Not even two of rock’s legendary musicians can thwart the London police.
In London’s Hyde Park Saturday, Bruce Springsteen was performing a duet with Sir Paul McCartney when the police unplugged their microphones because the show was past the 10:30 p.m. city sound curfew.
Both Fans and E Street Band members expressed their outrage on Twitter.
“English cops may be the only people on Earth that wouldn’t want to hear one more from Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney,” E Street guitarist Steven Van Zandt tweeted, “Is there just too much fun in the world? We would’ve been off by 11 if we’d done one more. On a Saturday night! Who were we disturbing?”
According to the Associated Press, large concerts at Hyde Park have traditionally caused tension between fans and local residents.
“It was unfortunate that the three hour-plus performance by Bruce Springsteen was stopped right at the very end but the curfew is laid down by the authorities in the interest of the public’s health and safety,” said concert promoter Live Nation in a statement on their website.
This isn’t the first time McCartney has been cut off by the cops. In 1969, a famed Beatles rooftop concert in New York City was shut down for disrupting local businesses and causing a traffic jam on the street below.
The Boss is known for his long shows and Van Zandt tweeted that they “break curfews in every country.”
London Mayor Boris Johnson told local radio station LBC 97.3, “It sounds to me like an excessively efficacious decision. You won’t get that during the Olympics. If they’d have called me, my answer would have been for them to jam in the name of the Lord!”