Sometimes bands get to a stage in their career where they completely lose the plot when it comes to putting together a setlist. It usually happens three or four albums in, when there’s more material to choose from, someone wants to get some new songs in and common sense goes on sabbatical. The time when Muse started playing Knights Of Cydonia in the middle of their set a decade ago is a prime example. Complete lunacy. Knights Of Cydonia is a song so monstrously huge it needs to be at the beginning or the end. Putting it in the middle was like having a roast dinner for brekkie on a Monday morning, you felt like you needed to go back to bed after.
Bar a tour in 2005 where they inexplicably began their gigs with the plodding Don’t Believe The Truth cut Turn Up The Sun, Oasis could always be relied upon when it came to getting a setlist right, even if there was a time when they were playing the diabolical She’s Electric. They came to their senses and it didn’t get a look in after 2002. Even when everything was going to pot and Noel and Liam were trying to kill each other backstage, their setlist held its nerve. Classics at the start, classics at the end, and a few classics in the middle casting a big enough shadow over the not-so classics.
