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Poppy’s Rockville Set Cut Off After One Minute as Severe Weather Shuts Down Festival
Poppy’s Welcome To Rockville set ended after one minute when severe weather and lightning protocols forced the festival to shut down.
Poppy barely got started at Welcome To Rockville before the weather did what festival weather so often does in Florida: stop everything. Her Friday night set at the Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach was halted after less than a minute, with severe weather and lightning protocols forcing the performance to end almost as soon as it began.
Welcome To Rockville is running from Thursday through Sunday, May 7 to 10, and this year’s bill is stacked with Guns N’ Roses, Foo Fighters, My Chemical Romance, Bring Me The Horizon, Turnstile and The Offspring all vying for top billing. But for a while on Friday evening, the focus shifted from the marquee names to the storm rolling across Volusia County.
As Poppy launched into the opening song of her set, weather warnings flashed on screens around the site and festivalgoers were pushed to their campsites and cars, or into the grandstands, where they could wait out the storm safely. The interruption was abrupt, but not permanent. Once the danger passed, the rest of Friday’s programme picked back up, with Foo Fighters eventually taking over the main stage as headliners.
The clip of the shutdown has been circulating alongside the festival’s weekend coverage, and it’s a reminder of how quickly a live show can disappear in a place like this. One minute you’re mid-song, the next you’re being told to move.
Poppy had released her seventh studio album, Empty Hands, in January, following Negative Spaces just a year earlier. Like that record, it reunited her with producer Jordan Fish, formerly of Bring Me The Horizon, and songwriter Stephen Harrison of House Of Protection.
Speaking to NME ahead of Empty Hands, she said working with Fish again felt like “the right choice”. “There’s a really nice point of consistency where you no longer have to explain yourself or your reasoning, and it’s understood and accepted,” she said.
She also drew a distinction between Negative Spaces and Empty Hands, saying the differences are “very evident.” “When the others hear it and decide to call it a genre or put their goo on it, that’s up to them,” she said. “I know where the line is drawn. To articulate that gives a bit of a disservice to it, because it muddies the presentation.”
Back in March, Poppy also joined forces with Son Lux’s Ryan Lott on In Death We’ve Just Begun, the anthem for Marathon.
