Talk about having a punk attitude. The Exploited aren’t going to let the coronavirus pandemic curtail their 40th anniversary tour.
“F–k coronavirus! I have had five heart attacks, a quad heart bypass and a heart pacemaker fitted,” frontman Wattie Buchan told tour promoter DRW Entertainment, who shared the rocker’s thoughts in a Facebook post. “Cancel gigs for a virus? We ain’t f–king Green Day — we are the real deal. No danger will we be canceling our upcoming gigs. Punk’s not dead!”
The band, who just kicked off their tour of New Zealand and Australia on March 13 with a sold-out show, have gigs scheduled through March 29. They are then slated to head off for the European leg of their tour in early May, wrapping with a show in France on June 5.
While the Scottish rockers have zero plans to scrap their tour, they did cancel their February gigs in Spain due to Buchan’s health. “Wattie [is] going back into hospital for a minor operation,” The Exploited announced on their Facebook page in January. The singer’s health has made headlines in the past, including in 2014 when he suffered a heart attack while on stage. In 2017, while the band was on tour, Buchan again had to be hospitalized for what the band called a “very serious heart condition,” adding that their frontman “almost died.”
Since the coronavirus outbreak, dozens of musical acts and events have announced cancellations and postponements. Among them are Green Day, Billie Eilish, Madonna, Papa Roach, Pearl Jam, and many, many more as a number of countries institute bans on large public gatherings. Festivals impacted include Coachella, Stagecoach, Ultra and others.
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