LONDON — It was a moment Bruce Springsteen had waited decades for, but clock-watching festival organizers pulled the plug on a surprise duet between the Monmouth County native and Sir Paul McCartney in London’s Hyde Park Saturday night.
The Associated Press reports that Springsteen and the E Street Band had already exceeded the 10:30 p.m. sound curfew at Hyde Park by half an hour when he brought McCartney on stage of a pair of Beatles hits, “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Twist and Shout.” Reportedly, the microphones were turned off before they could thank the crowd, forcing them to leave the stage in silence.
Back in Jersey, oldies disc jockey Big Joe Henry of New Jersey 101.5 called cutting the power on Springsteen and McCartney's performance “an outrage.”
“I can't believe they’d do that,” said Henry, on hand for the annual Haskell Classic Car Show at Monmouth Park Racetrack in Oceanport Sunday.
Henry noted that Springsteen is known for his lengthy shows and that “Twist and Shout” is a mainstay of the Boss' encores.
“It's a bad, bad day in music for that to happen, and shame on them,” Henry said.
A statement from concert organizer Live Nation said it was unfortunate that Springsteen’s three-hour-plus performance was stopped “right at the very end,” but it said that the curfew had been laid down by the authorities “in the interest of the public’s health and safety.”
Huge concerts in Hyde Park, a 350-acre expanse of landscaped garden and parkland that abuts some of London’s wealthiest neighborhoods, have increasingly caused friction between fans and the area’s well-heeled residents, many of whom gripe about the late-night noise and nuisance.
With complaints on the rise, local officials have decided that as of next year, the number of concerts will be slashed from 13 to nine. Also in 2013, they plan to reduce crowd limits from 80,000 to 65,000.
Steven Van Zandt, who plays guitar in Springsteen’s E Street Band, took to Twitter to criticize Saturday’s decision as heavy-handed.
“English cops may be the only individuals left on earth that wouldn’t want to hear one more from Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney!” Van Zandt wrote. “On a Saturday night! Who were we disturbing?” Finally he added: “There’s no grudges to be held. Just feel bad for our great fans. … It’s some City Council stupid rule.”
Some of Van Zandt’s posts were retweeted by Springsteen’s own official Twitter page.
London’s flamboyant mayor, Boris Johnson, said Sunday that the singers should have been allowed to keep going.
“It sounds to me like an excessively efficacious decision,” he told London radio. “You won’t get that during the Olympics. If they’d have called me, my answer would have been for them to jam in the name of the Lord!”
E Street Band guitarist Nils Lofgren put a more cheerful spin on the proceedings: on his Facebook page, Lofgren said they were “having too much fun so they pulled plug!”
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