Pearl Jam cancels gig after frontman's throat damaged by 'smoke from French wildfires'

Rock band Pearl Jam cancelled a concert after dust and smoke from heatwave-fuelled wildfires in France damaged their singer’s throat.

Eddie Vedder performed at the outdoor Lollapalooza Paris event on Sunday, amid extreme temperatures that broke records across France and was blamed on climate change.

Wildfires in the south west of France ravaged an area more than twice the size of Paris and forced the evacuation of 37,000 people and 1,000 zoo animals over more than a week as Europe was hit by a heatwave.

The American band, which comes from Seattle and is known for hits such as 1994’s Better Man, cancelled a planned Wednesday night gig in Vienna.

In the Austrian capital, amid high temperatures, animal rights campaigners demanded the city’s famous horse drawn carriages be forced to stop working when the mercury hit 30 degrees.

Pearl Jam offered fans a full refund and said they were “very, very, deeply sorry” about the “brutal news” and “horrible timing.”

“Due to the extreme circumstances at the last outdoor site outside of Paris (heat, dust, and smoke from the fires) our singer Ed Vedder’s throat was left damaged.”

“Ed wants to play. There’s just no throat available at this time.”

It is not clear if Pearl Jam will finish their European tour with final concerts planned in Prague on Friday and Amsterdam on Sunday and Monday.

On Thursday, Pope Francis called on world leaders to heed the Earth's "chorus of cries of anguish" stemming from climate change after the suffocating heatwave

Firefighters in France’s Gironde region, where more than 2,000 firemen and ten aircraft have battled for more than a week, said two huge blazes were finally contained and should be fully extinguished within weeks.

Spain, where more than 500 people died during a 10-day heatwave this month, has lost almost 734 square miles in its worst wildfires on record. As progress was made in containing the fires, the country was on alert for high temperatures.

Wildfires have already destroyed a larger area in the EU than all that was lost to blazes in the whole of last year, the bloc’s satellite monitoring service said Thursday.

As of July 16, the fires had torched 1,930 square miles, an area equivalent to the surface area of Trinidad and Tobago, the  European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) said.

The worst ever recorded year for wildfires was 2017, when nearly 3,861 square miles were lost, but EFFIS said this year could be even worse.

Officials in Slovenia, said it faced the biggest blaze since independence in 1991 and Bosnia also battled a blaze.

The fire in Slovenia’s southwestern Kras region has engulfed almost 5,000 acres and set off unexploded ordnance left over from World War I.