Peter Bjorn and John couldn’t whistle their way out of the SXSW show from hell on Wednesday night, when a lot of the “Young Folks” in the crowd got testy after the set was delayed by twenty minutes and there were numerous false starts in their songs. “It was an awful show,” Peter Moren told AP. “But it’s also good that stuff like that happens occasionally. Otherwise you become bigheaded.”
Reps for the Swedish trio are on damage control over the SXSW bomb, blaming technical difficulties, which undoubtedly put a thorn in the band’s side throughout the set. Rolling Stone, however, posted a story a few days ago that was a bit more critical of the band’s attempt to rehabilitate the set. For some reason, RS has taken the story down, but we google-cached it and here’s an interesting bit:
“Eriksson whistled a different melody for a few moments to kill some time, but the band mostly appeared disinterested and disconnected from the audience — a shout of ‘show me that you give a sh*t!’ was later followed by boos as the band struggled to get a guitar working (‘Boo for bad guitars,’ the band responded. Perhaps a language barrier was to blame?).”
It’s possible that reps for the band asked RS to pull the story, as negative press from a big magazine like Rolling Stone could hurt sales of their highly anticipated album Living Thing that drops next Tuesday (Mar. 31). No worries though, young folks, Living Thing is a studio album.