Lana Del Rey, who has been suffering from an international backlash since her train wreck of a live performance on Saturday Night Live a few weeks ago, has cancelled her Australian tour ‘due to unprecedented international demand’.
Of course, no one really believes what’s written in a press release, especially given reports overnight from the US that she is due to cancel her 30-date North American tour too as well as her appearance at SXSW due to management wishing to work extensively on improving her ability to perform live.
Refunds for the Tues 28 Feb show at Oxford Art Factory and Sat 3 Mar show at The Toff in Town will be processed shortly. If you purchased your ticket online or over the phone through Moshtix your ticket will be automatically refunded back to your credit card/PayPal account. If you purchased your ticket from a moshtix retail outlet you will need to return to the outlet with your ticket to receive your refund.
More extensive dates have been promised to be announced some time in the future, and ticket holders for the cancelled tour will be given priority booking for the new dates when they’re announced. No doubt their will be a number of furious ticket holders this morning who bought their tickets off eBay. At their peak a double pass was going for around $1000 to Del Rey’s Sydney show, a pass that is now virtually worthless.
Del Rey’s debut album, Born To Die debuted at #1 on the UK album charts and is currently sitting atop the iTunes Australia album charts in this, its first week of release, as well as in another 10 countries. Despite her record’s success, a large number of media outlets have turned on the 25-year-old singer in a relentless attack that is starting to take its toll on Del Rey.
In an interview with Vogue, last week Del Rey admitted that she was reluctant to write another record after the backlash saying “I don’t think I’ll write another record. What would I say? I feel like everything I wanted to say, I’ve said already. The album is a tribute to living life on the wild side. I’m sort of kidding because I’m not that wild any more… used to drink a lot. Too much. I haven’t had a drink for seven years now.”
Her quick rise to fame has also caught the attention of a number of artists who have worked for years to build their success and are cynical about her prospects. The Black Keys yesterday spoke to MTV about her overnight success saying “On some level, we’ve seen that Lana Del Rey thing since we first started, like, all of a sudden this new band would be headlining festivals.”
The band, whose latest record El Camino has broken through to the mainstream, also lamented the current state of the music industry revealing they “honestly feel bad for a lot of bands that are starting out with the way things are. … The trends kind of flip over so fast — something’s cool and not cool and it all happens within two to three months.”
