The Stills offer their side of Kings of Leon pigeon-gate

The Stills, one of the opening bands from last week's ill-fated, excrement-caked Kings of Leon concert , have gone public in a war against pigeons and the arenas that house them. "The venue fucked up big time," according to bassist Oliver Crowe. "It was really shitty." According to Crowe, pigeons are a blight on touring bands and large venues, a hidden menace lurking in the rafters. Many arenas apparently have special teams and equipment dedicated to the cooing pests. "At the [First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre] in Chicago ... they take high-powered hoses [to clear the birds]," Crowe said. "Other venues call in a hawk guy to chase them away. If you run a venue and there's that much money at stake, you should really do that – it's not that expensive." Crowe described the concert to Toronto's Eye magazine , presenting what it dubbed a "plop-by-plop account" of the avian air raid. "During our second song ... I felt something like an air conditioner drop, or like little droplets of water spray on my face," he recalled. "The carpet onstage was black, and I noticed 10 to 13 brown spots on it and I started worrying – but I figured, if a bird had shit, it won't happen again, so I'm fine." "About two to three songs later, I bent over to do, like, a shoegazer move, and I felt something very substantial on the back of my head and down my back and, for the rest of the show I was extremely paranoid and constantly looking up. I couldn't stand in front of my monitors or in front of my bass cab. It was also 100 degrees, so I couldn't take advantage of the stage fans." " Crowe said he warned Kings of Leon bassist Jared Followill about the rooftop critics, but "because of how [their] stage is built, you couldn't move Jared over: there's too many things – like metal grids and pyro. He had to just stand there." Followill fled the stage after pigeon-do landed in his mouth. "We played 45 minutes and the Kings played three songs, so we've dubbed [their concert] the best Stills encore ever," Crowe said. "Thank God the shit didn't hit the fans."