A month after a “miscommunication” between All Tomorrow’s Parties 2.0 organizers and the owners of the North Wales venue where the the April 22-24 shows were slated to take place resulted in the event moving to a different space in Manchester, ATP has thrown in the towel.
“After working through all options, including moving the event from Prestatyn to Manchester, we have had to accept defeat due to its lack of financial viability,” organizers said in a statement on Monday morning (Apr. 18).
While comedian Stewart Lee’s ATP event took place over the weekend at Pontins in Prestatyn, the two-day fest curated by Drive Like Jehu slated for April 22-24 at the same holiday camp (then moved to Victoria Warehouse in Manchester) has been canceled. On Friday, Velvet Underground legend John Cale announced he was pulling out of both events, saying the organizers had “let us all down.”
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regrettably, @therealjohncale‘s ATP shows now canceled.”we did our best to believe in the organizers, in the end, they let us all down” – jc
— John Cale (@therealjohncale) April 15, 2016
In a Facebook post accompanied by an image of a roll of toilet paper with the initials “ATP” scrawled across it, Drive Like Jehu expressed their disappointment with the news. “After 4 months of a long and bumpy ride, the wheels finally fell off the wagon and crashed and burned,” the band wrote. “It’s a uniquely cruel hoax to appeal to Drive Like Jehu’s ego and ask us to create a program based on personally inviting the bands and musicians that have inspired us and changed the way we hear music and then subject them and their supporters to this. We really wanted this show to happen more than anything. It had all the makings of a legendary weekend.” Organizers are offering ticket buyers a full refund.
As recently as last month, ATP organizers were claiming the shows would go on, but it became increasingly clear that the JLJ shows were in jeopardy. Among the bands that were slated to perform: Hot Snakes, Wire, Mission of Burma, Rocket From the Crypt, METZ, the Gories, Flamin Groovies and Martin Rev of Suicide.
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The news is the latest hiccup in the festival’s troubled history, which includes the cancelation of it’s 2014 Jabberwocky festival in London, which was pulled three days before scheduled sets from Neutral Milk Hotel, James Blake and Kurt Vile. That time, organizers blamed the last minute cancelation on a “succession of events that have lost money in an increasingly aggressive festival market.”
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Two years before, ATP Concerts Limited was placed in voluntary liquidation — similar to chapter 10 bankruptcy in the States — and forced to transfer all its assets, including the rights to the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, label, and shows, to a new company called Willwal Limited.