So, you're the headline act and...

[casapete]

In my old band , we regularly used to use this to walk on to. A version of this tune was used for the end credits of the TV comedy 'Bottom' starring Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson. Worked well for us!

 

[Nail Soup]

There's a few suggestions here for TV theme tunes.

I think that is OK to set the mood for an atmosphere of fun, and would fit a covers band (such as mine).

However, if I ever get to be in an originals band...… it's unlikely I'd want anything 'fun' as an into.

YMMV.

 

 

[Monkey Steve]

yeah, depends on the band, the venue and the crowd - most importantly whether it's originals or covers.  For originals I'm less worried - let the DJ/venue pick some music that keeps people entertained and is in the right genre to get them in the mood.  Last originals band I depped/gigged with have a few songs that use samples from TV and film as their intros, and they always pick one of those as the first song, so that the fans knew exactly what we were about to play and that the show had started while we were walking on and plugging stuff in, etc

For covers it's a much bigger issue - having played the pub circuit for years with a punk covers band, we quickly learned that if left to their own devices the landlords will stick on a Best Of Punk CD which has 80% of our set - on one occasion the last song played as we were about to go on stage was the first song in our set, with the landlord turning down our request not to play the CD because "they like punk, right, so they won't mind if they hear the songs a couple of times, and anyway I've bought the CD specially"

So we made a couple of CDs of pop songs covered by punk and metal bands - got the crowd in the right mood without airing any of our set.  We had about an hour to play before we kicked off, and another 30 minutes to play between sets, although we weren't always clever enough to get the timing right so sometimes we'd have to miss the last couple of songs as we were due on stage.  We also learned pretty quickly to bring our own CD player and to put it through the PA, because it was the only way to make sure it actually got played

As I recall, the ideal last run of songs was:

Wuthering Heights - China Drum

Boys Of Summer - The Ataris

Build Me Up Buttercup - The Goops

Get It Right Back - Hanson Brothers

In fact the last one made it into our set for a Christmas show one year

Honourable mention to Snuff who have any number of well known pop and TV tunes on their B-Sides: it's like they knew that there was a need for covers of the themes from Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads and Match Of The Day for exactly this purpose

[Andy_L]

Something to fire up the crowd 

[StickyDBRmf]

In the 80's we used Careering -  Public Image Ltd. At the time we were playing a tune called Excuses. Sort of funk w/ a rapping lyric, kinda spoken word/poetry (white middle-class American chaps...you know)