copyright© mariannemeyer, 2014

As you rehearse, are you discussing the set lists?

We’ve already had that discussion. There’s too many at the minute, but we’ll whittle it down over the next couple of weeks.

Some of the songs have complex arrangements and some feature full orchestrations. On the road, are there some songs you can’t do?

It’s not necessarily the bigger ones that have more in the arrangement, because we can work out versions of them and hopefully take out musicians that fill those roles. It’s almost the opposite – the simpler ones, that maybe we can’t play those because…It’s strange - the vibe of some songs only works on the recording sometimes because we captured it then and there. And there are certain songs that we can’t replicate that.

Does Guy have a bigger say in what songs make the list?

More and more, yeah. Especially, depending on how many dates you do in a row, some of the songs do stretch him vocally. And if he’s worried about that, then it doesn’t help anyone really. He needs to be comfortable in what he’s doing. So potentially, we might drop a couple that are challenging vocally. Or switch it up a bit, not necessarily always drop the same ones. That’s definitely a consideration.

Do you change the song selection for American audiences versus European ones?

We wouldn’t change it for that reason. Although saying that, there’s certain tracks…we might change the order a little bit because we know that there’s certain tracks that have gone down particularly well in one country.  In Belgium and Holland, maybe, they picked up on ‘Lippy Kids’ as a single and it went on the radio and so that track is bigger. So it’s only position-wise rather than adding or taking away.

“Starlings” would seem to present a special case. It seems to call out to be an opening number, to be at the start of something.

Absolutely. It’s really tough. Because it has such a slow, atmospheric start to it, it can only really be at the front of the set or at the front of the encore or if we..sometimes we do a little B-stage set in the big arena tours where we go out to another stage. That’s such a dramatic change in mood that potentially you could shove ‘Starlings’ in there.

Your set lists are unique in there’s always one sentence written in tiny little print: “This is only a set list if this is printed on it.”

It’s a joke really. Yeah, because if it wasn’t written on it then you wouldn’t know anyway. It’s a little joke from our tour manager. We don’t print out the set list ourselves.

Have you been pranked with fake lists?

Once the crew put out some set lists that were completely different initially…I think it might have been the last day of the tour. Something usually happens then, prank-wise. They did that once. But they swiftly swapped them back over.