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Scalpers force Prince to postpone ticket sales

Prince on Friday abruptly postponed ticket sales for a highly anticipated European tour, outraged that scalpers were already advertising vastly inflated resale prices.

Scalpers force Prince to postpone ticket sales
Prince performing at Coachella in 2008. Photo: Scott Penner/Wikimedia

Prince, who in recent years has preferred to announce concerts at the last minute, become slightly more traditional by revealing through press interviews an upcoming tour in which he will play unaccompanied on piano for the first time since becoming famous.

The Minneapolis superstar called off sales moments before tickets were set to go online Friday in Austria and Britain.

Twitter account @Prince3EG, which the musician has used with his all female back-up band, Third Eye Girl, to promote last-minute shows, aired complaints from fans that resellers had already been advertising tickets in the thousands of dollars even though they were yet to go on sale.

@Prince3EG posted a photo of a vulture with the caption: “Multiple choice: A. Scavenger. B. Vulture. C. Tout. D. All of the above.”

The account retweeted users who sought a return of the last-minute “Hit and Run” shows, calling the approach better suited to true Prince fans.

“Maybe you should build a small hotel next to Paisley Park and sell reservations and tickets for a show!” said a retweeted comment by Cheryl Frey, who was referring to the singer's mythic studio on the outskirts of Minneapolis.

Prince did not immediately announce a new plan to sell tickets for his “Piano and a Microphone” tour, which is scheduled to start November 24 in Vienna and is expected to go to 11 countries, although not all dates have been announced.

Concert venues in recent years have stepped up checks to weed out resellers, notably by asking buyers to type security messages to ensure they are not robots buying in bulk.

Yet ticket vendors also increasingly link directly to resale sites, hoping to keep the business out of the hands of the black market.

Prince is known for challenging music industry conventions. In the 1990s, he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol and wrote “slave” on his cheek to protest his label's control over his work and has since experimented with a series of more independent music ventures.

For his upcoming tour, Prince announced the concerts by inviting a handful of European journalists to Paisley Park for a private concert.

Prince — best known for his dexterity at guitar, his soaring falsetto voice and his elegant dance moves — said he wanted to get out of his comfort
zone through the nakedness of the piano.

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CULTURE

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday’s death

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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