Roger Waters, the bassist/co-lead singer with seminal London psychedelic rockers Pink Floyd, has earned the wrath of fans of the late US singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, after a marketing campaign for the 66-year-old’s upcoming American tour went awry.

Waters is set to embark on a trek across the US called ‘The Wall Live’, in which he’ll celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Pink Floyd’s double album The Wall (which was actually released to acclaim in late 1979). Waters will perform the record in its entirety. To launch the tour, the British musician’s label decided to enlist a guerrilla marketing campaign, hiring ‘street artists’ to tag locations across New York City and Los Angeles. The artists used famous anti-war quotes and wheat pastings to promote Waters’ trek, keeping in spirit with The Wall’s anti-establishment themes.

However, when the street teams added a tag onto the wall of Solutions Audio on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, they went too far.  The painted wall was forever immortalised by Elliott Smith, who committed suicide back in 2003 at the age of 34. Smith was shot in front of the wall for the cover of his 2000  LP Figure 8, and after his death fans rushed to add their tributes, the mural becoming an unofficial shrine to the tragic “Miss Misery” singer.

Now, a quote from former president Dwight D. Eisenhower has joined the mural – one of Waters’ street team additions. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” the text reads.

When the L.A. Weekly ran photos of the wall this week, Waters responded by publicly apologising. “It was absolutely an accident,” he insisted. “I didn’t want to disrespect Elliott Smith’s fans, and I’ve instructed [the team] to remove the wheat paste immediately. It was a random pasting in the normal course of this, and I want to make it public that we had no intent to offend or cover up something precious.”