At this year’s Grammy Awards on Monday night, singer Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter won in four categories, making her the musician with the most golden gramophones. 32 pieces in total! Congratulations! But dear Ms. Knowles-Carter, that’s no reason for airs and certainly no reason to avoid Berlin, or why in Apollo’s name don’t you honor us on your upcoming “Renaissance World Tour”?
There had been rumors for a long time and at the beginning of February the certainty came: Beyoncé is going on tour and is also honoring our side of the Atlantic. European capitals from Stockholm, Brussels, Paris and London have already registered prophylactically on the waiting lists of the relevant presale exchanges. Because one thing is for sure: When “Queen B” comes, the tickets will sell out faster than you can sing “Best Thing I Never Had”. In Berlin, amid all the hustle and bustle, there was only one question to be answered: will she be performing in the Mercedes-Benz Arena or in the Olympic Stadium?
Then came the disillusionment – and the realization only slowly trickled through: “B” wasn’t coming to Berlin at all. Your stops in Germany are Hamburg, Frankfurt and Cologne. Please what? And the rumor mill was already churning: In Cologne she will be performing in the RheinEnergie Stadium, in Hamburg it is the Volkspark Stadium and in Frankfurt the Deutsche Bank Park, also a stadium. All three venues have around 60,000 seats, so is the Mercedes-Benz Arena too small and the Olympic Stadium too big?
The Berlin journaille also gossip
Among other things, the “Berliner Zeitung” jumped up, chatted and headlined: “Beyoncé avoids Berlin” and also immediately provided a reason: In Berlin, US superstars sometimes had problems filling large stadiums for expensive money and Beyoncé would have such a disgrace “not in the mood”.
But is that true? At the time of going to press there was no response from “Bey'”, but a spokeswoman for Live Nation, the tour’s event company, did: “The tour was booked based on availability. Unfortunately, nothing was available in Berlin,” was the brief answer.
The “head promoter” of the booking agency Konzertbüro Schoneberg, Andreas Möller, explains this in a little more detail. He can only speculate on the specific case, but in general he cannot imagine that Beyoncé deliberately avoids Berlin: “Berlin is a popular travel destination for her target group, and there are enough examples of musicians in her league happily giving up come to Berlin,” he says.
And Möller also confirms: The decisions in which cities to play have different reasons and one of them is the availability of the venues. “Many artists are limited in time, the sequence of the successive cities must be logical. So it may simply be that there was no capacity in the Berlin venues in this time frame.” We are satisfied with that again.
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