Just before the end of their current tour with Versailles (read my interview with them here) French tour promoter company B7Klan announced another visual kei band for this year: Matenrou Opera. The band started back in 2007 and actually their so-far only visit to Europe in Spring 2008 was as the opening act of Versailles on the latter’s first EU tour. Back then they were signed to Kamijo (Versailles’ singer & leader) agency, but they left later on, went major and became a quite popular act on their own right with a melodic rock / metal sound and some truly excellent stand out tracks. Last year, after their guitarist Anzi left they kinda revamped themselves and opened a new chapter in the band’s history: they released a best of compilation, a new mini album, aptly titled Phoenix Rising and they also considerably toned down their usually rather extreme image (just compare the above photo with any of these).

And now, on their 10th anniversary, they will finally return to Europe and do so as a headliner! It will be a quite decent tour, covering eight cities in seven countries, staring in Helsinki, Finland on the 30th of June. Tickets will go on sale on the 10th of February and will be available thru B7Klan’s website.

Update (2017.06.15): Yesterday, just two weeks before the start, the band announced on its official site, that they are cancelling the tour. They claim that the reason is the worsening security in Europe due to the recent wave of terror attacks and also some problems with the local promoter. B7Klan has not released a statement yet, so it will be interesting to see their point of view as well.

Update (2017.06.16): B7Klan finally posted an announcement and while it is somewhat vaguely (and badly) worded, it implies to a completely different reason than the band’s previous statement. You can find their full statement below (minus the part about tickets), but basically it seems that the tour was cancelled due to lack of interest and bad ticket sales. And also seem like the company will stop working with visual kei acts altogether after about ten years. Which is pretty sad, especially as for the last several years, since vk’s popularity started waning, they were basically the only company that still tried to bring well known visual kei acts to Europe. Just the last couple of years, since the decline started, they worked with Versailles, Nocturnal Bloodlust, Deathgaze, Lycaon and Born (and probably more, that I do not remember right now), which is a very decent list and kept on doing these tours even though they obviously did not make as much money as the ones they did back in the so called Golden Age Of Visual Kei In Europe. The announcement closes in a hopeful manner, saying that they hope there will be a new interest in vk in Europe in the future, but well… we will just wait and see I guess. But it might mean the end of the era when big visual kei acts toured Europe in a somewhat regular manner and I am afraid that from now on all we gonna have are the tiny, no name acts that pop up in EU once in a while.

“B7 is very sad to inform we had to cancel the upcoming european tour planned for Matenrou Opera. Despite the band efforts and our promotion we must face a pity reality. We have been working J-Rock and Visual Kei for 10 years and for us this is a very sad ending. We hope for a new interest of Visual Kei bands in the future to allow them to tour Europe again in good conditions.
(…)
Once again, we thank Matenrou Opera for their understanding and we adress our sincere apologises to the fans.”

2017.06.30 – Finland, Helsinki: Gloria
2017.07.01 – UK, London: Underworld
2017.07.03 – Germany, Köln: MTC
2017.07.04 – Poland, Wroclaw: Firlej
2017.07.06 – Germany, München: Feierwerk
2017.07.08 – France, Paris: La Boule Noire
2017.07.09 – Netherlands, Amsterdam: Melkweg
2017.07.11 – Russia, Moscow: Club Moskva