Eagles to play Wembley Stadium in Europe exclusive
US rock band Eagles are bringing their Hotel California tour to London’s 90,000-capacity Wembley Stadium on 29 and 30 August 2020, the group’s only European dates of the year.
Eagles, consisting of Don Henley, Joe Walsh and Timothy B Schmit, along with Deacon Frey and Vince Gill, will perform the Hotel California album in full at the Wembley concerts, followed by an additional set of the band’s greatest hits.
The group recently performed three sold-out performances of the album – the third best-selling US album in history – in Las Vegas. The concerts marked the first time Eagles had performed Hotel California in its entirety and featured 77 musicians on stage, including a 46-piece orchestra and 22-voice choir.
As the best-selling US band of the 1970s, Eagles have won six Grammy Awards, were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998 and received the Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime contribution to US culture in 2016.
“We are delighted to welcome back The Eagles who played a huge part in this year’s success story”
The Live Nation-promoted shows see Eagles return to the stadium for the second time in as many years, following a sell-out show in June. The band contributed to a record-breaking summer for Wembley in 2019, with over 900,000 fans watching acts including the Who, Fleetwood Mac, Bon Jovi, Billy Joel and Pink.
“We are delighted to welcome back The Eagles who played a huge part in this year’s success story,” comments James Taylor, senior commercial manager for Wembley Stadium.
“Wembley is an iconic venue that attracts the biggest and best acts and we are thrilled this legendary band has once again chosen our world-class stadium for what will be their only performances in Europe in 2020.”
Tickets for Eagles 2020 Wembley Stadium shows go on sale on Saturday 14 December at 9 a.m. (GMT), available here.
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New Who song streaming exclusively in Music Walk of Fame app
On Tuesday (19 November), the Who became the first artists to receive a stone on the new Music Walk of Fame (MWOF) on Britannia Junction in Camden, London. The legendary British band, who were presented with their stone by Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, are also airing their latest single, ‘I Don’t Wanna Get Wise’, exclusively through the MWOF app.
The premiere of the new song – which comes over two weeks before the release of their 12th studio album, Who – is “the first taste of exclusive content that will become a characteristic of the official app”, according to its developer, Second Screen, which has also created festival apps for the likes of Boardmasters, Sound City, Neighbourhood Weekender, Notting Hill Carnival and Liverpool Psych Fest.
The MWOF app already houses a map of Camden with interactive points of interest marked as series of pins.
It will also incorporate augmented-reality (AR) technology triggered by each MWOF stone (the Who’s is outside Camden Town tube station), with more AR experiences set to be added as more stones are laid.ed in a series of insightful pins.
The Music Walk of Fame app is available to download for iPhone now, with the Android version set to follow in the coming weeks.
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The Who to play record third date at Hollywood Bowl
The Who will play a third date at California’s Hollywood Bowl as part of their Moving On! Tour this autumn, promoter Live Nation has announced.
The English rock band has never before performed at the iconic 17,500-capacity venue more than two times in one tour cycle. The Bowl dates mark the Who’s first appearance at the venue since a two-show run in April and May of 2006.
Liam Gallagher will open the third Hollywood Bowl show on October 24. The extra date comes as the band cancelled their performance at Rogers Place (20,734-cap.) in Edmonton, scheduled for 23 October.
Guests for the first two Bowl shows on October 11 and 13 are yet to be announced.
In 2017, Live Nation veteran promoters Andrew Hewitt and Bill Silva beat a rival AEG Presents bid to sign a ten-year deal with LA Philharmonic to exclusively promote non-classical concerts at the Bowl.
The Bowl dates mark the Who’s first appearance at the venue since a two-show run in April and May of 2006.
The Who kicked off their stadium tour on 9 May in Grand Rapids, Michigan, ending the first week of touring playing to a sold-out crowd at New York’s Madison Square Garden (20,789-cap.) on Monday (13 May).
The Who are accompanied by acclaimed local orchestras as they visit 29 cities across the United States and Canada for their symphonic concert tour. Guitarist and backup singer Simon Townshend, keyboardist Loren Gold, bassist Jon Button and drummer Zak Starkey also join the band.
A UK tour date, at London’s Wembley Stadium, is scheduled for July.
The Moving On! Tour is Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend’s first tour since Endless Wire in 2006. Speaking in a keynote interview at this year’s International Live Music Conference, Daltrey suggested that, despite the tour, his and Townshend’s relationship remains strained. The pair are recording the Who’s new album separately.
The album – the Who’s first record of new songs in 13 years – will be out later this year.
Tickets for the Hollywood Bowl go on sale on Friday 17 May at 12 p.m. local time. More information can be found here.
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Record-breaking summer for music at Wembley Stadium
London’s Wembley Stadium connected by EE is getting ready for a record-breaking summer of live music, with a line-up of 14 concerts expected to attract over a million music fans to the stadium.
The 90,000-capacity stadium, owned by the Football Association (FA), will host five weeks’ worth of concerts from 1 June. Nine headliners will play a total of fourteen shows, in the most music-focused schedule ever for the stadium.
The line-up includes shows from K-pop stars BTS, Bon Jovi, the Who and the Spice Girls, in their first set of shows since the 2012 London Olympics closing ceremony. Pink will also perform at the stadium as part of her mega Beautiful Trauma world tour, which has sold three million tickets just over a month in.
The number of concerts surpasses the stadium’s previous record of 13, set in 1992, before the stadium was demolished and rebuilt. The best year for music since the 2007 reopening of the stadium came in 2016, when six headliners played across ten shows.
“We are delighted to host what will be a record-breaking year for music at Wembley Stadium,” says Wembley’s senior commercial manager, James Taylor.
“Holding music events and attracting more people to our venue are an essential part of our business and we are looking forward to hosting some of the world’s biggest artists this summer”
“Holding music events and attracting more people to our venue are an essential part of our business and we are looking forward to hosting some of the world’s biggest artists this summer. We are setting the bar high in 2019 and long may this continue.”
The stadium will also host performances from Fleetwood Mac, Billy Joel and Eagles, as well as the Capital Summertime Ball, featuring Mark Ronson, Ellie Goulding, Jonas Brothers, Maroon 5 and Jess Glynne.
In 2016, Wembley Stadium achieved it best-ever turnover of £370m, driven in part by a busier live events calendar, with dates by Bruce Springsteen, Coldplay, Rihanna and Ed Sheeran.
However, last year the stadium recorded a pre-tax deficit of £9 million, compared with a £5.5m profit the year before, and a drop in sales by 13%. This slump in profit follows a scaling back of the music calendar in 2017 and a renewed focus on football.
More information and tickets for the shows can be found here.
A full list of concerts and dates are below:
Saturday 1 June: BTS
Sunday 2 June: BTS
Saturday 8 June: Capital Summertime Ball
Thursday 13 June: Spice Girls
Friday 14 June: Spice Girls
Saturday 15 June: Spice Girls
Sunday 16 June: Fleetwood Mac
Tuesday 18 June: Fleetwood Mac
Friday 21 June: Bon Jovi
Saturday 22 June: Billy Joel
Sunday 23 June: Eagles
Saturday 29 June: Pink
Sunday 30 June: Pink
Saturday 6 July: The Who and Eddie Vedder
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‘We tried to create the sound of war’: Daltrey does ILMC
Born during a V-1 raid in the Second World War, Roger Daltrey rose from the rubble-strewn seats of post-war London to become one of the world’s greatest rock frontmen – and host Ed Bicknell, and hundreds of delegates, were on hand to hear all about it, in this year’s later ILMC Breakfast Meeting.
Daltrey opened by talking about his new memoir, Thanks a Lot, Mr Kibblewhite, whose cover features the singer in his mid-70s pomp standing in front of what looks like a bombed-out house. “The world I grew up in was bombsites, of ruined houses being demolished to build jerry-built tower blocks in their place – and I wanted a cover that told that story,” he said. “It’s a composite of me in a glamorous period of my life against those houses being demolished.”
Daltrey said he, and others like him, became interested in American blues and R&B as a result of their working-class backgrounds. “Being working class in Britain was equivalent of being black in America, and that’s what drew us to that music,” he explained. “We identified with their struggle.”
His love of music, however, started earlier: “I was a choir boy when I was at school, so I had perfect pitch and I was a good singer. But it was [British skiffle singer] Lonnie Donegan who first made he want to throw my head back and wail. He influenced Robert Plant, all the singers of my generation… Lonnie Donegan, he was the one.”
Daltrey said the band that became the Who really developed their chops when they got into the blues, honing their craft by touring constantly across the UK’s then-booming grassroots venues circuit. “There were so many venues, then,” he commented. “Every other vehicle on the roads was a van taking a group up north somewhere to a gig. That’s what was so great – almost every street had a band in it, and almost every band was getting some kind of work, whether it was playing a pub, a bar mitzvah or wedding, a youth club…”
Fast-forward a few years, and the Who are riding high on their post-Tommy success, with Pete Townshend’s rock opera about a deaf, dumb and blind boy (who sure plays a mean pinball) propelling the band to greater heights. Yet despite their growing profile and critical and commercial success, they’re broke: “In 1971, after touring for a whole year, we came back to the great news that our debt, instead of being £1.3 million, had gone down to £650,000,” Daltrey continued.
“Even Peter Sellers used to laugh at Keith Moon, and it wasn’t easy to make Peter Sellers laugh”
As it turned out, the Who’s managers, Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert, had their hands in the till, with Daltrey, Townshend, bassist John Entwistle and drummer Keith Moon funding the pair’s lavish lifestyles and growing heroin habits.
“You can’t be managed by crooks – as the Small Faces found out [with Don Arden] – but Pete wouldn’t join up with us [to oust Stamp and Lambert],” Daltrey explained, “until he went to America, went to his publishing account and found a load of money missing. In the end they ended up with nothing, and we lost two creative people that could have been part of our team. They were the best creative managers any band could ask for, but they were crooked.”
Their replacement was Bill Curbishley, whom Daltrey first noticed working in the offices of Stamp and Lambert’s company, Track Records. “He used to disappear at the same time every night,” Daltrey recalls. “I only realised later he was on parole. Turns out he was inside for eight years for a bank robbery! One he didn’t do – but, equally, he could have got done for one that he did do…
“He did eight years for someone else, so I knew that if he did a deal with me, he’d be straight with me. And from that day on, we started making money. With Bill, you didn’t have to count your fingers after you shook hands, and that says a lot about a man.”
Reflecting on the Track team’s heroin use, Daltrey said he was also “in a band with three addicts. Pete and John were alcoholics, and Keith would have taken anything. He [Moon] had huge talent – he’d have you laughing until you had to walk out the room, because that’s all you could do; even Peter Sellers used to laugh at Keith Moon, and it wasn’t easy to make Peter Sellers laugh – but underneath that was this incredible frailty and vulnerability. He couldn’t channel his talent in a way he could use it creatively.”
Daltrey also recalled his own brief dalliance with narcotics – “I did speed back in ’64, in the mod days, when we’d play 8–11, and then again from 2–6am, and then I’d drive the van home as well” – but said all the ‘purple hearts’ did was “made me chew my lips up and make my mouth dry so I couldn’t sing.”
“For me it was really painful to hear this group of fantastic musicians play so badly”
The frontman’s distaste for drugs also led to his brief dismissal from the group: “For me it was really painful to hear this group of fantastic musicians, hear this band with so much talent, play so badly [because they were on speed] – I couldn’t take it. So I came off stage and flushed their stuff down the loo… they weren’t best pleased!”
Bicknell then shared an anecdote about his booking the Who in 1968 for a student night in Hull – and the young band’s approach to hecklers. “In May 1968, I booked the Who for 350 very large pounds, and halfway through the set, when you’re in a quiet passage, these very two large Hull dockers who’d made their way into the gig started heckling.
“Pete stopped the song and said, ‘If you can do any fucking better than this, come up here.’ To my horror the guy gets on stage, and Pete spins round and hits this him over the head with the machine heads of his guitar. To this day, it’s the hardest I’ve ever seen anyone hit with anything – blood spurts out this guy’s head and he collapses in a heap on the floor. Then the other guy gets on stage and you kick him in the head!”
“It never ceases to amaze me, the stupidity of these people,” said Daltrey. “It’s the first rule of warfare: you always need to have the high ground!”
Bicknell also recalled the overpowering volume of the band’s speaker stacks, even at that early stage in their career. “We wanted to create the noise of a battlefield,” replied Daltrey. “We were trying to create the sound of war.”
Although Daltrey and Townshend (75 and 73, respectively) are gearing up for a new album, their first since 2006’s Endless Wire, and a Live Nation-promoted stadium tour, Daltrey suggested the pair’s often-fractious relationship remains strained, revealing they are recording the new record separately.
“In the old days you’d just shout out the next number, responding to the vibe of the crowd… now you have to do that before the show”
Artistically, however, his sole remaining bandmate is a bona fide genius, he added: “People overuse the word ‘genius’ […] but when it comes to songwriting, Pete Townshend is – he’s one of the most important composers of the 20th century.”
“I can write songs, but they’re not great songs of significance like Townshend’s are,” he continued, adding he loves “being the guy who takes what Pete’s written” and interpreting it his own way.
Responding to a question from the floor about his opinion of modern big-production shows, Daltrey said: “In some ways I hate it, because we have to play to a setlist. In the old days you’d just shout out the next number, responding to the vibe of the crowd – now you have to do that before the show, because the whole thing has to work with the lighting man, the video man and everything else…
“So, in that sense it’s a little less exciting, but we manage it.”
Daltrey closed by talking about his work with Teenage Cancer Trust, as well as his vision for a worldwide network of hospitals designed specifically for teenagers – the people who, he acknowledged, were key to the success of the Who.
“In the ’70s, when it all went tits up and high earners were taxed at 98%, squeezed till the pips squeaked, we were one of the few bands who didn’t go abroad,” he recalled. “We thought, ‘We voted them [the Labour government] in’; we can’t just leave. So we carried on earning but turned ourselves into a charity, putting all the money we earnt into this charity and giving it out to other charities we thought were worthy.
“That’s how the Who were, and how I still feel. You get out of life what you put in.”
Previous ILMC Breakfast Meeting interviewees include Nick Mason, Bill Curbishley, Marc Geiger, Arthur Fogel, Claude Nobs, Doc McGhee and longtime U2 manager Paul McGuinness.
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Roger Daltrey announced for ILMC 31 Breakfast Meeting
Roger Daltrey, lead singer and founder member of the Who and one of the greatest frontmen in rock history, has been announced for this year’s International Live Music Conference (ILMC) keynote interview.
Daltrey will join former Dire Straits manager and raconteur Ed Bicknell for the latest edition of the ILMC Breakfast meeting at 16.45 on Thursday 7 March, joining a roster of previous Breakfast Meeting interviewees that includes Nick Mason, Bill Curbishley, Marc Geiger, Arthur Fogel, Claude Nobs, Doc McGhee and longtime U2 manager Paul McGuinness.
Famed for his powerful voice and energetic stage presence, Daltrey is among the most charismatic of rock’s vocalists, having sold more than 100 million records worldwide across a 50-year career with the Who and as a solo artist.
Daltrey has sold 100m+ records worldwide across a 50-year career with the Who and as a solo artist
As an honorary patron of the Teenage Cancer Trust, Daltrey has additionally been the driving force behind the annual Royal Albert Hall concert series since 2000, and with the recent publication of his memoir, Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite: My Story, he adds author to a long list of job titles that also includes film actor and producer.
Daltrey’s appearance at ILMC marks the 15th edition of the Breakfast Meeting, which this year moves to a later afternoon slot to accommodate changes to the Friday schedule and the new Futures Forum event.
The announcement follows that of the first round of ILMC panels and sessions in December, with the full conference schedule set to be announced in two weeks’ time.
ILMC, the leading gathering of the international live music business, takes place at the Royal Garden Hotel in west London from 5 to 8 March. The discounted earlybird rate for delegate passes expires on 23 January.
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Goldenvoice confirms Desert Trip megafestival
Though Roger Daltrey had already rather ruined the surprise, Goldenvoice – the AEG Live-owned promoter behind Coachella, FYF Fest and country music festival Stagecoach – has officially confirmed the existence of its long-rumoured California ‘megafestival’ featuring six of the biggest rock acts of all time: The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Neil Young, Roger Waters and The Who.
Tickets for Desert Trip will go on sale on 9 May and cost US$399 for a three-day pass, with single-day passes ($199), reserved floor, reserved grandstand and standing pit ($1,599) tickets and hotel packages, RVs and tent camping also available.
There will be further additions to the line-up, meaning each act will set back festivalgoers a hefty $66.66.
Here’s a poster:
