Past Times

 

There's a website called setlist.fm where you can catalogue the gigs you've been to, get to build up your history, compare setlists and stuff like that. Obviously for new gigs its pretty comprehensive - you buy the tickets online, lots of other people sign up to the website - people record bits of it own their camera and the setlist is detailed dynamically, either as it happens or pretty quickly afterwards. 

But its not as good for older gigs - cos its relying on attendees making contemporaneous notes, either because they grabbed a setlist from the stage at the end of the set, or they noted it in a diary or something like that. 

I used to have a Gene website, and there was a spell where I went to a few gigs over a short spell, and I reviewed them and recorded the sets. I used this to build out the detail on setlist.fm for those shows - but there's loads of other gigs I've been to that don't have that sort of info. I saw the Pale Saints, Pixies, All About Eve and The Wedding Present nearly 40 years ago. We can guess a lot of what they might have played - but we don't know the order and probably never will. 

Even more obliquely, there are gigs that I went to that I probably haven't remembered yet - maybe because I didn't keep the tickets. I was thinking about shows that I saw about the Roadmender and remembered that Paul Weller played a warm-up show there once for a Festival - Yes, its listed on the website but I';ve not put down that I attended it. I've added that to the list. But I also recalled last night that I saw him at the Royal Albert Hall as well - I can see he played there over a few years, often for multiple shows, so I don't know which one was my show (from the context of ticking it off on a list, not from an ownership perspective) - so I texted my sister, and she is going to check to see if she still has the ticket. Turns out she might have some more tickets as well, so maybe now I'll finally be able to record the time we went to see 'The Railway Children" as well.