Massive Attack cancel festival set because Franz Ferdinand was playing their music too dang loud

In what might be the most vicious attack against Franz Ferdinand since a bad day in Bosnia in 1914, British trip hop band Massive Attack abruptly canceled a festival set in Madrid last night after complaining that the Scottish band was rocking just too dang hard for them to play. The “Unfinished Sympathy” artists were scheduled to play at the Mad Cool Festival at 1:45 a.m. this morning, but were so upset by a potential sonic overlap that they made a “unilateral” decision to cancel the performance, according to a statement from festival organizers.

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And while we might argue that a non-optimal sound set-up is just one of the prices you pay for the intimacy and variety of the music festival experience, it’s also true that we haven’t caught a FF set in a few years; maybe they really are just shredding that fucking hard. Meanwhile, the band’s frontman, Alex Kapranos, offered his deepest sympathies on Twitter:

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In any case—and with apologies to the Massive Attack fans who were probably pretty disappointed by the abrupt cancellation—there is a silver lining here: If we start seeing murals everywhere of the members of Franz Ferdinand blatantly deafening a bunch of poor, crying children or humble, hard-working musicians, we might finally be able to confirm that old “Robert Del Naja is Banksy” theory once and for all.

[via Pitchfork]