The much ballyhooed reunion performance by GODFLESH at this year’s Hellfest Open Air in France over the weekend was unfortunately affected by issues out of the band’s control. Despite getting through the set, mainman Justin K. Broadrick was not pleased with the situation and issued the following recap:

“Okay, if you were in attendance for this then I am sure you are aware of how disappointed we were with what transpired, and we are sure you are/were most likely disappointed too.

“I am afraid that it was all utterly beyond our control, we salvaged a performance out of what was a fairly ridiculous set of events. The power generator blowing during the set from THE YOUNG GODS, on just prior to us, was the catalyst for the ensuing chaos. At one point, performing at all was even in doubt. We had an hour allocated for both soundcheck and stage set up, since there is no soundcheck prior to the start of the festival, unfortunately, something that we really did need, but we were having to put our trust in the one hour allocated before performance, this one hour then became 20 short and extremely stressful minutes, with the stage management proclaiming that we must start immediately without any check of the sound, disastrous for us - additionally, the backline they hired in for us was not entirely correct or had faults with it, Ben’s bass rig specifically, my guitar amp was not right either, the monitors were awful without the time for us to correct them sufficiently, resulting in not hearing virtually any of the Machine in the monitors for nearly all of our opener ‘Like Rats’, the DVD machine for our films was also somewhat faulty. In short, this was an absolute frustrating catalogue of disasters, presenting the band in, for us, one of the worst ways imaginable. We do though consider that we somewhat forged a performance out of a significantly bad situation.

“We played 40 of our intended 60 minutes; quite literally onstage I managed to turn 30 minutes into 40 due to ongoing arguments, during our set, with the stage management.

“We’re really sorry to everyone concerned that all this happened and hopefully this will all be rectified at the forthcoming GODFLESH performance at the Supersonic Festival.”