LOUD PARK

Danish heavy metal singer King Diamond (KING DIAMOND, MERCYFUL FATE) has released the following statement regarding the cancelation of KING DIAMOND's October 20 performance at the Loud Park festival in Japan: "Let me try and explain this without saying **** all the time. "The Japanese promoters at Loud Park had, when I woke up this morning, posted a false and deceitful cancellation announcement, which they are going to have to correct to what really happened. "First of all: We did not cancel the show. The promoters did. "Let them show an email saying we cancelled the show. They can't. We can provide the email in which they cancelled. "They cancelled so late that some of our people were already in flight to Japan. I myself found out from a forwarded email at 4:26 a.m. Dallas time, waiting for a pre-ordered cab to arrive at 6:00 a.m. to take me to DFW International Airport. The email had come from Onta (working for the promoter, in what capacity, I don't know, but at least in a capacity to be able to cancel our performance), saying, 'Sorry for the result. Please stop taking flights for all…' "So much had happened up to this point, and I will try to condense everything into a short sequence of events. "Entire theatrical production, including all instruments and special effects, had been put into the professional care of a Danish shipping company, who is also used by Rocket Cargo, among others, in order to make sure everything would be in Tokyo with time to spare. This was trucked from Copenhagen to Hamburg harbor, and loaded onto a Chinese ship. "During the sail from Hamburg to Ningbo, China, where our entire cargo would be in transit and go via Japanese ship to Tokyo, our Danish shipper found out through their agents in China that the ship's arrival had suddenly been announced with a six-day delay. No reasons given. "The Chinese ship company seems to still be working on an answer to our Danish shipper. "With such an unexpected delay (our Danish shipper had never experienced this before), new ways to try and make up for the delay had to be thought out. "A shipping company in China known to our Danish shipper was contacted, since they were known to have connections to the Chinese government, with the hope that they might be able speed up a procedure that has never been done before. People at Creativeman also brought in connections in China to cooperate with everyone. The new, never-before-done plan was to now import the entire cargo into China, truck it in China from Ningbo to Shanghai, from where it would be exported and air lifted with a Chinese airline 747 cargo plane (the only one which had large enough entrance) to Narita Airport in Tokyo. "To my knowledge, the Danish embassy and the Japanese embassy in China became involved in trying to solve this dilemma. "At this point, money also became an issue. This procedure would add at least 21,500 euros to expenses, which was agreed to be split between promoter and band. An amendment to the contract was negotiated, in which promoter in the end agreed to give band half the concert fee, even if the gear didn't make it. This was agreed to, so that both band and promoter participated in the risk of incurring a bigger loss if we went along with this new plan, and still couldn't make it. "The following paragraph explains the scenario from which the promoters probably took parts and wrongfully used in their cancellation statement, in order to push the blame onto us, while at the same time practically ridiculing us. "The promoter at some point tried to almost force the band into agreeing to play two free backline shows next year, only paying expenses for flights, rented backline and crew salary, in case the cargo didn't make it in time to Loud Park, in order to make up for promoter's part of the possible loss. However, this idea was quickly scrapped, since we couldn't guarantee that it would fit in our future schedule, plus that we would have huge losses doing that, and last but not least we do not play without our theatrical production anymore.