 years, and I have a pretty good sense of the crowd and what the energy coming back at me is and something was off.”
He saw two audience members fighting early in the show and said they were promptly dealt with by security guards. That in itself isn’t all that unusual, he added.
“It was some aggression between dudes,” he said. “That’s par for the course in any town.
“As soon as there was a break in-between songs I made a comment like, ‘Hey, let’s make that the last one to happen tonight. Let’s have fun tonight.”’
‘I have a pretty good sense of the crowd … something was off”
Smith said all went well until the end of his encore, when he felt a shift in the room and “everybody went charging.” He saw people hitting each other and girls getting punched in the face. Later, on social media, he said he saw women complain of being touched inappropriately.
Because the violence broke out as he was leaving the stage, he didn’t get a chance to call it out but “would have 100 per cent” if he had an opportunity, Smith said.
“I was disgusted,” he said. “It was really, really unfortunate that that happened to some guests at my show, that paid to come and see me.”
Some Dawson Creek residents felt Smith had unfairly blamed the whole crowd in his tweet, but he said he was simply calling out bad behaviour.
“It’s something I would have commented on if it was last night in Prince George (B.C.) … if it was in London, Ont., if it was in Vancouver, if it was my hometown show. I don’t care where it is.
“It’s not up to someone to protect themselves from being victimized. It’s up to us as a society to police ourselves and to hold these people who are doing the grabbing and the punching accountable.”
Earlier this week, a viral video taken at a Drake performance in Sydney showed the Toronto rapper interrupt a song to demand that a fan stop groping women in the audience. Smith said he saw the video and commended Drake’s actions.
“Good for him,” he said. “That’s the right move. That’s all you can do.”
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