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Bolton coming, but why a house party?
By Ranjit Vethakan
Michael Bolton is the latest musical heavyweight to come our way, and will perform with his band at Water's Edge on Friday, November 25.
The Sunday Times can exclusively reveal the two-time Grammy winner, one of the several major names to emerge in the 1980s, will be visiting Colombo at the tail-end of a tour which began in early March this year.

It was The Sunday Times which broke the news about the long-anticipated visit by the King of Romance, Engelbert Humperdinck, even before the ink in the contract had dried.

Bolton has sold about 50 million albums in a career that began in the early 1980s, but hasn't hit the top 40 in any major market in quite a long, long while.

Known for hit tunes like When A Man Loves A Woman, Love Is A Wonderful Thing, How Can We Be Lovers If We Can't Be Friends, How Am I Supposed to Live Without You, and many more, Bolton will also become the first major international act to play in the Vietnamese capital of Ho Chi Minh City outside the war years. He is scheduled to play at the huge Ho Chi Minh Sports Palace on December 1.

While Bolton's Sri Lankan fans, as expected, will gleefully welcome this concert date, well placed industry sources based in Los Angeles, Melbourne and London questioned the wisdom of the promoter's decision to stage this "big sound" show in a miniature theatre like Water's Edge (capacity a paltry 1,300). Every venue linked with Bolton's current tour has had a minimum capacity of 2,500 seats.

Obviously, this source, along with her fellow critics, is well aware of the availability of much larger arenas in Colombo which, the trio claimed, could have gone a long, long way to help reduce the cost of tickets.

"We're talking about the possibility of ticket prices being less than half of what Sri Lankans would eventually have to fork. It sounds more like someone's having a house party", said the London-based source.

"I don't think Michael will be all that pleased when he learns about the capacity", said the source in Los Angeles, echoing the views of Engelbert, who was flabbergasted and somewhat irate, when discussing the capacity of Water's Edge during my phone interview, in the lead-up to his Colombo concert. Ever the diplomat, Engelbert refrained from making any public comment on the number of fans able to attend.
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