OK folks. Sorry for the false information. Metallica will NOT be appearing at Midi.
However, we (and our sources) were not all caught up in hallucinatory excess. In fact, there was an announcement that Midi would be hosting the mighty rock Gods. The story is told much better that us by Jon Campbell, who solved the riddle in a wholly tangential manner. We had asked Jon to report on the “Midi Music Series” that has been happening over the summer in Zhenjiang. Jon has written a most impressive tome that we will publish later today, but in it, he reports thus:
The HiFi Xijindu series is part of Zhenjiang Music Season – “China Mobile Zhenjiang Music Season” to be exact – that includes Chang Jiang Midi and a range of other events. But not Metallica. It was in the Season’s announcement that the rumor of Metallica’s appearance was first mentioned. Midi will tell you that there certainly was a ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have Metallica play at the festival?’ moment in the festival’s planning stages (which festival hasn’t had similar daydreams?). But daydream turned to silliness when someone on the local government’s press-release-writing team thought, ‘What a perfect way to wind up the HiFi Xijindu Series announcement’. In the May release they tossed a quick line in about how the festival will feature different kinds of music, oh, and American band Metallica HERE. Nobody told Midi that they’d be writing that into the announcement and nobody wondered why a town looking to be put on the map didn’t mention Metallica in the first – and every subsequent – line of the release. That a release would end with a whisper of Metallica appearance and open with a product placement might have clued one in to the veracity of the former, so let’s give them a few points in the PR team’s ‘bad’ column.
So there we are. More from Jon very shortly…