Alison Moyet Gives Texas the Finger

Remember a month or two back, when I slapped up a glowing post about how wonderful ex-Yaz frontwoman and now-solo artist Alison Moyet is/was? Yeah, well, fuck that. The cool kids at HandStamp just posted the news that Moyet’s cancelled her two Texas shows, Dallas and Houston, which were supposed to be this freakin’ week, on Friday & Saturday, respectively. Crap, crap, crap.

The reason HandStamp’s Joey got from the show’s promoter? She’s cancelling because of “the dilapidated state of the local economy in Houston and Dallas following the recent destruction caused by Hurricane Ike.” Translation: not enough people bought tickets. Which couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that they were $39 a pop, could it? Nah, of course not. Heck, if I hadn’t gotten a pair for me & my wife pre-Ike, I’d have been seriously be thinking twice about getting ’em since.

Now, I know us Texans are out-of-the-way down here, but it still stings to see somebody good cancel a show and then try to pin it on the hurricane. If the promoters were actually concerned about the state of Houston and Dallas (and, um, how the heck did Ike affect Dallas, by the way? did the storm surge magically travel all the way north on I-45?), they’d have kept the shows on and made the tickets more affordable to us economically-dilapidated types. This, on the other hand, is just crass and lame. My wife, a 20-year fan of Moyet’s music, has now vowed to boycott her from now on. Extreme? Maybe, but a little honesty would’ve been nice, especially if it’d been delivered sooner than, say, four days before the show. Hell, we already had a babysitter all lined up, which for us is no mean feat.

sigh. Big, big “thank you” to HandStamp for breaking this — it’s definitely better to know now than at 7PM Saturday night. Now I’ve got to figure out how to get a refund from Ticketmaster for my $78 (I’m assuming the Ticketbastard “convenience charges” don’t get refunded), which is compounded by the news of the cancellation apparently not going all the way down the pipe yet; tickets are still for sale on the Ticketmaster site. Argh.

First Andrew W.K., then this — is it me? Am I the jinx, so that any show I actually plan to go to gets the smackdown as the big day/night nears? Okay, so maybe I’m being a tad self-important there, but I swear, I’ve got this nagging thought at the base of my skull that maybe I haven’t been sacrificing enough chickens lately or something…