Fanzines and Webpages: Setlist Democracy

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These days I like to think of MJ Hibbett & The Validators as less of a ROCK BAND and more of a facility for research into ROCK methodology. We do still do the gigs and all that, but over the years we've probably spent more time investigating exciting and innovative new ways of working within the ROCK environment. For example, a few years ago we discovered that it's easier to record songs if you learn them BEFORE you go into the studio (at the time a stunning breakthrough in recording theory) and we practically invented the science of Getting Everyone To Agree Rehearsal Dates On Email.

Recently, however, we have turned our attention to one of the knottiest problems in all of ROCK: Writing A Setlist. Of course, the basic mechanics of a setlist were worked out decades ago, with the standard agreed international setlist going like this:

SECOND BEST SONG
FAST ONE
NEW ONE
THIRD BEST SONG
SLOW ONE
ANOTHER FAST ONE
FIRST BEST SONG
COVER (optional)
(Encore: REALLY OLD SONG)

This setlist has been set in stone since time immemorial and those who deviate from it are doomed to crash on the reef of audience indifference. But what happens when you have a TONNE of songs? How do you choose *which* slow one to play, or which songs *are* your best ones? If you're playing solo or operating as a singer-led-dictatorship this is still fairly easy, but what if you are a longstanding band whose members have Firm Opinions?

What you do is call The Validators' Institute Of ROCK Research.

For the past decade or more the way we've worked out Validators setlists has been to bicker endlessly over email for several weeks, come to a poor compromise list, forget to bring it with us to the gigs, argue some more, flounce around in huffs/threaten to cry, and then me and Tim shout at each other until one of Frankie or Tom get sick of it and write it all down... at which point Emma comes back from the bar, says "No, I don't want to do that" and we have to start again. This system is not without its merits, but clearly it could be bettered.

And so it was that, a few weeks ago, we decided to try using Proper Band Democracy. Our first (and so far only) gig of 2015, at Going Up The Country in Congleton, was fast approaching so I sent The Validators a long list of all the songs we were pretty much able to play. Each Validator, including me, replied by putting one of three words next to each song - "YES", "NO" or "MAYBE" depending upon how they felt about it. These votes were then recoded numerically, with "YES" as 2, "MAYBE" as 1 and "NO" as -1. Mathematicians will notice that we did not use zero as a code. This was done for two reasons 1) it avoiding recoding an abstention or "zero" response as a hard "NO" and thus skewing the results and 2) coding in favourite of positive votes meant we were more likely to do songs that more of us actively liked than those which we just didn't mind.

The Validators are a CRACK admin unit and within 24 hours we'd all voted (SIDEBAR: I'm told that not all bands respond to MEMOES so quickly, and I would say to those bands "Get on with it! The less time you spend faffing about with admin the more time there is for BEER!"), the results had been calculated and ... it totally worked! We came out with an excellent list of songs that we could definitely PLAY, with each of us having several songs they liked and a couple we maybe wouldn't have chosen but that others preferred. In other words it was a proper democratic compromise that led to something GOOD!

It was a thing of beauty, which surprised us all by turning out to be STURDY too. Come the day of the gig we all looked at the list and, rather than breaking out into MORE arguments (e.g. someone whose identity shall be ENTIRELY DISGUISED saying "Why can't we play that song that came up on shuffle last week in my car that we haven't played since the 1990s? I still know how the drums go.") we all said "Yes, that looks good." Better yet, when we sat down to work out the order the whole thing fell simply and easily into the standard setlist format. Best of all, when we did it in front of an Actual Audience, it actually WORKED, with clapping and EVERYTHING!

It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a ROARING success, and one I would recommend all other bands try out, if only because it means you can spend your precious band-together time arguing about something else altogether. Maybe we should try this system with album tracklists next?

(originally appeared in Candy Twist, 2015)

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