Pori To Ask LN For Compensation

Pori Jazz Festival is to ask Live Nation to stump up at least some of the euro 1 million ($1.42 million) it reckons it lost when it failed to get Tom Jones as a headliner.

The Finnish festival’s organisers claim that at this year’s ILMC they were given the thumbs-up to announce the Welsh star would be playing. LN, which was organising Jones’ European dates, denies the gig was confirmed.

Pori has responded by sending Pollstar a copy of an e-mail it claims to have received on the eve of the onsale, fully two weeks after the press conference announcing Tom Jones would be topping the bill.

The mail appears to have been sent to Pori managing director Katja Leppakoski and former international booker Jyrki Kangas, who has stayed with the festival in an advisory capacity. It appears to come from Johan Hollsten in Live Nation’s Helsinki office.

Kangas claims it arrived March 31, the day before the tickets went on sale, and it said: “I regret, that I have to be the middle person to deliver to you the message, that Tom Jones’ agreed performance can’t take place.

“I don t know the exact reason, but it must be some confusion between Phil Bowdery and Tom Jones’ management.

“So, you can’t start to sell tickets (tomorrow!) on Tom Jones’ name. We will do our best to find a replacement at our earliest opportunity.”

Bowdery and Live Nation Finland chief Risto Juvonen both insist that Jones, whose 2009 outdoor appearances included the U.K.’s Glastonbury Festival, was never confirmed for the Finnish festival and no contract was ever issued.

Kangas says the matter became worse when LN announced its own Tom Jones show at Helsinki’s Hartwall Arena in the fall before the festival found a replacement headliner. He says it effectively meant the U.S.-based company benefited from the advertising campaign and the media attention that had greeted the news that Jones was to headline Pori.

“Two weeks later we replaced Tom Jones with Brian Setzer’s Big Band, but we’d lost the big launch and hardly sold any tickets in those first two or three weeks,” he explained.

The festival eventually sold 60,000 tickets, which was enough to put the world-famous event in the black, but last year it shifted 70,000 and Kangas thinks the global concert giant should shell out the difference.

It’s not the first time Kangas has been involved in a contract fiasco. In 2002 he handed about $50,000 to a con artist who convinced him he was the brother of AC/DC band members Angus and Malcolm Young and was now managing them.

Kangas booked the act, signed the contract and paid the deposit before the impostor disappeared.