Sammy Hagar admits downsizing UK tour was due to ticket sales: “We didn’t sell it out”
Sammy Hagar has admitted the downsizing of his upcoming UK tour was due to low ticket sales.
The former Van Halen frontman is set to embark on his first UK tour in three decades next month, which was originally slated to visit arenas in Manchester, London, Leeds and Birmingham.
However, Hagar later downsized the dates to the 3,400-capacity Wolverhampton Civic Hall, 3,500-capacity O2 Apollo in Manchester, and announced a three-show residency at the new 3,800-capacity British Airways ARC in London.
At the time, he stated the decision was due to his recent experience of performing a residency in Las Vegas, which allowed him to explore more of his vast back catalogue and play in an intimate setting.
Now, in a new radio interview with Total Rock (via Blabbermouth), Hagar admitted that ticket sales played a role in the rescheduling, sharing, “I love the fact that we get to do three shows in London. I love the fact that we’ve moved it to a smaller venue so it’ll be full instead of playing some big giant place that holds 12 [thousand] but there’s only 6,000 people there.”
He added, “The ambience of that is so much different, and that’s why we changed it. Guilty as charged — we didn’t sell it out. I thought, ‘Oh, we’ll sell that out, no problem.'”
However, the rock singer did still maintain that the idea of a residency, which allows him to play different material, was another incentive, sharing, “For someone that can afford to buy three tickets, which I know it’s tough, but they’re gonna get a lot. They’re gonna go, ‘Wow, I can’t believe they played that,’ ’cause we play deep tracks.'”
In the same interview, Hagar shared that he chose to come back to the UK after appearing at Ozzy Osbourne’s Back to the Beginning farewell concert last summer, which took place just weeks before the Black Sabbath icon’s death.
While he was “so nervous” about performing due to his lengthy absence from these shores, it went far better than Hagar anticipated and reminded him of his popularity in the UK.
Hagar shared, “I told my manager the next day, I said, ‘I wanna go play the UK, I have to,’ because there’s so many fans over there that probably grew up on my music, that are probably kind of too old to be going to concerts, and the younger people that really don’t know who I am. I can’t live with that.”
His tour, which will see him joined by guitarist Joe Satriani, bassist Michael Anthony, and drummer Kenny Aronoff, will kick off on July 6th in Wolverhampton.
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