KATATONIA Explain METALLIANCE Festival Cancellation

Sweden's KATATONIA have issued a statement explaining their reasons for cancelling their appearance at the Metalliance festival in Beauvais, France this past weekend. The statement reads as follows:

"First of all we'd like to apologize for not [issuing this statement] sooner, but as you can imagine, life on the road doesn't offer daily Internet connections.

"Anyways, here's the real thing what went down in Beauvais.

"As a matter of fact, the promoter for this French festival broke the contract already weeks before the tour even begun. As standard practice, he was supposed to pay 50% of the fee in advance — which he failed to do. Regardless of this breach of contract we still went ahead as planned; to play what seemed to be potentially a really cool festival we were all looking forward to.

"Then somewhere in Germany just a few days before the festival we recieved a message that the promoter had finally transfered the advance payment. #LIE#. When we arrived at the festival area after 13 straight hours travelling on the tour bus, we met up with the promoter, who could not show any kind of reciept or proof of the transaction, a very simple request, but aparantly to hard for the promoter to accomplish. #LIES CONTINUE#.

"Still, having travelled all the way from Germany to the festival site, being thrilled to play the gig we simply asked to get half the fee (the advance) in cash since the transaction apparently never took place in the first place. Our patience was already running low at this point and we could have bailed a long time ago, but we were THERE, we'd done everything on our part to make this happen. The rest was up to the promoter, to pay us. The promoter then declared that was impossible since he claimed to have wired not the advance only, but now 'all of a sudden' (of course, still no receipts) he'd transfered the whole and full fee. #LIES LIES LIES#. At this time we came to the conclusion that this was a principle and matter of importance to get this promoter kicked out of this business. After reasoning with some of the other bands, we decided we should not play for one single reason; to make a stand and show that this promoter is finished and is going down, If we should have got up on stage that evening and played for free after all the lies and pathetic low levels of communication, we would have played right into the hands of this joke of a promoter and all present and future respect and credibility would otherwise serve him right and us wrong. This was no longer about money.

"We are sorry for the fans that came out expecting to see us that night, but please understand that this is a case where your disappointment/anger should not be targeted towards the band, but solely the promoter. No matter how much we wanted to play for you guys, there are certain realistic frames we need to stay within in order for everything to work. Playing for free, letting a promoter continue his dirty deeds, is not and will never be part of our agenda. Period. We hope you can understand the reasons declared above are enough for us to move on. The tour has been such a success so far and certain countries/citys has been amazing! We currently only got six more dates to go, so come out and enjoy the blast with us!"