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Can Justin make it up to Nordic Beliebers?

Pop legend Justin Bieber has announced the dates he'll be performing in Scandinavia in 2016, as he attempts to woo back Nordic fans left devastated when he walked off a stage in Oslo earlier this year.

Published: 9 December 2015 14:06 CET

Can Justin make it up to Nordic Beliebers?

Justin Bieber in Los Angeles in October. Photo: Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP/TT

The 21-year-old Canadian heart throb announced on Twitter on Wednesday that he would be heading to the Tele2 Arena in Stockholm on September 29th next year, along with venues in Helsinki (September 26th), Copenhagen (October 2nd) and Oslo (September 23rd).

The dates form part of the European leg of his Purpose World Tour which will see him performing in more than 30 world cities.

Tickets for the concerts in the Nordics are set to go on sale on December 17th at 10am, ten months ahead of the scheduled gigs.

Bieber will be attempting to win back the hearts of his Scandinavian fan base after causing a huge stir in October this year when he cancelled a performance in Oslo after singing just one song. He was apparently annoyed at a fan who spilled water on the stage.

“I’m done with this,” he told his audience after throwing his hoodie on the floor, video evidence of the incident showed.

Many fans thought his swift exit was a joke and ended up in tears when they realized it wasn't.

The star later apologized on Instagram, saying he didn't always “handle things the right way”. He blamed a difficult week and lack of sleep, adding that he stopped the show because “the people in the front row would not listen”.

The singer also walked out of a Spanish interview during the same week, apparently frustrated at the language barrier.

But his outbursts so far seem to have done little to damage his global fan base. 'Purpose', his fourth studio album, racked up 200 million Spotify steams in its first week when it was released last month.

READ ALSO: Swede wakes up with Justin Bieber tattoo

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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