There are some beef between Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Biffy Clyro’s Simon Neil…who? I know, the first guy is a superstar and the second unknown to me too, but Biffy Clyro are an indie Scottish band which got mainstream the last years, and they are actually super famous across the pond… and apparently sound like the Foo Fighters.
So Nine Inch Nails, which just played an intimate show here in Los Angeles at the Troubadour – and I wasn’t invited – were part of the 2013 Reading and Leeds Festivals late August. Curiously for us, NIN weren’t the headliner at Reading on August 25th, Biffy Clyro were! This didn’t please Reznor who twitted:
‘Should be an unusual show tonight at Reading… …the lying promoter and the band following us (whoever the fuck they are) fucked us on our production.’
Oohs! It doesn’t sound like a friendly remark, ‘whoever the fuck they are?’ Isn’t it a bit pretentious? Trent wasn’t happy, and he took umbrage because being second place spoiled his little show! But according to Faster Louder, frontman Simon Neil was fast at responding to Reznor:
‘I think he basically spat his dummy out. Nine Inch Nails are a huge band and they’ve been headlining loads of festivals everywhere and I think their manager or someone told him they weren’t headlining Reading and Leeds, god forbid, and he basically spat his dummy out and decided to take it out on us … He played with us on the Friday night and there was no problem. He didn’t care about the Leeds bands obviously and he knew damn fine who we were, so I think he was just being obnoxious.’
‘I was dying to tweet back to him all day … but we just wanted to focus on our show. We thought, ‘Well you might not know who we are now, but I guarantee by the end of today you’ll know exactly who we are,’ that was our plan … We’re not naive, Trent Reznor operates in a different world to the rest of them. He lives in Beverly Hills, he’s won Oscars and all that. And he’s just brought the band back together. So maybe for a split second [we were offended], but to be honest we’ve kind of had enough of that happening through the years that it didn’t bother us so much.’
I know it sounds strange to us that these guys got the headliner title, but I guess they are big enough over there to deserve it? Reznor shouldn’t have been so arrogant, his band has all the success of the world, I saw hundreds of people lining up in front of Amoeba at 10pm on Monday to get a chance to see him at the Troubadour, some of them would have sold their right arm to get a winning ticket! And when you have the chance and the privilege to have reached this level of stardom, shouldn’t humility and generosity come easily?