Metallica: Halifax threatens to not send in the cops

This is a bit of a complicated one.

Last year, the Black Eyed Peas and Alan Jackson played Halifax - we're talking Nova Scotia here, not the Yorkshire one. Ticket sales were disappointing (or, perhaps, expectations were unrealistic) and the promoter, Harold MacKay, is yet to pay back CAD400,000 advanced by the city. Harold had paid back a bit, but then his company went into insolvency.

This year, Harold's wife Michelle MacKay is trying to put on a Metallica concert in the city. Not so fast, says the city:

"The MacKay family has asked the municipality to provide services in support of the METALLICA concert. The municipality is not obliged to provide the services you have requested. If you and any member of your family wish to continue to do concert business with the municipality, the municipality expects that a payment plan to reimburse the public for concert debts will have to be negotiated."

The city won't let police, fire or even permits for the merchandise stall to be assigned to the event without seeing greenbacks. Canadian greenbacks.

It's possible that Metallica fans would prefer there to be no police involved, but the idea of not being able to buy a tshirt would be horrible. They'd be planning to wear that tshirt until the next time Metallica are in town.

Watch with No Rock: Halifax PopFest

You might enjoy at least some of the Halifax Pop Explosion highlights currently being splashed about by CBC Radio 3.

Celine Dion: a little picky

Celine Dion had announced a gig in Halifax, and was somewhat surprised that - rather than declare a Celine Dion day - the people of Halifax were a little disappointed. Or, rather, a newspaper columnist was.

Celine, however, threw a big fit and pulled the gig. Not quite grasping that people weren't that arsed about her coming in the first place, her husband-manager Rene Angélil suggested that Halifax should feel itself scolded:

"I'm gonna tell you something and I hope everyone is listening. Don't try to find any reasons for cancelling the concert. There's only one reason and you know what it is," he said.

"I'm not saying that all people in Halifax are negative, but … this is a question of feeling. We're humans. If you would go to a city and you read day after day … 'This is not the place for you, you shouldn't have come, I expected someone else,' I don't know how you would feel about going there."

Now, considering some of the things that people say about Celine Dion - references to her horse-faced honking, suggestions that she could play a role keeping shipping off rocks in thick fog, that sort of thing - this might be considered a little touchy.

It gets a worse, too:

Angélil, who said he monitors worldwide media response to Dion on a daily basis, said he's astonished at the response from the Halifax media.

"We get negative reactions all the time when they review her records or shows. I mean, this is part of the game. But we never got negative reactions before an event," he said.

"Wait until she performs and then you can say whatever you want about Celine."

Now, leaving aside the image of a woman so vain she's got her husband up tapping her name into Google News on a daily basis, is it really necessary after her surprisingly long and drawn out career to actually wait for the gig to happen to have a pretty good idea what its going to be like? It's not as if people come away from Dion gigs saying "blimey... spunkrock... you never know what you're going to get, do you?" It's surely fair enough to hear a woman who has been turning in the same performance for a decade or so is coming to town and to say "her music is insipid so it's a bit of a shame."

Still, it's good to know it only takes a negative preview in the local paper to keep her out of town. We know what to do.