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Originally Posted by The Walrus
Can you copy and paste it? I can't tell what I'm supposed to be looking at
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Whoops, dont know why that link didnt work, anyway here it is.
Ali.
Hi everybody,
For this last part of my diaries about the 2006 tour I want to address something we've been hearing a lot about lately: the set list! Some of you might think we don't change it around enough, or they think we play the exact same thing twice at the same town, on the same tour. But even so, even if we play the same set list six nights in a row, it's because we simply play six different cities to six different audiences!
Yes, we visit some areas more than once during this tour, some of it by demand. And that's great for us, it's good to know people want us to come back! Whenever we get somewhere that we already played within the last year, or 30 miles from it, we pull up the set list of that earlier show to make sure we won't play exactly the same, 'cause there's no point in doing that. For example, if we opened with "HELLRAISER" back then, we might open with another song the second time around or something along those lines.
The problem that we have, is that we only have 1 hour and 20 minutes to play on this tour. Within that time, we want to promote our new album so we play 2 or 3 new ones.....but what can we drop when you have about eighteen top 20 songs, like we do??!! (some problem!) We can't really justify throwing in "GODS OF WAR" or something like that, not right now ..... hopefully there'll be many other tours when we can extend the set to feature more of our more "selective" stuff!
Chances are, even if we try and include something other than the ones that we play now, it would be something from "YEAH!" because again, we ARE on the road to promote that. If we are going to play songs that the audience haven't heard, we have to be very careful where we place them in the set. For example, opening with "HELLRAISER" works, but to put it in between "ARMAGEDDON IT" and "ANIMAL" would be a complete disaster! Believe me, some songs definitely work together and others don't -- to balance a set list is not just a case of putting some great songs on a list and then just play them!!! The order in which they're played is very important. Anyone expecting us to play "PHOTOGRAPH" as the second song would be nuts! That's an example of a song that HAS to be at the end, because a show always has to build up towards a climax.
There's some people who want us to play B-sides, things like "RING OF FIRE" -- well, we've done that before and guess what? It didn't always work too well. It works for the mega-fans, it worked for three people in Japan! But when we play something like that, 99% of the crowd goes "what the **** is this?!" So if we're gonna do something unknown, we might as well do a new song! Now the first part of the set is where we are most likely to feel a little bit experimental, or adventurous! It's where we play songs that weren't necessarily hit singles like, "FOOLIN'" or "HEARTBREAK" (which was more a video hit than a radio success). But the second part is definitely for the hits.
That's reality: every single person in the audience wants to hear a different set list, but we have to play what we feel is right and generally speaking, people are not interested in going to a big rock show to hear songs they don't know. That's the way it is!
We can't please everybody all the time, but we're really working our asses off to please as many people at the same time as possible!!
Luv 'n' peace,