Question and Answer

I was at the Saturday concert in London. I believe that your music is better suited to an all seated environment. The Shepherds Bush Empire was mainly standing. Do you involve yourself in the choice of venues, or is the decision made by others? The music was absolutely amazing. What was the encore? I had to leave before then, just to make it home. I bet it was "Song for Bilbao", which is one of my favourites! Stuart.

hi stuart,

honestly, if it were up to me, no one would ever sit at any of our gigs - everyone would stand up all the time. the energy and the level of participation and appreciation that we feel from a standing up audience does not even compare to a seated one. it is, therefore, so much more fun for us - plus it allows the people who want to be close to the stage to be there. we wind up from our perspective with a whole bunch of folks jammed together right in front of us who are really into it, and that never fails to inspire the band. plus, there is another fairly recent phenomenon that we have all noticed, especially here in the states that is getting to be very disconcerting to us as performers - which is the people in the first few rows just sitting there staring at us, often not even bothering to applaud. it is almost like they are watching tv or something, we keep expecting for them to whip out their channel changers and zap us. that never happens with a standing audience. i sometimes hear people complain about the standing thing in relation to the length of our shows and how hard it is to stand for that long. all i can say is, i do it myself, every night. promoters are less and less likely to let us have standing shows these days, because they feel that since our audience is presumably getting older, they won't stand for it, so to speak. all i know, is that the shepards bush gig, and all the others like it that we do in europe are the ones we enjoy the most. the encore? yes, it was song for bilbao.