Justin Bieber's India concert: 'Sorry' singer cheats Beliebers by lip syncing at a 'live' gig

While legions of Beliebers seemed only too happy with Canadian pop sensation Justin Bieber's performance in Mumbai on 10 May 2017, there are now rumblings of discontent from some quarters over the 'Sorry' singer's lip-syncing, First Post reported.

Bieber's Mumbai performance — at the DY Patil Stadium — marked the India leg of his Purpose World Tour. It was his first concert here in India and he flew down from Dubai (the previous pit-stop on his tour).

There was a crowd of about 45,000 people at the convert venue, many of them teenagers accompanied by their parents, who had gathered to hear Bieber sing.

They queued up outside the stadium from 8 am onwards (some of them even earlier) — the gates were to open only past 2 pm — in the sweltering May heat; paid anything between Rs 100-200 for bottled water (which they weren't allowed to carry inside the stadium); paid another Rs 100 for snacks like chips, ice cream and Rs 150 for a can of Red Bull; waited expectantly while DJs Sartek, Zaeden and Alan Walker played their sets — and cheered loudly for their idol, Bieber, when he came on stage.

Bieber himself came on stage about 10 minutes after the scheduled time 8 pm, and performed for around 120 minutes (fans had initially been told it would be a 90-minute set).

But then came the part the audience hadn't perhaps expected — Bieber lip-synced to at least right of the 12 tracks he performed on stage that night.

The concert had cost a cool $4 million; like an international artiste of his level, Bieber had a pricey list of demands from the organisers; and fans had shelled out anything between Rs 5,000 to Rs 15,000 for tickets to the gig.

So the consternation over the lip-syncing was all too-understandable.

Add to that the general consensus that this was among the most badly managed concerts anyone had been to in recent times, and what you had, was a recipe for dissastisfaction.

Musician Leon Saalis de Souza pointed out that there goof-ups right from the box office onwards.

"The box office ran out of paper and people had to wait for a whole hour till somebody finally realised that there was a show already running inside! Missed Alan Walker's set due to this, and the attitude of the Book My Show people at the box office didn't help either," de Souza wrote in a Facebook post, adding, "Justin Bieber, please don't do a show in India, like you were coming out of a shower and running late for a dress rehearsal. It is safe to say, that the show was an operational and a production nightmare, except for the fireworks bit and the feeling I got when I finally managed to sit in a cab two hours after the concert got over. And to think, we waited four months for this. Pathetic."

In a second post, de Souza also captured the disillusionment of many of the concert goers when he wrote:

Musician Sona Mohapatra also took a critical view of the lip-syncing, and expressed her views — much to the consternation of Beliebers — on her Twitter and Facebook pages.

"How come we don't hold our idols to some standards?" Sona wrote. "Forget higher, just — don't take our money and treat us with contempt?"