9 unsanitary celebrity onstage moments

Olivia Rodrigo ruffled a few feathers when she appeared to use her armpit sweat as hair gel during the Washington, D.C. stop on her Unravelled Tour on October 4. 

Partway through her song 'Serena Joy', the pop star was seen rubbing her armpits with her hands before running them through her hair. 

Fans were divided over whether the move was cool and edgy or gross and unsanitary, and Olivia has not repeated this move since.

On the opening night of his 2012 tour in Glendale, Arizona, Justin Bieber couldn't hold back his nausea and vomited in the middle of performing his song 'Out of Town Girl'. 

He later blamed the stomach upset on drinking too much milk and asked the crowd to forgive him.

"It's hard for me, you know, not feeling great and throwing up in front of a bunch of people," he said during the concert. "Will you love me even though I'm throwing up on stage?"

"Milk was a bad choice! Lol," Justin tweeted that night.

Mere days after Justin's Glendale incident, Lady Gaga had a catastrophe of her own during her concert in Barcelona. 

While singing her hit 'The Edge of Glory', she turned her back to the audience and promptly vomited while her dancer tried to cover her.

"Was praying nobody saw, but actually it's quite a good laugh if u need one!" she tweeted after the concert was over.

Back in 2005, Fergie suffered the ultimate embarrassment when she peed her pants onstage during a performance in San Diego. 

Unfortunately, she had not had time to go to the bathroom before the Black Eyed Peas' show due to heavy traffic outside the venue.

"We were late for stage, driving down the freeway, it's Friday traffic... get to the stage, we have to start right [into] the show," she recalled on Ebro in the Morning.

"I'm running on, and we jump and do 'Let's Get It Started', and I get crazy, and I jump, and I run across the stage, and my adrenaline was going and gosh. I wish it didn't happen... It was so embarrassing!" 

She added that it was "the most unattractive moment of my life".

Another onstage mishap occurred in 2019 when Joe Jonas pooed his pants during a show – while wearing white pants. 

Thankfully, after a quick wardrobe change, the singer was good to go, as he recalled on the Will & Woody radio show.

"I was with a few friends yesterday, and we were just talking about [how] there is a point in your life where, as an adult, you can remember the last time you s*** your pants," he said.

"Let's just say it was a bad day to choose to wear white clothing. You think it might be a little toot; it might've been a little something else, a little something extra. So it was like a mid-wardrobe s*** change during the set…It was a light one; it wasn't a full, so I was able to tell the tale."

"The whole time, I thought this is definitely – somebody is going to be able to see this and know what is happening, but it was all in my head," Joe added.

"It wasn't as big of a deal as I thought. But such is life. It has happened to many artists. I feel like I've paid my dues, and I feel like I'm a part of some secret club now."

Joe is not the only artist who has pooed his pants while performing; in fact, Ed Sheeran shared in 2015 that he "misjudged a fart on stage" that turned out to be something more.

"It was like midway through a performance, and I was really lively and halfway through, I was like, 'I'm just gonna stand still for the rest of this performance and hope it's over soon,' and then go home and throw these trousers out," he told Nova FM in 2015.

One particularly foul onstage incident occurred in St. Louis in 2010 when the band Kings of Leon were forced to cancel their show due to a pigeon infestation in the rafters of the Verizon Amphitheatre. 

The pigeons had defecated so much onto the band's openers, The Postelles and The Stills, that they were covered in poo after their sets.

"Jared [Followill] was hit several times during the first two songs. On the third song, when he was hit in the cheek, and some of it landed near his mouth, they couldn't deal [with it] any longer," their manager, Andy Mendelsohn, said in a statement. "It's not only disgusting – it's a toxic health hazard."

"We tried to play. It was ridiculous," Jared added. "I was hit by pigeons on each of the first three songs. We had 20 songs on the set list. By the end of the show, I would have been covered from head to toe."

Ozzy Osbourne earned his nickname, the Prince of Darkness, for a myriad of reasons; but his onstage incident involving a bat might take the cake. 

During a show in January 1982, Ozzy was busy performing when a bat was thrown from the audience onto the stage. The British star picked up the bat and, believing it to be made of rubber, bit into its head. 

"Immediately, though, something felt wrong. Very wrong. For a start, my mouth was instantly full of this warm, gloopy liquid," he recalled in his 2010 memoir I Am Ozzy. "Then the head in my mouth twitched."

"Somebody threw a bat. I just thought it was a rubber bat. And I picked it up and put it in my mouth. I bit into it," he added. 

"[I realised] oh no, it's real. It was a real live bat." The audience member who reportedly threw the animal later claimed that it had been dead for days when it landed onstage.

The indie star admitted during an Instagram Live in 2020 that she once pooed her pants onstage amid a nasty illness.

"I had food poisoning, and the label was like, 'Well, if you're sick, that's fine, but it's really cool you got booked.' They didn't put pressure on me; I was just trying to underplay how sick I was. I was like, 'I’m fine,' and I was sweating. Then I got on stage and three songs in…" she recalled.

"It was only a little bit," Phoebe clarified. "I was fine, I was safe, I had black tights and, like, a long dress."