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SEXUAL ASSAULT

Swedish music festival cancels next year’s event amid rape reports

Following reported rapes and sex offences at this year's Bråvalla music festival, there will be no festival in 2018, the organisers said on Saturday.

Published: 1 July 2017 16:52 CEST
Updated: 1 July 2017 18:03 CEST
Swedish music festival cancels next year's event amid rape reports
One person was reportedly raped during Håkan Hellström's concert at Bråvalla. Photo: Pontus Lundahl/TT
One of Sweden's largest music festivals, Bråvalla has been arranged outside the eastern Swedish town Norrköping every summer for the past five years, and this Saturday, July 1st, is the final day of the 2017 edition.
 
 
But the popular festival will not return in 2018 due to concerns over several cases of sex offences, the organizing company FKP Scorpio said in a press release on Saturday.
 
“Words cannot describe how incredibly sad we are about this, and we most seriously regret and condemn this. This is not f-ing okay. We do not accept this at our festival,” a festival representative wrote.
 
Police later said four rapes had been reported in total, 23 cases of sexual molestation (“sexuella ofredanden”), one case of sexual coercion, 13 assaults, 116 cases of minor narcotics offences and 97 thefts.

 

One person was reportedly raped during a Håkan Hellström concert.

 
The organizers did not say if or when the festival will return. Nor would they say whether the company's financial situation had anything to do with the cancellation – FKP Scorpio reported a loss of 75 million kronor ($8,904,500) in 2016.
 
“We don't have any further comments on that. We have issued a press release, and that's what applies here,” FKP press spokesperson Johanna Jonasson told Swedish broadcaster SVT.
 
Taking place near Norrköping in eastern Sweden, the Bråvalla festival was hit by a spate of reported rapes and sexual assault in 2016.
 
The British band Mumford and Sons, which headlined the 2016 festival, said they would boycott Bråvalla until they had had assurances from the organizers and police they were doing something to combat the problems of sexual violence.
 
 
Meanwhile, a debate about sexual molestation raged in Sweden in 2016 after it emerged that groups of boys had been groping girls at the We Are STHLM youth festival for two years running.

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.

Published: 17 November 2023 09:05 CET
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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