Hi ho.

Time for a construction update!

I made a spreadsheet of all our previous set lists (yes seriously, there’s a lot of material) and noted the quality of each track – their era, audience, how long ago they were made, what their response had been, so on and so forth. Leaving out obvious exceptions we have 44 tracks.

Then came the ‘downsizing’ (yes, I sacked some of them). Some of them are designed with an American audience in mind (the ‘Nettwerk’ era), not the UK/Europe. There’s about a 2-3 year difference between audiences… a track like Greater Reward is better for the USA. 15 tracks thus moved into a holding pen.

Then we have a fair few antiques popular with the old folks. Many were rebooted by the Seances 1 and 2, but only some would be good outside of your living room. Séance 1 tried to sound near to the originals – that really won’t work on a PA. They go into a remake bin where they may be re-purposed.

Then comes the hard part. In Germany there’s about an hour, maybe a little more. There’s some things people will definitely want to hear and some that they would be surprised to hear. There’s limited duration in which these principles will struggle. In London people will be a mix of expectations – familiarity, surprise, challenge. There’s more time and so a higher variety to present.

Petrol 82 85 11 25

Case history: Checking the construction dates I can see that Petrol was last rebooted in 2011. Uh Oh! But I quite like the last reboot (90’s arcade game). An idea comes up … what would happen if we made a hybrid that actually demonstrates the progression…

… a video where the sound and vision of each version of Petrol is segued. At the end of this comes a new version which takes the results into 2025. This might work – if so there might be time to make a few of these documentary versions that illustrate how things have changed over the years. Make it bloody obvious. (My render farm is currently at it – churning out 2025 Petrol images day and night.)

At the moment there’s 14 tracks planned for Germany – they are mostly familiar (but not quite) with a few things to stir it up. London is still complex … we have six months it’ll be OK.

So this is the kind of work that goes into the shows and hopefully illustrates the process involved. Questions and suggestions welcomed.

Dollarex

Still reading? One track that went in the first round was Dollarex. It’s mainly of interest to the North Americans, but also way out of time with the imagery – based on television (a tribute to the film Looker) – and of course television is a quaint memory for us all. Actually there’s a bit of Twitter up near the end… remember Twitter? You would have to remake it all with phones and… fuck that, it’s all way beyond any protest song now. I am not Bob Dylan.