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Gigs & Festivals Top Stories
Another Bieber promo show canned because of crazy fans
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 26 April 2010
Do any of Justin Bieber’s promotional appearances go ahead any more, or are they all called off as police officers and security guards struggle to deal with that most dangerous of threats: 4000 teenage girls out of their tiny brains on Bieber love?
The latest Bieber promo gig to be cancelled due to crowd issues was in Australia. The squeaky-voiced haircut was due to do his only public performance in the country as part of the ‘Sunrise’ breakfast TV programme on Channel Seven, and was set to sing three of his “songs” outside the show’s studios in Sydney’s Circular Quay. Fans were invited to come and watch.
Said fans started arriving for the breakfast-time performance at 6pm the previous evening, and began to cause police concern between 2am and 3am when a rumour spread around the crowd that Bieber was already in the house. Crowd surges began, fans started to pass out, and, well, let’s face it, faced with the prospect of four more hours of screaming girls shouting “Justin”, you’d want to call the whole thing off, wouldn’t you?
Presumably by the time Justin really was in the house, police advised the telly show’s producers that if the popster actually went up on stage to sing his three songs as planned they feared for the safety of the crowd, who were probably, by that time, past being tired and into that weird period of sleep depravation where you become even more hyper.
As a solution, Bieber performed one song inside the TV studio which was piped outside for the fans to watch. After singing his song Justin told his disappointed fans: “I would love you to stay and hang but you have got to go. The police say you’ve got to go home”. The TV show’s slightly optimistic presenter David Koch also addressed the crowd outside the studio, saying: “You all now have to go home in a quiet manner”.
Angry parents of the now rather disappointed Bieber-loving teens have hit out at Channel Seven, arguing they failed to competently prepare for the performance, which was obviously going to attract a large crowd. One told the Brisbane Times: “Certainly [‘Sunrise’] knew that thousands of kids would turn out, and it would be unmanageable, [yet they] set him up to play to a few kids at Martin Place. Channel Seven and ‘Sunrise’ owe the fans and their parents an apology for shameless publicity stunts that ended in injury, hurt, disappointment, money spent and sleep deprived”.
But Channel Seven’s Head Of Morning Programming, Adam Boland, said the blame lay with the pesky kids and their clueless parents. Unrepentant, he told reporters: “At one stage we asked any parents to come in and help … and we had [host] Mike Goldman trying to get this crowd back into this space, but they just wouldn’t move … so the police inspector and myself decided to pull the plug”.
Oh well, at least none of Justin’s team were arrested this time. As previously reported, the popster’s US label rep and manager have been charged for failing to send out a message via Bieber’s Twitter stream when police cancelled a in-store in New York, which was axed because of similar crowd control issues. Similar problems at an in-store in Paris saw a performance cut short also because of more unruly fans. Lock em up I say, and don’t let them out til they learn to love better music. Or at least love Bieber more quietly.
