EUROPE – who have just released their 12th studio album, Come This Madness – once thought the unthinkable: ‘Let’s NOT play The Final Countdown’ tonight’.
“We were going to do it once,” singer Joey Tempest told us in 2018. “But we jinxed it I think.
“It was the Download Festival in the UK, the biggest festival in the world probably. One of them, anyway.
“And we decided on the way: ‘Let’s make, let’s do something different this time – let’s exclude, let’s not play ‘The Final Countdown’ from the set’.
“Can you imagine the Download audience? There would be such a boo and scream that we would get more and more publicity.
“But the thing is, what happened was: we didn’t make it to the show. That year in particular it was raining. People were … we missed our slot by five minutes.
“A lot of other bands missed it too. They had to rearrange the whole festival.
“So we took it as a sign never to discuss leaving it out.
“On the tour bus there, we said ‘let’s take it out’. We didn’t make it to the show and now we’ve decided not to do it again.”
Hear the full Joey Tempest interview HERE
