My brother gave me a DVD of the Roger Hodgson concert in Montreal (June 6, 2006). It is very good. Sound and vision wise. He is a superb entertainer and has had a storied career as frontman and creative talent behind the 70’s superband Supertramp.
The elephant in the room on this DVD is the same for all leaders of bands that produced mega-hit after mega-hit: Everybody going to the show wants to hear those songs, not any of the new stuff being recorded. That was obvious in Roger’s concert. He would pepper the hits with some new stuff. Although the new songs were politely applauded it was the type of applause that could be interpreted as “OK, enough’s enough. Get back to the real stuff”. And it doesn’t take an applause specialist to interpret this. I’m sure Roger, sitting up there in front of thousands of adoring fans can sense this too. I’ve seen this in many concerts or heard about it from others. For example, when Brian May was doing concerts after the death of Freddie and Queen, he was embarrassingly experiencing the same phenomenon.
I wonder how that makes these masters of bygone days feel. Pigeon-holed in their past. Very few that I’m aware of have been able to break out of the mold for better or for worse: Peter Gabriel, Robyn Hitchcock for example.
Can you think of any others?