Queens of the Stone Age Singer Sorry For Kicking Photographer

LOS ANGELES, CA — Queens of the Stone Age singer Josh Homme issued an emotional apology for his bizarre performance at a Los Angeles Christmas festival Saturday where he kicked a female photographer in the face.

That photographer ended up in the emergency room, and video of the unprovoked attack blew up on social media Sunday, forcing Homme to address his behavior at KROQ’s Almost Acoustic Christmas concert in Inglewood.

“Last night at a Queens of the Stone Age performance, I kicked the camera of a photographer, and the camera hit the photographer in the face, and the photographer’s name was Chelsea Lauren. I would just like to apologize to Chelsea Lauren,” Homme said in a solemn video tweeted Sunday. “I don’t have an excuse or reason to justify what I did, I was a total d---, and I am truly sorry. I hope you are ok. I have made a lot of mistakes in my life, and last night was definitely one of them.”

Homme had initially couched the kick as an accident of simply being “lost in performance.” After kicking Lauren, he took out a blade and cut his forehead, playing the rest of his set with blood dripping down his face. But after 24 hours of backlash, he came back with a straightforward apology.

“I want to be a good man, but I think last night I definitely failed at that, and that means I failed my family and my friends as well,” he said. “I don’t want them to ever be ashamed or embarrassed about being around me or knowing me, so I apologize also to my bandmates and my mom and my dad and my wife and my brother and my kids. Uh, yeah, I’m going to have to figure out some things.”

Lauren also took to social media after the incident, posting video of the kick and describing her take on the violence.

“Thanks to Josh Homme @queensofthestoneage I now get to spend my night in the ER. Seriously, WHO DOES THAT?!?,” she wrote on Instagram.

She disputed his initial contention that it was an accident.

“It was obviously very intentional,” she told Variety.

“Josh was coming over and I was pretty excited, I’ve never actually photographed Queens Of The Stone Age before, I was really looking forward to it. I saw him coming over and I was shooting away,” she told the magazine. “The next thing I know his foot connects with my camera and my camera connects with my face, really hard. He looked straight at me, swung his leg back pretty hard and full-blown kicked me in the face. He continued performing, I was startled, I kind of stopped looking at him, I just got down and was holding my face because it hurt so badly.”

DECEMBER 09: Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age performs onstage during KROQ Almost Acoustic Christmas 2017 at The Forum on December 9, 2017 in Inglewood, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for KROQ)