~ Chilee Agunanna of Encomium Magazine
Nigerians joined the Guinness Worldwide 250 Anniversary celebrations at the Oceanview Restaurant, Victoria Island, Lagos on Thursday September 24th, 2009.
The show had M.I, D’banj, Wande Coal and the Mo’Hits Allstars perform most of their hit tracks to a lively and appreciative audience before P-Square came on stage.
The track four of the new P-Square Danger album ‘Possibility’ features 2face and they obviously wanted to perform it with him. But the organisers wouldn’t let 2face on stage to join P-Square. At about 10pm, Guinness had planned to transmit the performances round the world live and wanted Sean Paul to be on the Nigerian stage at that precise moment, but P-Square would have none of it. They went backstage and after a few minutes ran back onto the stage screaming “These organisers are f**ked, they don’t want 2face to perform”. Paul then threw his microphone into the crowd and all hell broke loose.
The crowd immediately began throwing things on to the stage while at the same time shouting off the roof “2face, 2face, 2face!”. In order to safeguard their musical instrument, the ban packed up and left the stage and the rain of objects ranging from plastic bottles, drink cans and every other available object continued to drop on the stage.
Basketmouth, who was the MC and DJ Jimmy Jatt who was also part of the concert team tried all they could to pacify the crowd, but had little success. They promised that 2face would perform after Sean Paul, but the crowd would have none of that. The show simply stopped for about an hour while the issue was sorted out backstage.
P-Square later came back on stage to complete their performance inviting 2face to join them, but they performed to their CD because the band didn’t come back. P-Square afterwards apologised for their action. They said that one must always be their brother’s keeper adding that something like that should never happen again. They ended their performance by introducing Sean Paul to the stage.
All the ugly incident notwithstanding, the Nigerian version of the Guinness 250 concert celebration was a huge success.
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What do you guys think of P-Square's behaviour?
This is what I think.
First of all, don’t throw anything into a crowd, you could have hurt someone.
Secondly, we all have to learn to control our anger, especially if we want to continue staying 'on top'. It's possible that this behaviour will turn off other corporate organisations from hiring them to perform at their shows. Remember what happened to Eedris Abdulkareem?. But maybe their action is justified? What do you guys think?
