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Neil Young’s Hyde Park show won’t be marketed under Barclaycard BST banner

By | Published on Thursday 13 December 2018

Neil Young

AEG has confirmed that Neil Young’s show in London’s Hyde Park next summer will not sit under the banner of British Summer Time. This follows the musician’s public griping about the planned concert, with Young complaining online that he hadn’t been told the show was being announced, that he wasn’t able to offer his signed-up fans a pre-sale opportunity, and that he had a major problem with Barclaycard sponsoring the gig.

These moans appeared on the Neil Young Archives website shortly after AEG announced that Young would be co-headlining a day of its Barclaycard-backed British Summer Time series alongside Bob Dylan. Young’s management firm subsequently admitted it had screwed up by not keeping its client fully informed about the show being made public.

Young took umbrage at the BST shows being sponsored by Barclaycard because of the wider Barclay group’s investments in the fossil fuels sector. He wrote: “I learned that the show had a sponsor, Barclays Bank, a fossil fuel funding entity. That doesn’t work for me … At the moment, we are trying to rectify the situation … we have been talking about requiring a different sponsor as one option”.

The NYA website then announced that it had been agreed that the show would go ahead without Barclaycard sponsorship, although at that time it was still being promoting on the British Summer Time website complete with the credit card company’s branding. But later yesterday the Neil Young/Bob Dylan concert was taken off the BST site.

Meanwhile AEG said in a statement: “Neil Young has made the decision to move away from the Barclaycard presents British Summer Time concert series. Neil Young and Bob Dylan will play a stand-alone concert in Hyde Park on the same date, 12 Jul. All tickets will remain valid. The Barclaycard presents British Summer Time concert series remains unaffected and will continue as normal with more headliners to be announced in early 2019”.

So, there you go. Simple. They just need to remember, on the morning of 12 Jul, to go round the Hyde Park compound AEG builds each summer and remove any Barclaycard branding. It does mean that the live music giant’s big brand partner can’t be associated with one of the key bookings for the annual series of central London gigs, but that’s probably better than having one of your headliners openly slagging off the sponsor at every opportunity.

Maybe AEG and Barclaycard should have realised from the off that an environmentalist like Neil Young would never ever agree to perform at an event sponsored by a fossil fuel investing bank. Except, of course, for that one time he played London’s Barclaycard British Summer Time festival in 2014.



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