The metal band Pantera will not appear at the twin festivals "Rock am Ring" at the Nürburgring in the Eifel and "Rock im Park" in Nuremberg after all. The organizers announced this in identical statements on Monday on Twitter.

"The band Pantera will not perform at 'Rock am Ring' and 'Rock im Park' 2023 as announced," said the first tweet.

The second was followed by the explanation: "In the last few weeks we have had many intensive discussions with artists, our partners and you, the festival fans, continued to deal with the criticism together and decided to remove the band from the program gain weight."

Previously there had been great excitement and criticism of the scheduled gig. "The reason for this is a planned appearance by the band Pantera, whose singer Phil Anselmo made a video with right-wing extremist failures that was circulating on the Internet in 2016," summarized Die Toten Hosen - who also appeared on "Rock im Park" and "Rock am Ring" - the trigger of the conflict on Instagram a few days ago.

Two years after the incident, Anselmo (54) said in an interview with "Metall Hammer": "It hurt me deeply that people took my behavior at face value, because what I said is not my true opinion . I accept every individual as an individual. I have defended individuality, not the mass, throughout my life, my entire career."

He continued: "There are great people all over the world, regardless of the color of their skin. I find it absurd, repulsive and unfortunate that some people want to put me in the wrong corner. I was an idiot on purpose that night, to put it that way."

Die Toten Hosen commented on any attempts at apology by the singer in their above-mentioned post with the words: "Even if he apologized soon afterwards for his underground behavior and has since asserted that he is not a racist and that he also learned from his behavior at the time, the question remains how credible his apology is and how to deal with this issue."

A solution seems to have been found for the twin festivals on June 2-4, 2023.