The NIN trouble
As mentioned before the Nine Inch Nails were booked headlining for the Frequency festival. But they had a very hard stand. The organizers gave them the next to last slot at the main stage on the 2nd day (starting 10:30pm). Generally this is not a bad slot– prime time at the evening, main stage with room for a lot of crowd, not too late – so the crowd shouldn’t be completely exhausted. But due to some unfortunate circumstances it ended in a scandal.
The slot was between the two German bands “Beatsteaks” and “Die Ärzte”, those two bands share a lot of fans. One reason for the Beatsteaks success was advertising of “Die Ärzte”, who referred to the Beatstakes in on of their songs. Also both German bands play German punk rock, where NIN’s style is American industrial rock from that point of view, they would have been far more compatible with Interpol (they are doing American indie rock). But Interpol was put into a similar slot trapped between two other German bands (“Jan Delay” and “Freundeskreis”) at the second stage.
Plenty of people attended the Beatsteaks’ concert, who afterwards stayed in the front rows waiting for Die Ärzte, without any interest in the performance of NIN. Even worse, a lot of them was not open minded enough to take the NIN performance and started chants demanding Die Ärzte on stage (“Wir wollen die Ärzte sehen! Wir wollen die Ärzte sehen!”. So the atmosphere got really screwed. NIN lead Trent Reznor commented the show
“the worst performance and certainly the worst crowd of the whole tour by far.”
in his official tour blog. This was a very annoying situation for all fans of harder music, who already had to cope with the canceled performance of Tool the day before.