Songs bands don't perform anymore
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Why do bands like Oasis refuse to play their biggest hit live?
Wonderwall by Oasis there of course. They'll probably play it at their Slain concerts next year but frontman Liam Gallagher has been vocal about his hatred for this particular anthem. Once saying he wants to gag any time he has to sing it. Once a band scores a hit there's an expectation they'll play it at every show. Some do it begrudgingly, some do it happily and some just don't do it at all. I'm joined by Simon Marr, founder of 8radio.com. Morning Simon. Morning. Refusing to play your most famous song live is taking a bit of a gamble on your fan base's loyalty. But why do some bands do
it? I think for a lot of bands, and I asked a couple of people in bands even about this, and they just say it's fatigue, you know. And then some of them say, well, it's timing. It's that that was us at a particular moment in time and that's not us now. But then you've got other bands who are very, very grateful for the success and everything else that a song has brought. And they will, even though they may not be as keen on it and they really want you to listen to the new stuff, They'll say, well, we know we got to play. This is the fan tax is that we got to go and do it. But when you get bands like Oasis, who I suppose are contrarians by nature, you know, they're always going to be the one who's going to say they're not going to play it.
But in the end, you know that for a lot of bands, if you pay them enough, they'll do it again.
Absolutely. And of course, the song was written by Noel rather than
Liam. So maybe that has something
to do with it. And they have a couple of other songs they only perform begrudgingly
as well. There have never been fans of doing She's Electric. And then there's one particular song, Sunday Morning Call, which I kind of like, which was off their last album. But Noel wrote that song again. But he says he doesn't like to play it because it's, let's just clean it up for morning radio and say, he says, because it's terrible. Yeah. But it still gets requested at gigs. But he said that's where they draw the line. So they'll do Wonderwall. They'll do the big anthems. But they say when it comes to certain songs, it's just no.
Okay. If you're a fan of Radiohead, you won't hear this at their live shows.
But I'm a creep. I'm a weirdo. What the hell am I doing?
Now, any rational person would say that is an absolute banger. And Pablo Honey is their best album by a country
mile there, I've said it. But Tom York doesn't like Creep. He doesn't. Well, you know, I think it's that he doesn't like what Creep represents for Radiohead. So Radiohead released Pablo Honey, which is obviously an amazing album. I would grant you that. They had the Benz and then they moved on into the OK Computer era. Yeah. And by the time they got to the OK Computer era, it was like, no, we are not the Creep band. We're now the OK Computer band. So request Paranoid Android or whatever it is, but don't request Creep. So what they did is they just cut it out of their set completely for a long time. It used to get really, really cranky then when people asked for it. I don't mind a band deciding they don't want to play a song.
But if somebody really, really wants that song to be played, you can't begrudge them asking for it at least. So they took it out of the set. It came back then about, it was probably well into the 2000s when they started to play it. And now they play it rarely. And rarely is fine as well. You know, when you're a band with a big back catalogue and you can decide, OK, I'm going to pick these songs, I'm going to play them rarely. That's fine. But dropping Creep and getting cross at people for asking, for having the gall to ask for the song. The song that made you famous and allowed you to have
the career that
led you to
do OK Computer and all the rest of it. Anyway, it's a great rock song, but maybe that's the problem. This next song has been banned from guitar stores, immortalised in Wayne's world and become the subject of a long-running copyright battle over its opening guitar figure. And Robert Plant avoids performing it, if at all possible.
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