The 2013 Regeneration Tour, billed as “North America’s premier 80’s tour”, just got a bit smaller. The Human League has dropped off the tour.
Phil Oakey of Human League photo by Ros O'Gorman
The lineup for the semi-annual trek had been the Human League, Andy Bell of Erasure and Howard Jones but somewhere along the way there was a breakdown between the promoters and the Human League as they have pulled out of the show.
That puts the tour, which had four announced dates in August, into a bit of a quandry as the promoter look to fill the empty slot. They posted the following on their Facebook page on Wednesday:
As some of you may have heard, The Human League will not be joining us on this summer’s Regeneration Tour as was previously announced in certain media and at certain venues.
We are waiting today on an answer regarding their replacement. Andy Bell and Howard Jones and Information Society have all expressed their desire to continue with the tour. I know this may be disappointing for those of you who bough tickets and were looking forward to seeing THL. We hope you will be as excited about their replacement.
They tried to keep the fans interested with a further post later in the day:
Just to help get a few names out of your heads, ABC are already playing some shows this June in the US, that puts them out of the picture for us. Heaven 17 have been contacted and could only do 1/2 the tour, we need someone to confirm for the whole tour. Marc Almond will only tour as Marc Almond, not as Soft Cell, not quite as valuable for tickets. Simple Minds will likely never tour the US again as their expectations are way too high here, I tried a few years ago, could not make it work with them, also Jim will not tour as part of an “80’s” show. New Order are touring the US already. Yaz does not exist and Allison Moyet is touring on her own in September. Belinda is touring this summer in the Go-Go’s. Peter Godwin & Book of Love do mean nearly enough to be in this slot, they would be under Information Society in the bill.
Why the Human League dropped from the tour is not known in detail, but it appears that there may have been some problems over money. The took to their own website on Thursday to try and clear a few things up with two separate messages.
As some of our US fans may already have heard from other, somewhat premature, sources, we are sorry to announce that we will not now be touring the US this summer as we had planned. We are really very sorry about this cancellation, all of us were really looking forward to coming over and playing for you but the decision was really completely out of our control. Essentially we were promised one thing and delivered something so completely different we just could not make it work, much as we wanted to.
Our apologies again, we will be back we promise.
(…)Thank you all very much for your kind posts below and for your understanding over the cancellation of our US tour dates, much appreciated we assure you. As far as answering the question of ‘why’ we had to withdraw from these dates goes we don’t think it would be appropriate to get into that here so all we will say is that, unfortunately, two plus two still equals four, not six. It’s all about the maths really.
It does seem, though, that Howard Jones is raring to go with the following statement on his webpage:
Dear US Supporters of Howard Jones, as you may already be aware The Human League are now not participating in the Regeneration Tour in the USA this summer. (…) We are working hard to try and get over to the USA this summer and will post a further update as soon as we have any more information.
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