by Serguey Shinder
For about two years our set ended with the same song. It was the best thing we had written, it built for seven minutes, and the other forty minutes were ordered as a long slope designed to arrive there. We rehearsed the set from top to bottom, timed it at forty seven minutes, and asked promoters for fifty.
In the spring of 2016 I went back through the gigs we had played that year. Of fourteen, we had finished the set as written at five.
The other nine followed a pattern I could have predicted. Doors opened late. The first act overran by ten minutes, because first acts always do. Changeover took twenty rather than fifteen. And the venue had a curfew that did not move, because the room became a club at half ten or the neighbours had a solicitor. So the time came out of the last act on each bill, and within that act it came out of the end. Somebody at the side of the stage would hold up two fingers during the fifth song, and the thing we cut, every time, was the seven minute closer, because it was the only song long enough to rescue the schedule on its own.
So on nine nights out of fourteen the audience heard forty minutes designed to lead somewhere, and never heard where. That is worse than a shorter set. A slope with nothing at the top sounds like a band that has run out of ideas.
I had planned the set for the time printed on the contract. The time we actually got was a distribution, and the contract figure sat near its generous end.
What we did afterwards was practical. We played our best song third, while there was still plenty of evening left. We marked the set list in two colours: black for songs that were always played, grey for songs that could go, with the grey ones ordered by which went first, so that when the fingers went up nobody had to think and nobody argued on stage. And we rehearsed the thirty minute version as its own set, from top to bottom, until it had a shape of its own rather than feeling like the long one with bits missing.
The thirty minute set became our favourite. It was tighter, and on the nights we got the full fifty, the grey songs felt like a gift to the room rather than an obligation.
I think about that set list most weeks, far from any stage. Almost every plan I make has a version that happens when the time I was promised turns out to be shorter, and that version is the one that usually runs. It deserves to be designed on purpose, in advance, and not improvised at the side of the stage by whoever is holding up fingers.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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