Bruce Springsteen's Guitarist Slams London Concert Curfew

LONDON - Bruce Springsteen's guitarist Steven Van Zandt has taken to Twitter to express his outrage over London concert promoters' decision to pull the plug on Springsteen and Paul McCartney Saturday night.

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As reported, the music stars had their microphones cut off on stage around 10:40pm in London's Hyde Park Saturday evening after Springsteen had exceeded a noise curfew.

Springsteen and the E Street Band were scheduled to finish at 10:15pm, but an encore ran past that time, and they brought McCartney to the stage for a couple of songs only to be cut off.

On Twitter, Van Zandt later wrote: “One of the great gigs ever in my opinion. But seriously, when did England become a police state?"

He added: "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?"

Van Zandt continued with a complaint about the band's treatment by local police: "We break curfews in every country but only English cops need to ‘punish us’ by not letting us leave until the entire crowd goes."

Email: Georg.Szalai@thr.com
Twitter: @georgszalai