Updated: Fans Fury Over Jeff Mangum ATP Rescheduling

Fans are furious over the postponement of the Jeff Mangum curated ATP Festival, which was due to take place in December.

In a statement issued today ATP said that “due to a set of extremely unfortunate and unforeseen circumstances, this festival event is being postponed – the event will be rescheduled to March 9th-11th 2012 at the same location of Butlins Holiday Centre, Minehead, UK.”

But a look at the Butlins website reveals that the venue is due to play host to a 90s weekender of a less alternative variety, featuring boy bands such as 911 and Damage, on the original dates of Dec 2-4.

Festival goers who cannot attend the rescheduled dates are being offered a refund, but not any booking fee paid. Those who have already booked train or plane tickets will also lose out.

There was anger today on ATP’s Facebook page with festival goers annoyed that more information has not been given by the organisation about the rescheduling.

One festival goer Chris Pennington says: “I appreciate these can happen and I don’t see any point in berating ATP if they are genuine or unavoidable, but i would like the reasons explained or at least a modicum more detail.”

Another, Simon Fox, said: “So, our friends who were flying over from the USA to come to this…you gonna pay for their cancelled flights or admin fee for rescheduling them?”

There is speculation from fans that either a double booking blunder with the boyband event was to blame, or the event has been bumped by Butlins.  It is understood that the tickets for the boy band weekender have been on sale for  most of this week.

ATP have issued a follow up statement in response to angry fans. This also declines to shed any further explanation on the reason for the postponement.

The follow up statement says : “Unfortunately we’re not able to give out more detail on the reasons for the postponement, we wish we could as we know it is very frustrating, but as stated this decision was unavoidable and putting on the event in December would have been impossible – we announced the postponement as soon as we possibly could – in this case we only knew for sure very recently that the event couldn’t happen in December.

“It was a matter of reschedule, or cancel completely which nobody would have wanted.”

Jeff Mangum performing at Harvard's Sanders Theatre in Sept.

ATP are unable to guarantee that all of the original line up, which  includes The Fall, Fleet Foxes and Low, will be able to play on the new dates.

The decision to postpone has also effected some of  ATP’s London shows in December.

The ATP statement continues: “The separate London shows for The Magic Band and Superchunk will stay at their original dates – we are waiting to hear back regarding the Jeff Mangum, Panda Bear, Olivia Tremor Control and Thurston Moore London shows which may also be rescheduled – keep an eye on our website for confirmation – we will let you know as soon as we can.”

Read the ATP statement in full here.

UPDATE:  The Mountain Goats are the first act to confirm they are unable to play on the rescheduled dates due to other commitments.

A further announcement will be made on November 10th on those artists that can still make the event and about any new additions. ATP insist that some of the original line up have already  confirmed they can make the rescheduled event, but have declined to name them until next month.

Robyn Hitchcock has confirmed via his Twitter account that he is available to play at the rescheduled festival.

ATP adds that “the decision to postpone…was not Jeff Mangum’s and he is as disappointed as everyone else that the festival is not taking place on the original date.”

Share

2 Comments

  1. thanks for the tip…looks like tickets have been on sale for most of this week. Luckily I can go to the new dates and didn’t book any transport…but there are others who are not so lucky.

Comments are closed.