Let the music speak for itself?

[ambient]

I’d rather hear music played well with emotion and feel by a band with little or no, for want of a better phrase....stage presence, than hear music played badly, with mistakes and no emotion by a band that are more preoccupied by what they’re doing on stage or what they look like.

 

[Dad3353]

+1 ^^

(Although polystyrene Stonehenges wouldn't put me off completely, opening pods that don't open would, probably...)

Edited December 6, 2017 by Dad3353

[Monkey Steve]

System of a Down are odd.  First time i saw them was supporting Black Sabbath on the original farewell gig at the NEC in (I think) 1999.  Great performance, full of energy, bouncing around the stage.  Last year at Download...not so much.  Though I do understand that there are a few, ahem, issues between some of the band members, and that was reflected in the performance.

Marilyn Manson is another one - great when he's on the right drugs (Reading festivals in 2005 sticks out as being excellent), but dull as hell the last couple of time's I've seen him at festivals.  And QOTSA...loved them back in the day with Nick Oliveri, but as soon as he was sacked the live shows (and the music IMHO) have been very, very dull.

I don't think there's one right answer.  If the music is great then I'm not too worried about the show...but if the music isn't great then I'll still stick around if the show is great fun.  Basically I'm easy to please as long as the music and the show aren't both rubbish

To pick up on Blue's point, I think this makes a huge difference at the covers/bar band level, where you hear the same songs every week at differing levels of competency, but you'll remember and come back to see the band with the frontman who put on a great show.

[Lozz196]

2 hours ago, ambient said:

I’d rather hear music played well with emotion and feel by a band with little or no, for want of a better phrase....stage presence, than hear music played badly, with mistakes and no emotion by a band that are more preoccupied by what they’re doing on stage or what they look like.

 

Def, if a plain choice between one or the other music being played well would always be my choice.

[fretmeister]

23 hours ago, ead said:

I think we can probably agree that fans of Kiss are unlikely to like the  bands you mention and vice versa.  Is not beauty in the eye of the beholder?

I quite like JST, she's very good in such a staid old genre.

 

 

 

[ead]

1 hour ago, fretmeister said:

I quite like JST, she's very good in such a staid old genre.

 

 

 

I concur, seen her a few times live.  Have to say that I don't recognise the comments above about her shows being dull, there was plenty of audience interaction in the ones I have attended.

[EliasMooseblaster]

43 minutes ago, ead said:

I concur, seen her a few times live.  Have to say that I don't recognise the comments above about her shows being dull, there was plenty of audience interaction in the ones I have attended.

Allow me to split further hairs in clarifying my remarks - I draw a distinction between "lacking stage presence" and "being dull live". For me, JST can be a bit of the former but is certainly not the latter.

I've always enjoyed her live shows, but I feel I've been spoiled by similar artists like Ian Siegal, who have an almost shamanic quality about them that keeps an audience in rapt attention. JST's always entertaining to watch, but doesn't preoject quite the same "aura" from the stage. She certainly doesn't qualify for a space on my list of Bands I've Seen Who Were Boring (I say "list"; it's really just "Elbow" written in big letters...)

[Barking Spiders]

On 06/12/2017 at 13:13, Happy Jack said:

And you can make it worse - I've seen a number of pub bands in London where the 'spontaneous banter' is clearly scripted and rehearsed. My God does that suck.

My favourite was a 4-piece band where both guitarists and the bass player had mics & stands. About 30 minutes in to the first set, I finally twigged that one guitarist did all the singing and ... erm ... that was it. There were no BVs or anything going on.

The second guitarist and the bass player each had a mic & stand purely to let them do the pre-prepared banter.

 

Good point. Prepared 'banter' is usually painfully obvious, just like you see on the many dire comedy panel shows. You can best tell by the way the bantering band members stand on stage in relation to eachother and feign shock/surprise/amusement/whatever. When it's older blokes whose gags are seriously dated it's time to crawl off and die

Edited December 7, 2017 by Barking Spiders

[davepb24]

Saw the original Fields Of The Nephilim four times in their heyday...absolutely zero audience interaction, half the time you couldn't even see  them for smoke...yet rarely have I seen a band hold an audience so captivated 

[Bluewine]

On 12/6/2017 at 09:32, ambient said:

I’d rather hear music played well with emotion and feel by a band with little or no, for want of a better phrase....stage presence, 

 

That's fine if there's at least 50 other people in the room that share your position.

Blue

[ambient]

7 hours ago, Bluewine said:

That's fine if there's at least 50 other people in the room that share your position.

Blue

How an audience reacts to a gig is quite a genre specific thing, I think anyway.

What we're talking about is performance. There's an excellent book called 'Musicking' by Christopher Small. He defines 'musicking' as: To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing.

So either by going along to watch a gig, or by being a musician performing, we're all taking part in the process of 'musicking'. The book is really excellent, I encourage anyone who has any interest in music to read it, particularly if you do perform. 

There's another article that I was reading recently called 'Performing Performance: Interface design, liveness, and listener orientation', by Mark J. Butler. It's aimed mostly at the electronic music scene, but is sill relevant.

Performance is central to what I do, and I guess to what we all on here who gig do. I'm personally very aware when I gig that people are watching me. Even though it's only me sat on stage with a MacBook and a bunch of effects pedals, I do make a definite effort to interact with the music, and to demonstrate my part in what they're hearing.  I definitely don't dance or move about, but that's not expected. It would be expected though maybe in a rock and roll gig, and definitely would be in a more dance orientated genre. Which is my point.

The article by Mark Butler describes how electronic musicians, and DJs sometimes over state their movements on stage, there might only be them on stage with a MacBook and nothing else, but they are still 'performing', and by the somewhat dramatic gestures they're showing their participation in the production of the music.

I occasionally play gigs where I'm sharing the bill with laptop artists, sometimes they're using treated instruments too. Again, they're engrossed in what they're doing and their interaction is evident. They're not expected to get up and move or dance, but it's still obvious by what they do do, that they're not just checking their emails :).

To reiterate, it all depends on the actual music that's being performed. 

[Cat Burrito]

"It's all about the music" is a fairly tired cliché. It's about how it makes you feel, it's a soundtrack to people's lives. Music is about passion but music can also be about fashion. Sometimes the non-image or simple show is a statement in itself. People seem to default to thinking of Pink Floyd lightshows or Alice Cooper onstage beheadings when they think of the trimmings that come with rock n roll but the reality is it can also be Bill Wyman's 'at the back nonchalance'.

[Barking Spiders]

On 06/12/2017 at 16:37, Monkey Steve said:

System of a Down are odd.  First time i saw them was supporting Black Sabbath on the original farewell gig at the NEC in (I think) 1999.  Great performance, full of energy, bouncing around the stage.  Last year at Download...not so much.  Though I do understand that there are a few, ahem, issues between some of the band members, and that was reflected in the performance.

Marilyn Manson is another one - great when he's on the right drugs (Reading festivals in 2005 sticks out as being excellent), but dull as hell the last couple of time's I've seen him at festivals.  And QOTSA...loved them back in the day with Nick Oliveri, but as soon as he was sacked the live shows (and the music IMHO) have been very, very dull.

I don't think there's one right answer.  If the music is great then I'm not too worried about the show...but if the music isn't great then I'll still stick around if the show is great fun.  Basically I'm easy to please as long as the music and the show aren't both rubbish

To pick up on Blue's point, I think this makes a huge difference at the covers/bar band level, where you hear the same songs every week at differing levels of competency, but you'll remember and come back to see the band with the frontman who put on a great show.

+1 viz QOTSA.  Although Josh Homme was kind the band leader/head over the first three albums, Nick O was clearly the heart of the band . Every album they've done since his sacking are'nt a patch on SFTD

 

[Count Bassy]

On 06/12/2017 at 11:58, Conan said:

You've seen my band Blue?  There are five of us though. But one is so boring that he is sometimes invisible.

 

Yes, but that's still better than no bass player at all.

[Barking Spiders]

23 minutes ago, ambient said:

How an audience reacts to a gig is quite a genre specific thing, I think anyway.

What we're talking about is performance. There's an excellent book called 'Musicking' by Christopher Small. He defines 'musicking' as: To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing.

So either by going along to watch a gig, or by being a musician performing, we're all taking part in the process of 'musicking'. The book is really excellent, I encourage anyone who has any interest in music to read it, particularly if you do perform. 

There's another article that I was reading recently called 'Performing Performance: Interface design, liveness, and listener orientation', by Mark J. Butler. It's aimed mostly at the electronic music scene, but is sill relevant.

Performance is central to what I do, and I guess to what we all on here who gig do. I'm personally very aware when I gig that people are watching me. Even though it's only me sat on stage with a MacBook and a bunch of effects pedals, I do make a definite effort to interact with the music, and to demonstrate my part in what they're hearing.  I definitely don't dance or move about, but that's not expected. It would be expected though maybe in a rock and roll gig, and definitely would be in a more dance orientated genre. Which is my point.

The article by Mark Butler describes how electronic musicians, and DJs sometimes over state their movements on stage, there might only be them on stage with a MacBook and nothing else, but they are still 'performing', and by the somewhat dramatic gestures they're showing their participation in the production of the music.

I occasionally play gigs where I'm sharing the bill with laptop artists, sometimes they're using treated instruments too. Again, they're engrossed in what they're doing and their interaction is evident. They're not expected to get up and move or dance, but it's still obvious by what they do do, that they're not just checking their emails :).

To reiterate, it all depends on the actual music that's being performed. 

Some of the best gigs I've been to have been Underworld, Chemical Brothers, Chase & Status and Orbital.  Somehow they manage to hold their audiences  attention without much movement or lengthy badinage. I think it's partly because they don't replicate their album tracks slavishly but rework them  and ad lib quite a lot. Some bands can overdo the audience participation thing. At Download this year, with Five Finger Death Punch's set there were long gaps between songs with the lead singer trying to work the crowd  up into a mosh frenzy. This undermined the momentum built up by the furious tunage

[ambient]

6 minutes ago, Barking Spiders said:

Some of the best gigs I've been to have been Underworld, Chemical Brothers, Chase & Status and Orbital.  Somehow they manage to hold their audiences  attention without much movement or lengthy badinage. I think it's partly because they don't replicate their album tracks slavishly but rework them  and ad lib quite a lot. Some bands can overdo the audience participation thing. At Download this year, with Five Finger Death Punch's set there were long gaps between songs with the lead singer trying to work the crowd  up into a mosh frenzy. This undermined the momentum built up by the furious tunage

That's it yes, yes. You're aware of what they're doing. You know it's live and improvised. That awareness itself generates an excitement I guess.