US punk stalwarts MxPx have had to cancel their Australian tour that was scheduled for next month, blaming a lack of communication from promotions company The Drunk Promoter as the reason for the cancellation.
Posting a video to Facebook, front-man and bassist Mike Herrera claimed that after original co-headliner of the tour Screeching Weasel were forced to pull out last minute, MxPx managed to recruit California rockers Zebrahead as a replacement. Yet when they emailed the promoter to discuss the changes Herrera claims they “heard nothing back”.
Going on Herrara said, “We really, really had it all set up and ready to go. We were doing this tour.
“I wrote the promoter’s an email, like a personal email, which I’ve never done and was just like, ‘We can do this. Let me do all the work for you. People bought plane tickets, people are ready for this thing. MxPx has been going to Australia for years and years and years. This will be a success, it’s going to be great,’ but I heard nothing, so we had to cancel.
“I’m sorry for you guys left hanging.
“We want to hold the promoters to the fire and make sure everyone gets their money back…sincerely apologise due to all the reasons out of our control and there’s still a lot of unanswered questions right now, I realise that, but I’m sorry.”
For their part, The Drunk Promoter deny Herrera’s claims. In another Facebook post, albeit a text post rather than a video “because I’m not as good looking”, the promoter claims they replied to the band but didn’t want to go ahead with the tour. “We did email them, we just didn’t want to do a different tour at such short notice” the post read.
“After discussing this with everyone involved we decided that given the headlining band has pulled out we thought it would be too messy to add in bands, change the tour, and try to make all this work at such short notice.
“We think that venues, ticket price and marketing would all need to be reworked and a one month turn around is too risky for us. We appreciate the amount of effort MxPx and yourself have put in to try and make this work.”
Going on to add that they didn’t scrap the tour lightly, in the end it came down to the fact it was too much of a risk to repackage the tour at such short notice.
“Even though I did my best to stay positive and think of ways to make this work, there’s no way I was going to try and convince my partners to risk thousands of dollars when I wasn’t even sure how it would go myself.”
You can watch Herrara’s full video here and read the full post from The Drunk Promoter below.
