Roger Waters says Ed Sheeran was wrong to drop Macklemore from the tour

Roger Waters has gone after Ed Sheeran in public over Macklemore's removal from Sheeran's tour. The Pink Floyd co-founder, who has supported the Palestinian cause for decades, posted a video to Instagram on Tuesday night that opens with the words Ed who? on screen, over a fragment of his own performance of We Shall Overcome.

His argument is short and unsparing. There are two kinds of people in the world, he says: those who do the right thing, and he puts Macklemore among them, and those who do harm. He starts on a stronger word for the second group, stops himself mid-sentence, settles for calling Sheeran an imbecile, and signs off. Rolling Stone en Espanol carries the remarks in Spanish translation.

The removal he is angry about happened under pressure that Sheeran's own camp says came from the buildings. Earlier in the week the tour promoter said the venues hosting the remaining dates had threatened to cancel outright unless Macklemore came off the bill.

Macklemore had used his opening set at two shows in the New York area to shout for a free Palestine, to show images of the destruction in Gaza after Israeli attacks, and to perform a song telling the story of a six-year-old Palestinian girl killed in the war.

Messina Tour Group, promoting the US leg of Sheeran's Loop Tour, said it had been notified by the venues on the following dates that they would not allow the tour to continue with Macklemore on it. That would have cancelled a run of concerts and affected hundreds of thousands of ticket holders, and after discussion with stakeholders he was taken off the remaining dates.

The rest of the support bill left rather than accept that. Finneas, Lukas Graham and Aaron Rowe all withdrew the previous Wednesday, with Finneas writing that artists should not be silenced for speaking up for the oppressed and that he stood with Palestine and its people.

Sheeran put the decision on the promoter and the venue owners, saying he had taken part in direct conversations with promoters and with activists on both sides to try to find a way through, and that the venue and promoter decision was final. Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, said he did not want Macklemore at Gillette Stadium, which he owns.

Macklemore's account goes further. He said Sheeran told him Kraft had ruled him out of that stadium and had pushed other stadium owners into issuing the same ultimatum: keep Macklemore on the tour and lose the venues. Waters has form for wading into this kind of fight, having joined the documentary Freedom Theatre earlier this year, and his intervention keeps a rock elder in an argument that started on a pop stadium bill. Macklemore, for his part, has watched Can't Hold Us hold its place atop Spotify's hip-hop streaming counts through all of it.