THERION frontman Christofer Johnsson has posted the following explanation at the band's official website as to why their July 16th performance at the Metal Meeting Festival in Zadar, Croatia had to be scrapped:

"As some of you already knows, our performance and the entire festival in Zadar was cancelled and even though the reason for that should have been announced, I thought I'll make a post about that just so that there are no misunderstandings of what happened and why it was like that. And to ensure thaat no one needs to worry that we think bad of Croatia and will never return and stuff like that we hear people talk about. In every country there are people - some can and should organize festivals, others shouldn't. We will for sure play in Croatia in the future, but this time it will all be organized by the national promoter who is a cool guy and a trustworthy business partner.

Background facts:

We got half the money as a deposit weeks ago, so we had money for the travel paid. But the other half is due to the contract supposed to be paid put before we enter stage - to prevent promoters to run off while we play or to say 'Sorry, I have no money' after we are done. AMON AMARTH and RAGE didn't get a deposit as we did, but were supposed to get their tickets paid by the organizer.

- Rage didn't get their plane tickets confirmed in agreed time before the show, so they cancelled a few days before the festival.
- Amon Amarth had their plane tickets confirmed only 5 HOURS (!) before their flight was leaving!

We went up 02:30 in the morning, loaded our equipment from our studio, went to the airport and took the 06:40 plane over London to Trieste and had a 6 hour bus ride from there. From our starting point when we left with the equpment for the airport (04:00) we had a 17 hour trip to get there. We had went through quite a lot to get there (and would face sililar on the way back to Sweden), so were prepared to play under conditions we'd never accept normally and therefore waited at the festival site in hope that things would be solved long after SOULFLY had left ans cancelled when realizing they would never get paid even if the problems at the festival were solved (not meant to be bad against Soulfly - that's how any professional band would do it normally).

Our version (based on the facts we got to know) of what happened that day is this:

1. The start of the problems. At the time when both stages should have been ready long ago, the main stage was not finished and the second stage they had not even begun with. As there was a very strict curew (time when all loud noise must be ended, else the police stop the show), this meant that things were so delayed that the local promoter/organizer had the choice between cancelling all bands on the second stage, or it would be a very big risk of the entire thing being cancelled. Quite clearly this is a very unpopular decision to take as those bands have travelled there with their own money in order to play on this festival and promote their bands by playing in front of a big audience. But if the festival don't happen, then it's no good ffor them to be there anyway, so it was the only rational decision to take. However (later in the day when many other problems had turned up) I actually requested that someone would be announcing in Croatian to the crowd why those bands got cancelled and by WHO it got cancelled in order to not have anyone getting wrong or stupid ideas of why things turned out that way. We had decided we would play some extra songs for the crowd to lighten them up a bit for missing Rage and all those bands that should have beeen on the second stage.

2. Getting worse. Things where not by far ready when we got there, so we waited for some hours in the heat, talked to people, walked to a store and bought an ice cream. Then our tour manager told us it's pointless with us hanging around there as some of the equipmeent didn't even arrive yet and we were driven back to the hotel meanwhile. After a while I get a call to the hotel telling me the stuff has arrived - but it's not the stuff that was agreed upon. It had been agreed long time in advance and the local promoter had agreed to supply it as a part of the deal. Now all of a sudden the organizer say that he wrote in a mail that he did NOT have the stuff we requested. That is a lie and there is email correspondance saved to prove that. This in itself is a legal reason to cancel the show and still get fully paid. Many tour managers would have done that to teach unserious organizers a lession. I spoke with our tour manager and I told him that if he (as he is also our sound engineer) can live with the sound we'll get out of what was available, we'll play on it for the sake of getting the festival happening.

The really stupid thing with this entire thing is that if the organizer just would have played with open card and said 'Sorry, I cannot get those things you request', the national promoter in Zagreb (the guy who contracted us for the organizer - we never booked the show directly with the local organizer) said he could have fixed it easily and brought iy with him! So this was a problem that existed purely because of the local organizer not being honest and open. All problems can be solved if they're just brought up in good time and not some hours before the show the same day.

3. Total fuck up. Some hours later we got brought back there again. At this point the festival should have started long ago according to the original schedule and we were just about to start the soundcheck! So we did and after having some problems we got to something that was possible to live with during the special circumstances. After all, the whole point in us insisting on special equipment is because of the sake of the fans that we think deserve a good sound, so if you order a Mesa Boogie 2:90 power amp for your stuff (read: Ferrari) and get a Marshal 2000 top (read: Fiat) it's still better to 'Drive your fans in that Fiat than letting them walk.'

Just as we had decided that we'd have to live with it and try something out all together the power got cut! Very soon after that we got informed that the guy who rents out the diesel generator that creates the power for the festival didn't get paid as promised and until he got paid, he'd deliver no power anymore!

As this is not a huge expense (for a promoter - for any ordinary person it would be a lot) it was very bad news and I realized that maybe the whole thing was fucked then. Ivo (yes, our old Webmaster) had told me that the organizer is know for owing everybody money and a simple 1 + 1 calculation make me realize that the guy don't have any money. Shortly after that we were told that Soulfly had given up the thought of playing, cancelled and went to the beach to swim instead. And the national promoter had told me the evening before when we arrived that he was pissed off at the local organizer because that guy didn't work properly for the festival.

The power generator guy was of course right from a legal point of view, but I have to say he was dumb fuck - a total fucking imbecile to be honest. You can not just pull the plug when you have expensive equipment plugged into the power. If he would have got any sort of brains he would have said 'I never got my money, in five minutes the power is cut.' Besides the stuff on stage that can break if we'd be unlucky, there is a much bigger risk that the PA or the mixing desk gets damaged if you just pull the plug. You must first turn down the volume, put it in stand by and then switch it off. And as it was a brand new and damn good PA, the company who had supplied it (who also not got paid in advance - but that would be normal I guess) all of a sudden said they don't know if there would be a short or long term damage to the PA because of this and that they now wanted to have money on the table before they'd let us use it (if the power got paid of course, esle we'd have no use of the PA). So from a situation where it was hard to get the money, now it seemed impossible. PLUS the fact that if the organizer could not pay even for the electricity, how could he pay for the bands? This is what Soulfly had realized and instead of wasting the resty of the day waiting at the festival site they went swimming so that they'd at least get SOMETHING out of their visit in Croatia. I don't blame them.

4. The end. The organizer had the chance to come up with the money and get the electricity back on. Time went and nothing happened, so when time was up the tour manager and the management said the show as cancelled (after talking it through with the national promoter who was the one liable for the actual contracting of the bands) and our crew was ordered to start packing the stuff. While packing it still nothing changed. It got rumoured that the electricity would be on again soon, but that was the national promoter who wanted to make sure that none of the bands got shit from what happened, so he went out and bought 30 liters of diesel for his private money for the power generator and started broadcasting a recorded message. Apparantely he must have persuaded the guy owning the power generator to use it for this purpose if he used his own diesel.

5. We had travelled for 17 hours after a night of 2 hours sleep the day before, we had waited all day and we had hoped even though we at he end knew that the chance was getting very very small. We had been talking to local acts that was of course very sad and dissapointed after travelling with their own money to get there for nothing and Ivo and his friends had (like so many fans) travelled far too. The whole scenario was just so dissapointing and depresssive and we just felt very depressed about the whole situation and wanted to get out of there as quick as possible, so we helped the crew load out the stuff and got on the bus out of there.

Our management was very keen on not having us staying in the same city for security reasons. We didn't see any upset fan trying to take it out on any of the bands, but after the small riot in Sucre in Bolivia in 2001 (their organizer had to cancel our headline show due to rain - the entire stage risked being electrified!) where the hotel was attacked and windows were broken until the police came to clear the streets, they take no risk and move the band out - even if fans seems to react totally reasonable like the case was in Zadar - just to be 100% on the safe side. We also have a bit of responsability to avoid trouble for the hotel and the bus company.

This also meant we were driving up near the border to Slovenia and by that got much closer to the airport. By doing that we got 5 hours sleep instead of 2-3, which was at least making the journey home a bit easier.

6. When we got to the hotel we heard from the hotel that they were not paid either. I have to say they were very cool with us. You have to leave your passport in the reception when you check in and I know that most hotels would have said we don't get them back before the hotel is paid. So a big thanx to the hotel for being so increadibly nice people!

7. When picking up our stuff at the hotel we talked to Amon Amarth who explained that they had nowhere to go as they were leaving on the Monday and had no transportation to Split (they fly from there) and nowhere to go as the hotel was not paid. They said they'd wait and see if they could play anyway (there was this talking of playing at a small club with a capacity of 300 people or that there still would be a chance to get the festival stage going). They knew they wouldn't get paid, but then they thought at least the organizer would make sure they got somewhere to stay and get transported to Split.

I also had a meeting with the national promoter that had contracted us and who is the one responsible for our future headline show in Zagreb. He was very upset with the local organizer and explained us a lot of things. For instance, I get the correct figure of the pre-ales. The night before I was told 2000, at the festival I was told 1300. The national promoter said the correct figure was 1500. And to my question where the money from the pre-sales had gone (20 euro x 1500 tickets is 30.000 euro, there should have been plenty of money to pay for the electricity), he said that the local organizer had many debts from the year before and that he must have taken the money to pay for that instead of the costs to run this year's festival.

8. Seems like the local promoter used what was left of the 30 liters of diesel to put one Croatian band and Amon Amarth on stage and somehow persuaded the power supply guy to go along with it as long as it was not his diesel. In any case it would not have been enough to put Soulfly or Therion on stage as well. And even if more diesel would have been bought,the national promoter who contracted us had said the festival was officially cancelled (so it was actually an Amon Amarth headline show on the same stage as the festical would have happened), we had our equipment packed down in the bus and we were on our way home when Amon Amarth played. To have turned back and played would not have been possible technically at this late point (we would have needed a minimum of 3 hour set up time) and also it was 100% clear that we would not have got paid by the organizer for it. I can obviously not tell our hired singers and our crew that they must sing or work for free.

In any case, you can be sure of that the hotel, the PA company, the guy with the power supply, the local crew that worked on stage etc. never will get paid for this day, all money from the pre-sales were spent and no new tickets were sold as the gates was opened to everyone when Amon Amarth played. The organizer still have debts left from last year.

Finally I'd like to say one thing. The organizer approached me when we were leaving saying he 'was sorry for everyting and that he was a bad organizer, just a big fan.' I'm sure he had good intentions with everything, but that is really no excuse for being extremely irresponsible and cause economic damage to bands, the national promoter (who is a cool guy and has to try clean upp the mess aftwerwards and save his own good name) the PA-company, hotel, power supply company, festival workers and at last but not least the fans who most of them had travelled to see the show. Everybody was waiting in the sun all day hoping things would be fine in the end and everybody involved just got dissapointment after dissapointent as the day went by. It's because of risks of having events like this that the managements, tour agents and tour managers are very hard and strict and demand all organizers to be 100% professional."

Christofer Johnsson