What I hope to see in a performance is good energy, tight playing, and strong singing (if there is any). I understand the desire to see familiar music from someone you've followed for any length of time, but it's more important that they have the desire to play it, old or new; the performance will always be better for it. I read Matthew's Fluxblog post about the Smashing Pumpkins, where part of the complaint was the lack of older material, but I think the greater complaint about the new material was a lack of cohesion. It also sounded like Billy Corgan was being an asshole, which no one really enjoys in a concert. Perhaps if you were an established band and intended to tour playing all or mostly new material, you should advertise it as such so that people don't feel led on. But if you don't have an interest in playing your older music, why should you? If the desire to please some fans is outweighed by the desire to progress, at least it's being honest.
I rarely see shows now. But the best shows I remember seeing are memorable for the performance quality more than them playing old songs. Though most of them did play older songs. I saw the Police in 1982 with The Beat opening (playing under the name "English Beat") and that is still one of the best shows I've ever seen. I barely knew The Beat and was blown away by the energy and quality of their playing. The Police were always fantastic in concert. Peter Murphy in 1990 was excellent, in great part due to his incredibly strong live vocal performance. The most recent concert I went to was David Byrne's new one. It was very good, his voice was unbelievably good for a live show, I think it's better than ever. He played a mix of old and new (about half and half),but the audience response was much greater to his old, known songs; I have to admit when I heard the beginnings to, say, "The Great Curve", or "Help Me Somebody", I got goosebumps. For the audience, familiarity breeds a kind of excitement it's hard to reach with even very good new material. His new material was very good, but certainly slower for the most part, and the audience grew just a little listless during some of them. The quality was good enough that even if he had played all new stuff, I would have still loved the show, but hearing some of the great old songs really made it special. It was also too brief a show, about 90 minutes.
I do think if the artist's heart isn't in it, they probably shouldn't play it, unless they can really fake it well. |
