In the wake of the attacks on an Eagles of Death Metal concert in Paris, a lot of bands called off their European tours. Others decided to stay the course as well and the whole situation caused a lot of unneeded tension among fans. This applies to Lamb of God as well, who cancelled their shows and swiftly received the uneducated, and frankly stupid, wrath of fans. If bands feel safe to continue on, great! If not, isn't that completely understandable?
Drummer Chris Adler was recently on Elliot In The Morning and explained the situation (as transcribed by Lambgoat).
"Well, I'll tell you exactly how we decided [to scrap the shows]. And we're not immune to all the chatter and backlash that happened when we did that. And it wasn't something that we wanted to do. The shows were doing great, ticket counts were great… It was really, really disappointing that we had to do it.
"What happened was… The Paris attack happened. We were just coming out of the UK with the shows that we had just done with Megadeth together. We played a show in Germany and then came over to Tilburg, Holland. And when we got to Tilburg, we learned that… not only… We already knew about the Paris attack, but when we got to Tilburg, we realized that the same night we had played in Germany, about two hundred miles away, was the planned attack of a stadium there; there was an ambulance full of explosives that they found. So we were glad that nothing happened there. And so we got to Tilburg. And there was a specific security concern at the venue, where the venue security found two grown men outside taking pictures for hours of the facility and where the buses were parked and where the trucks were parked. And as they approached them to ask what was going on, the two guys ran as fast as they could, jumped on their bikes and took off. So security came to us, explained that situation and said, 'We don't have any credible evidence, and we're gonna beef up security for the show, but you guys, we wanna make sure that you know what's going on.'
"What really made the decision for us was not that we were scared, not that we were intimidated to play, but the fact that we know now that something… we've been given information that something was amiss. So if we go ahead with this and somebody breaks in and does something horrible, more than likely the band will be able to run off the back of the stage and out the back door and we'll be fine. But we're putting our crew in danger, we're putting everybody that's bought tickets in danger, and they have no idea that they could be hurt or coming into this event, that something could be going on. So it felt very irresponsible for us to go ahead with the show, knowing that something wasn't quite right. It doesn't mean that something was going to happen, we have no idea, but just knowing… Had we played the show and something had happened, we'd never forgive ourselves.
"And then continuing on from there, we felt like this thing that happened in Paris with that particular band [Eagles of Death Metal], here we are, with this… The band is called Lamb Of God; that's a target in itself. We're a bigger band than they are at the time. It's just, are we now more of a target? And as we cruise across Europe, we were heading towards Brussels, where they had just shut down the city, like, two days after we left. So it just looked like it was just gonna get more and more messy. I mean, we probably could have hung around and played Switzerland — you know, nobody is gonna probably blow up Switzerland — but it just… It didn't make sense. We would have been hemorrhaging money all across the continent."
Again, doesn't this make perfect sense? If someone essentially says to you "hey look, you and your fans might be in serious mortal danger tonight. Your call," isn't that a little irresponsible t go ahead with things in this particular situation? Even if the band makes it out alive, even a single injury is now on their consciouses for the rest of their lives, let alone if there are mass casualties.
I stick to my original convictions on this one- it was an incredibly dangerous time and all cancellations should have been understood.
