Fans want to hear "the classics", and may prefer to hear everything in the style that was current when they first fell in love with the band/artist. But this is not necessarily great for the artist.
Singers and songwriters are in a strange position, because every night they revisit different periods of their life. If you’re a painter, you paint a picture and you sell it to a gallery in Tierra del Fuego and you never see it again. It’s gone, you don’t have to keep looking at it.
But if you’re a songwriter and a performer, you have to keep digging up stuff that you might have written when you were 18 years old, and you go, ‘This song is so immature,’ but if it’s a popular song and the audience wants to hear it, then you have to find something in it to hold on to and relate to. It’s a strange thing.
Richard Thompson in a recent interview.
Thompson tends to push his most recent material rather than his older, best loved songs. He acknowledges that the audience is entitled to expect golden oldies and favourites (I'm avoiding the word "hits" here, because he's never really had any), but feels that the artist is entitled to keep things interesting and current for themselves as well.
His most recent album was recorded on the road, live, in front of audiences who did know that they'd be getting an entire show of new material but didn't know much more than that (there was a 2nd, shorter set of "classics"). Take that! *
So, a little bit of input from the other side of the musician/audience divide.
* admittedly this is probably easier done for Thompson than Metallica. He's never had any hits so doesn't have to worry about revisiting those past glories (though I'm one of a not that large number of people who, in recent years, have been at an RT show where he didn't play "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" ?), and his audience, like Reed's I suspect, expect a bit of the unexpected. Though back in the 90s when he had Mitchell Froom producing there was some unhappiness from long time fans who thought he was becoming "Americanised" (and tended to overlook a substantial high point in terms of songwriting and performance). Big hits can become an albatross around the artist's neck.
