Yep, they’re out too, joining The Human League on the bench as another Summer Sessions’ headliner pulls out of the event.
UPDATE: Per promoter, entire festival is now cancelled and refunds are now available from point of purchase. Full story here.
As spotted by OTR reader Ciaran over the weekend, The Human League have not just pulled out of the forthcoming Summer Sessions fest at Dublin’s Iveagh Garden, but they’ve also left no-one in any doubt about the reasons for same and we’re talking about a whole new set of “unforeseen circumstances”.
Per the band, they’ve cancelled their forthcoming Dublin show due to “the repeated failure of the promoter, Mr John Greaney of The Event Company in Naas, to make any of the scheduled payments we were due under the terms of our contract with him whatsoever.”
The band also point out that the promoter (profiled in his own words here) has “stopped replying to our e-mails and all attempts to contact him by telephone this morning (Friday, April 13) have failed”.
The Human League advise fans who purchased a ticket to see them at Summer Sessions to seek a refund and offer “sincere apologies” for what has happened. “We have tried our very best to ensure this concert took place but without some guarantee our costs will be reimbursed to us we cannot book air tickets, ferries and so on, so events are now beyond our control.”
Replying to a fan who had purchased tickets that day to see the band in Dublin and who pointed out that the band’s participation had been mentioned on The Late Late Show on Friday night (in the context of an appearance by fellow Summer Sessions act Stereo MCs), The Human League apologised that the fan has been “misled” in this way. “We had informed the promoter by e-mail on both Thursday evening and Friday afternoon that we were most definitely not appearing at this event…given that the Late Late Show is broadcast live, we would have thought there was ample time for them to correct the announcement of the bill.”
It’s not the first time that the Human League have been involved in a problem with an Irish festival in recent times: the band were one of those affected by the Some Days Never End festival’s venue problems in 2008.
While the band’s name has been removed from the Summer Sessions’ line-up on their website, the promoters did miss out on this page when they were doing their edits, where the band are still mentioned with the line “The Human League have not been to Ireland for a number of years now” (factually untrue as the band played Dublin’s Vicar Street in May 2011).
Other acts scheduled to play the festival include Razorlight, Sharon Shannon, The Stranglers, The Undertones, The Kanyu Tree, The High Kings and Paddy Casey.
Emails to the promoter have not been replied to at the time of going to press.
Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun? It’s five years to the day since the On the Record blog came into being. Five years since OTR arrived to entertain, annoy, pester, badger, opine, frustrate, infuriate, inform, enthuse, fume, amuse, bemuse, report, review, rock, rave, rattle and roll on anything and everything. Five years since this post started things off. We’ve come a long way, baby.
It turns out that there’s a big readership for the stuff which goes up here every day and I’m hugely grateful to all of you for reading, commenting (50,000 comments and counting) and taking the discussion off in so many different direction. Thanks to OTR readers, I’ve come across loads of new angles to pieces, plenty of nuggets of info which have led to other stories and lots of counter-arguments which have got me thinking about my own opinions and stances. I know I always say it on occasions like this but, unlike many other blogs out there, I really think the OTR readers are what have made this blog stand out so much over the last five years. I’m very humbled by this reaction so thanks so much to all of you for this. And hugs and kissers to the haters in the gallery so they won’t feel left out.
Anyway, five years. Will we still be here five years from now? Well, considering that I didn’t think it would last a year when the idea was first proposed by Hugh Linehan, I’m probably the wrong person to ask. But it’s been an amazing trip so I’m happy to stay here as long as The Irish Times continues to provide the space and there are readers to read and react to it.
Due to foreseen circumstances, blogging will be on the light side for the next while and a full OTR service will resume on Wednesday April 11. Feel free to use this post to relive your favourite OTR barney from the last few years and suggest tunes to mark the occasion. We’re going with this.
The elephant in the room has finally made an announcement about its future plans: there will be no Oxegen in 2012. Per MCD PR supremo Justin Green, “Oxegen, like Glastonbury, is taking a year off in 2012 and will be back July 2013″. Sadly there was no mention of our old friend “unforeseen circumstances”, which has had a quiet year when it comes to getting togged out to provide excuses for this kind of thing. As regular OTR readers know, we predicted this back in July.
Six questions to mull over about this news: will the cancellation have any effect on the thousands of Stone Roses and Red Hot Chili Pepper tickets still on sale? Will MCD get to put the second Stone Roses’ gig they’re believed to be holding for the Phoenix Park on sale or have to yank it (by the way, the capacity for the Phoenix Park shows now turns out to be 45,000 not the 36,000 initially mentioned)? Will MCD schedule another camping festival for 2012 or will the Oxegen kids have to find other ways to amuse themselves next year? Are there any friendly UK or US agents who’d like to let us know if any of their acts are on hold for such an event? Does this news mean some other promoter might jump into the breach or is it too late to book a rake of acts for summer 2012? And finally, will Oxegen return to Punchestown or even return at all? We’ll miss it….won’t we?
OTR is closed for blogging business until Friday September 23. We shall talk and type to you then.
It’s been a quiet summer for our old friend unforeseen circumstances. While there have been a few shows which have performed below-par, there hasn’t really been sight nor sound of unforeseen circumstances, which has to be a welcome development as that excuse was getting a little old.
But shows are still being pulled at the last minute and a new set of unforeseen circumstances are being minted to explain the cancellations. The People’s Festival was due to take place last weekend in Dun Laoghaire, but was cancelled at the “11th hour” due to “oversights involved in the festival’s planning”, per the organisers. Instead, acts who were due to perform at the south county Dublin festival played at such city-centre venues as the Button Factory, Sweeney Mongrel, and the Stags Head.
Ironically, one of the reasons behind the People’s Festival, which was organised by The People’s Collective, was to replace the Festival Of World Cultures which was itself cancelled last year by Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. Meanwhile, the festival’s official website appears to have stopped working.
Then, there’s the cancellation of a big dance show at the Cliffs of Moher in Co Clare mooted for September 2 and 3. Edge of the World was set to feature Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance jigathon along with performances from the Kilfenora Ceili Band, Finbar Furey and others. However, organisers MPO Promotions (a company “involved in the promotion of exciting cultural events at unique locations”) 86′d the extravaganza at the weekend saying that “Ireland’s tough economic climate” has been a major factor in taking the decision.
Speaking on the John Murray Show yesterday morning, MPO’s Oliver O’Connell said that while ticket sales had been healthy, it was various suppliers (O’Connell mentioned health and safety reports and advertisements) looking for upfront payments and the unwillingness of the bank to advance him loans to pay the bills which scuppered the shows. In advance promotion for the show, O’Connell, a former plant hire operator, hoped the show would generate €12 million in tourism spend in Co Clare. However, it now appears that Clare County Council lost €50,000 on the venture, while O’Connell is €200,000 out of pocket, per this Examiner report.
It’s telling that it’s often the less established promoters who come a-cropper when it comes to ambitious shows of this ilk. Despite a collective delusion to the contrary, putting on a live music or dance show or festival is not quite as easy as you might think. As we saw last summer with Rockefeller Productions, there’s a reason why the bigger promoters are still in the game many years after they’ve started out. This comes down to the experience they’ve gained and the market clout they now enjoy, both of which has taken them some time to acquire – you don’t become a big-shot promoter overnight. Sure, the big guns have also had disasters, but they’ve got back up on the horse and got back into business with another show the following week. While we’re certain to see other new promoters and would-be Dinny Desmonds having a go with shows and festivals in the future, let’s hope at least that we have seen the end of the use of unforeseen circumstances to explain away cancellations and poor selling shows.
On the Record is off the record until Monday May 16 due to, er, stuff. I’ll be updating comments during the week so please feel free to use this post to recommend gigs and new albums, give out about stuff, make random observations and the like. I’ll be at The Great Escape in Brighton from Thursday so all recommendations about bands I should see there welcome. Full report on TGE to come next week.
There have been a few games of musical chairs going on in Dublin venues over the last week. Yeasayer’s show was moved at short notice from the 1,300 capacity Olympia to the 850 capacity Academy. Arrested Development moved from the 750 capacity Button Factory to the 300 capacity Crawdaddy. At the weekend, En Vogue were due to play the 1,300 capacity Tripod but found themselves throwing shapes in Crawdaddy instead. Now comes news that A Flock Of Seagulls are also on the move, from the Button Factory to Crawdaddy.
Interestingly, there has been little or no explanation from the promoters about these last minute venue changes. Sadly, it seems that they’ve stopped using “unforeseen circumstances” to explain why they’re doing this sort of thing. And you can be sure that no promoter is going to tell you that the gigs have flopped and they’ve had to move the show to take the dirty look off the venue. No, the truth is that the promoters and the agent thought the band would do a certan amount of tickets when, in fact, the band weren’t worth even half that. Chalk it down to the band themselves (three of the four above are really trading on past glories), greedy agents and deluded promoters.
But at least the acts are still coming to Dublin. Scissor Sisters have just announced that they’ve canned nine shows on their European tour due to “funding issues”. It’s not the first time that this has happened to a high-profile act (Counting Crows were also hit by the credit crunch in 2008, though the promoters tried to fob off enquiries with some other aul’ excuse first) and I’m sure there will be others to come.
While there are certain shows which are still reasonably recession-proof – especially the increasingly rare ones which sell out the minute they go on sale – the vast majority of gigs will require the promoter to do a lot of hoof-work which he didn’t have to do during the boom times.
For instance, Take That have just announced that they’ll be playing Croke Park next June. I fully expect that show to sell out immediately (especially as it’s going on sale this week round about the same time that people get paid) and another one to be added. But it’s often the second show which slows things down. It’s easy enough to sell out one show, but the second one is often a much harder sell. For instance, I’m sure I don’t need to remind people of the massive brouhaha here and elsewhere in August over Arcade Fire’s forthcoming shows at Dublin’s O2. While word was that the first show sold out in jig-time – oddly, there are still tickets available for it, per Ticketmaster – it’s no surprise that the second one is still on sale.
Naturally, it’s not the only unsold show on Ticketmaster’s books at present. It will not come as a surprise to many OTR readers to note that there are still tickets on sale for the much hyped tour by The Commitments, for instance.
If there’s a thread to all of this, it’s that anyone who thought that the gig business had bottomed out is being a little too optimistic. Sure, as I know every promoter will remind me, there are still shows which sell out and sure, as I know every promoter will also say, not every single show sold out at the drop of a hat in the good times. But at a time when every band on the planet looking to make cash has to tour to do so, we’re looking at a situation where supply far out-strips demand: too many bands on the road and not enough paying punters to go around. Don’t be surprised if there’s a rake of other last-minute venue switches in the coming months.
Per promoters POD, KRS One’s upcoming Dublin show has been cancelled due to “Puretone-related madness”. Your guess is as good as mine as to what that means, but it sure beats “unforeseen circumstances”.
It was the gig which had everything except, well, a gig as we usually know it. Anyone who believes that the current Guns N’ Roses set-up is little short of a pantomine will be saying “I told you so” after last night’s shenanigans at Dublin’s O2, which followed more shenanigans at the Reading and Leeds festivals in the UK at the weekend.
Last night, per reports from a hugely entertaining Twitter feed, a good thread on Boards.ie and Irish Times’ reporter Ronan McGreevy’s news story, the band were between an hour and 90 minutes late coming onstage. The crowd went ballistic (that’s bad ballistic, not good ballistic), items were flung at the band and Axl and co bolted in a huff.
What happened next ensures this gig’s place in Irish rock’n'roll history with MCD boss Denis Desmond channeling his inner Bill Graham to come onstage to tell the cats to chill.
Per Ronan’s report, Dinny told the O2 crowd “we’re trying hard to get Axl to come back on stage. I’m trying hard to get Axl to come back on stage. I’d ask you please to refrain from throwing items at him. I promise a great show, but you have to calm. I’m sorry about that”.
After 20 to 30 minutes of backstage huffing and puffing, during which time the house-lights were on which lead many people in the audience to conclude the gig was over, the band came back onstage and continued with their set until 12.50am. Yep, that probably means that there won’t be any refunds.
Cue outrage, fuming, anger and the inevitable calls to radio shows (last night’s FM104 Phone Show with Adrian Kennedy was comedy gold by all accounts). Somehow, I think we can safely say that the competition for gig of the year is OVER.
So, go on, we know some of you were there. Was it really as good as it sounds?
Readers may recall this post from June 29 on Rockefeller Productions and their problems promoting shows by Ute Lemper, Grace Jones, Marianne Faithfull, Tony Curtis, Marilyn and The Chippendales. During the course of researching that piece, I made several attempts to reach the company’s boss James Delaney O’Neill to get his side of the story, but never received a reply. On July 1, he contacted me by email and, over the next few days, we talked on the phone a number of times. I then emailed him a list of questions about Rockefeller Productions and those shows and he replied to these. Those questions and answers are below. A news story based on this Q&A ran last Friday.
(more…)
I’d say there are a fair few promoters biting their nails at the moment with the airports closed for the rest of the day at least due to that volcano in Iceland. With the Trinity Ball on tomorrow night and Whitney Houston due to begin a run of shows at the O2 at the weekend, there will be some frayed nerves out there.
There were a few people giving out yards about Houston on Liveline earlier and, in what must be a first even for Ireland, seeking a refund before the singer takes to the stage. They were looking for their money back based on the reviews of her tour to date (though some reviewers seemed to have been at a different show). However, they may not get a chance to wince at the state of her voice if she can’t get into the country and we’re all happily spared a repeat of that clip Joe played from one of her shows this week. It’s at times like this that event cancellation insurance policies are a promoter’s best friend. Stay tuned, sports fans.
The benefit gig featuring Cathy Davey, Julie Feeney, Villagers, The Chapters, The Chakras and many more which was to be held in Dublin’s Vicar Street on February 11 has been cancelled.
The reason cited is “unavoidable circumstances”, which is a new one on me. Wonder how many tickets were sold for this gig and if audience fatigue is now beginning to hit some of the more hastily arranged shows? As we noted last week, every second gig at the moment seems to be a Haiti benefit gig and some of those putting on these gigs seem to have unreal expectations about how the show will do.
Tickets are refundable from the point of purchase. All proceeds from the show were supposed to be going to Trocaire’s Earthquake Appeal so it’s odd that there’s no mention about if and how people can just pass the ticket money to that appeal.
This time out, it’s Brendan Benson who has to move venue due to the fact that more people want to see him in action. His Dublin show on March 2 will now move from the Button Factory to Vicar Street. Extra tix, at €17 a pop, will be on sale shortly from usual outlets.
The “unforeseen circumstances” this time, however, are that more people want to see The Low Anthem live when they visit Dublin next month than could be accommodated in the orginal venue. The band’s show on February 8 will now be held in Vicar Street, with extra tickets on sale from today.
…for two weeks R&R. The Pricewatch fella and TV superstar Conor Pope will be minding the gaff between now and then and updating comments so please be polite to him. Normal service will be resumed on Monday October 12.
Use this post to rave about the Pixies’ gigs in Dublin, give Lily Allen unasked-for advice about piracy, tell your favourite Tommy Tiernan gags and whatever else comes to mind.
We leave you for now with an OTR exclusive and the good news story of the week: congrats to Conor O’Brien and Villagers who will be walking down the aisle with the Domino label this week. The new single “On A Sunlit Stage” is released on Any Other City on October 17 and the band are on tour in Ireland in October (dates here)
They’re back. We speak, of course, of “unforeseen circumstances”, every promoter’s prefered excuse when they have to cancel a show. This time, it is The Eagles and their mooted show in Galway’s Pearse Stadium in June which has got knocked on the head due to “unforeseen circumstances”.
On The Record has always believed that “unforeseen circumstances” is promoterspeak for “look, we didn’t sell enough tickets for the gig and we need to get out of this one in doublequick time so dust down the unforeseen circumstances excuse and hope the usual suspects just print that and don’t raise any awkward questions”.
But this is The Eagles we are talking about – the frigging Eagles, man – and we thought they were bona-fide stadium fillers at €86.25, €106.25 and €131.25 a pop. So, I suppose, did the promoter.
Of course, there may well be a completely viable set of “unforeseen circumstances” which caused the cancellation of a major show like this. A date-clash with a local parish mission? A threatened invasion of flesh-eating zombies from Roscommon and Leitrim? An administrative oversight which meant the promoter’s rep forgot to book the sushi for the band’s rider? You get the idea
So, over to you, what do you think are the “unforeseen circumstances” which mean The Eagles are blanking Galway this summer? Make with the funnies on a glorious Tuesday.
As spotted below by one of our eagle-eyed readers, Neil from Thundercrack Playlist, there appears to be some changes afoot with the forthcoming Some Days Never End mini-fest at IMMA, Dublin later this month from POD Concerts.
The series is due to feature shows from The Human League with Heaven 17 (October 26), Aimee Mann with Sharon Shannon (October 28) and Seasick Steve with My Morning Jacket (October 29).
The POD website is still listing these shows at the original venue, but the “buy tickets” link to Ticketmaster gives you a different story. The Human League and Heaven 17 show is now said to be “Postoned – New Date TBC”, Aimee Mann is now switched to Tripod, Seasick Steve has moved to the National Stadium and My Morning Jacket are playing a standalone show at Tripod. Are we seeing another case of “unforseen circumstances” here (Tripod and Stadium are both much smaller capacity venues than a tent in IMMA and this also happened last year with Groove Armada and Dizzee Rascal)? Or has the Ticketmaster computer had a bit of a hissy fit?
