Foo Fighters are taking on the insurance industry. The US band have filed a lawsuit against the insurers of their 2015 European tour for failing “to pay amounts that even they recognise are due and owing” on claims made to several shows the band cancelled.
The group are suing Lloyds of London, several insurance companies and the insurance broker who secured the policies, Robertson Taylor, according to Billboard. The two-part lawsuit covers two separate runs of shows: first, two at Wembley Stadium and one at Murrayfield in Edinburgh, which were cancelled after Dave Grohl broke a metatarsal onstage in Gothenburg on 12 June 2015; then four gigs – in Turin, Barcelona, Paris and Lyon – cancelled after the Paris terror attacks last November.
With the British shows, the band claim Robertson Taylor failed to properly warn them that adding three shows to make up for the cancelled gigs would adversely affect their claim, and that insurers would view the gigs as having been rescheduled. They say the two Wembley gigs would have been the highest-grossing of the tour. The three cancelled UK shows were replaced with two gigs at Milton Keynes Bowl and one at Murrayfield, all in September 2015.
In the second part of the complaint, the group say: “Foo Fighters reasonably expected that the Terrorism Policy would provide them coverage for the four November 2015 performances, which were necessarily cancelled as a direct result of terrorism. While [the insurers] have engaged in a seemingly neverending series of requests for increasingly irrelevant information, particularly as to the necessity of cancelling the Turin and Barcelona performances, they have not provided Foo Fighters with any indication that they dispute coverage for the cancellation of the Paris, France and Lyon, France performances. To date, seven months later, however, London Market Insurers have not paid or offered to pay a single penny of Foo Fighters’ terrorism coverage claim.”
Insurance for large gigs is a necessity because of the cost of refunds – which runs into millions of pounds for stadium shows – in the event of cancellations. That cost to the band is then swollen by the lost revenue from merchandise sales. A typical tour insurance policy costs around 1.5%-2% of a band’s revenue. The 80 shows on the 2015 Sonic Highways tour had gross ticket sales ranging from around £460,000 for smaller arena sales to £9m for big stadium shows.