Nightwish forced to cancel three concerts in North America after work permit delays

print this

The Finnish Gothic metal band Nightwish, whose most recent album Once has topped the Billboard European album charts on two occasions this summer, have been forced to cancel the first three dates of a North American club tour after problems in securing the necessary work permits for the U.S. in time for the scheduled start of the tour.
      The band’s official website (see below) contains a note from keyboards player Tuomas Holopainen dated this Tuesday, blaming U.S. immigration officials for taking overly long to process the permits.
     
Nightwish were to have kicked off their 14-date tour on August 16th with gigs in Toronto, Montreal, and Philadelphia, but these three appearances have had to be cancelled. The band and its management are much aggrieved, since all tickets for the two Canadian dates had been snapped up already, and reportedly many of the other tour venues are also close to being sold out.
      The tour will now apparently get under way on August 20th in Worcester, NY, where the band play the 3,000-seater Mass Palladium. In fact the work permit process is still incomplete. The necessary documents, gathered by a New York-based agent, are on their way to Finland, but they must still be delivered to consular officials at the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki.
     
The glitch is particularly galling for the band in the sense that they would not have needed the paperwork for the two Canadian appearances, but the band-members had to remain behind in Finland in order to pick up the documents from the embassy here in person.
      This is Nightwish’s first headlining trip to the United States, and is seen as a pipe-opener for a possible tour of larger venues next spring. Nightwish will be accompanied this month by another Finnish band, Lullacry, who also feature a female vocalist.
      Nightwish’s vocals are in the hands of Tarja Turunen, who originally trained as a classical singer, and whose operatic style has led to the use of expressions like "symphonic metal" to describe the band’s music.
      She fronts a four-piece group of instrumentalists, with composer and keyboards player Tuomas Holopainen joined by Marco Hietala (bass), Erno "Emppu" Vuorinen (guitars), and Jukka Nevalainen on drums and percussion.


Links:
  Nightwish (official site)
  Nightwish featured in a Dutch metal magazine (search on band name)

Helsingin Sanomat