It was a meeting of two of rock music’s legends. Paul McCartney joined Bruce Springsteen on stage in London’s Hyde Park in front of thousands of adoring fans in a one-off collaboration ahead of the Olympics.
And then – someone pulled the plug.
NME reports that ‘The Beatle joined Springsteen onstage right at the end to perform ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and ‘Twist And Shout’. However, the rock legends’ microphones were switched off before they had chance to thank the crowd because Springsteen had already run over curfew.’
Naturally, the decision to turn off the sound was met with anger from all fronts. Springsteen’s guitarist Steven Van Zandt led a chorus of disapproval. He wrote on Twitter: “Is there just too much fun in the world? We would have been off by 11 if we’d done one more. On a Saturday night! Who were we disturbing?”
Unlikely rock fan Boris Johnson also waded into the argument, criticising Live Nation’s decision to end the concert. He said: “It sounds to me like an excessively efficacious decision. You won’t get that during the Olympics. If they’d have called me, my answer would have been for them to jam in the name of the Lord!”
Quite what that sentence means, we at Boriswatch HQ are not sure (jam in the name of the Lord suggests the cake stall at a church fete) but the sentiment is there. Whoever the killjoy was that flicked the switch, shame on you.