Sneaky Pete wrote
Saw them in Joburg about 15 years ago.
Been a big fan all my life, but...
For a 50th Anniversary Tour , all they can manage is 2 nights in London,
and 2 nights in New Jersey..?
And...no new album...guess they've run out of songs....even the usual cr@p fillers.
So...would I pay 1000 pounds or even 100 pounds to hear a bunch of 30-year-old songs AGAIN...?
It's like watching a 300lb porky Elvis waddling across the stage, sweating like a pig and wheezing like a blacksmith's bellows.....WHY!!??
Well if you only get to see whoever it is you're a fan of once or twice then you want to hear your slice of history (and at the prices the Stones are charging you're entitled to be demanding). I've seen Richard Thompson live four times - but only once with him playing electric guitar with a band. There I was, in Wolverhampton (not the glamour capital of the world) having stood all afternoon in the queue and then for about an hour in the venue before the show started and then through a two hour plus show. He could have played "Shoot Out The Lights", couldn't he? I doubt I'll ever hear that song live from Thompson now. Even though he's never really had hits, he's got a hard core of fans who have been listening to him for years and want to hear some of the old favourites. He does usually do "1952 Vincent Black Lightning", but it's sounding a bit tired now and he must be sick of playing that one. And therein lies the problem: we want the vitality AND we want the old favourites.
Thompson puts it quite well:
It’s the weird thing about being a songwriter as opposed to being a lot of other things. You know, as a painter you paint a picture and somebody buys it and sticks it in a museum in New Zealand and then you might never see it again. It’s gone and you move on and your old work becomes just a memory. If you’re a songwriter, then you may have written a song thirty years ago but the audience might drive you to perform it forever.
But I'd still have liked to have heard Shoot Out The Lights that night in Wolverhampton.
We're part of the problem.
As for the lack of shows, for the money that appears to be changing hands here you can bet there will be clauses in contracts that guarantee the promoter that the Stones will not play another venue within X km (probably on the same land mass in this case) within Z days either side of the show.
