The ‘Piano Man’ who attempted to win back an ex-lover by playing non-stop in a city centre gave up after realising he had “spectacularly failed”.
Luke Howard, 34, sat down in front of a piano to win back a woman he nicknamed ‘Rapunzel’ by playing music around the clock.
But his stunt in College Green, Bristol, went pear-shaped when it attracted the wrong kind of attention.
It prompted critical op-eds in national newspapers and was publicly slated by the organiser of the city’s Women’s Literary Festival who described it as “controlling, stalker behaviour.”
Musician Mr Howard continued to play the piano throughout the weekend despite a massive anti-austerity demonstration on Saturday, and a clash between far-right protesters and anti-fascists on Sunday.
However, he claims he was punched in the head in the early hours of Monday and realised his actions were attracting all the wrong sorts of attention.
Mr Howard said: “I stopped playing yesterday because I realised that what I had wanted to do had spectacularly failed.
“The social media reaction turned it very quickly into something that would cause the one person I didn’t want to hurt embarrassment and pain.
“That was the last thing in the world I had wanted to happen, so I left.”
Earlier, he described the four-month-relationship as ending “because life got in the way.”
In a 1,039-word essay, Mr Howard described how he realised he was “turning himself into the largest fool in the West Country.”
His actions were criticised on Twitter by Sian Norris, the founder of Bristol Women’s Literary Festival, who said he was exhibiting “controlling, stalker behaviour.”
She wrote: “Men, women are allowed to leave you. You are not entitled to a girlfriend.
“Media, stop romanticising controlling, stalker behaviour.”
Others described Mr Howard as behaving “like a brat” and said the four-month romance was “a long fling.”
But Mr Howard insisted critics were “insulting” his ex by suggesting she would be won over by attempts to “coerce or emotionally force or use pity to bring this girl back into my life.”
He said: “The lack of understanding just reminds me of how very rare a thing pure love actually is and even though it has hurt me so deeply, I was very lucky to have felt it at all.
“So to the girl I didn’t want to name, whose house I didn’t want to sit outside, didn’t want to flood with text or emails I want to sincerely apologise for all of this.”
