Encores have long been an established tradition in live music, but are they really necessary? Scene Queen, Boston Manor and The Wonder Years reveal how their shows end by mixing things up…
We all know the drill: the band say it’s their last song. They walk off the stage. The lights go down, and fans start chanting: ‘One more song!’ Soon enough, they're back to knock out a few more, and once they’ve played their biggest hit, the show ends for good.
Encores are a staple of gigs, and have been for years, but there is some awkwardness around them. Bowling For Soup compared bands leaving the stage to ‘peek-a-boo, but for adults’ while another viral post described them as the band asking fans to ‘beg’. And in a more recent post, a concert-goer overheard a fellow audience member saying that encores were a ‘TikTok trend’. Um…
Not every show has to end with one, though. Boston Manor just don’t do them, period. “We think they’re lame,” frontman Henry Cox tells us. “I think it’s a real tired trope.”
Photo: Bethan Miller
One problem is deciding which song to actually end on. “You're either leaving your best song for this encore that everyone knows is coming anyway, because you’re not going to not play your best song,” Henry explains. “Or you come on and end your set with a deep cut or something that’s not going to land as hard a punch, and not be as conclusive [an] end to a show. So you just set yourself up to fail.”
Part of the challenge for bands is the fact that lots of fans have come to expect encores. For Henry, it’s about always making it clear onstage, announcing their last song and confirming that when Boston Manor are gone, they’re gone. “It also means that gets a better last song out of the crowd, because they know that it’s the last bit,” Henry says. He adds that they play house music right after they walk offstage, so gig-goers know for sure that the show’s over.
“If we were fucking around after people have been jumping around for an hour and 15 minutes and then hiding behind a curtain, what are we doing with people’s time?” Henry asks.
But encores do serve a purpose. “It’s situational,” The Wonder Years vocalist Dan Campbell considers. “There are times where an encore makes sense. Sometimes we do a really long set, and honestly, I need two minutes to catch my breath before I can give you the last song that you deserve. And so it’s functional in a way, too.”
Last year, The Wonder Years did a 10-year anniversary tour for 2013’s The Greatest Generation, which was shaping up to be a lengthy show. “We were doing a whole album, and then we wanted to do a whole other set, which stacks up to a lot of fucking songs,” Dan explains. “We knew we were going to need a break at some point.” The Wonder Years opted to leave the stage right when they finished the album, and then returned to the stage to play the additional songs. “It feels incredibly self-indulgent to encore after that,” Dan adds. “We’ve already left the stage once. We don’t need to leave the stage twice!”
Photo: Jenn Five
But an encore isn’t just the chance for performers to catch their breath. “Sometimes it gives us an opportunity to do something special,” Dan says, pointing to the band’s No Closer To Heaven tour as an example. “We would finish the set, and then in the encore break, our crew would bring out a second drum set, which we could not have done anywhere else during the set.” The band would then perform their song Cigarettes And Saints with two drummers.
“Maybe it’s almost looking at it not as an encore, but as a final act of the set,” he ponders.
Scene Queen has also been coming up with different endings to her shows. “We always try to do something stupid for the encore,” she reveals. “Because I feel like, at this point, people expect encores.”
During her first time touring the UK, as an opener for WARGASM, the Bimbocore icon (AKA Hannah Collins) played her final song, Pink Rover, twice. “We had the audio track being like, ‘Oh my god, play the same song again,’ as if it was a suggestion from the crowd,” Hannah recounts. “Because, again, the whole idea of an encore at this point is asking your fans to beg for more music. So we started putting it in the track, and then we were trying to make a bit of it because when does the opener do an encore?”
During her support slot on PVRIS’ UK run this year, Hannah had her tour manager come onstage and tell her that the set was running over their allotted time. “Bands can’t have true encores because you have a sound curfew,” she explains. “Us being an opening band on the PVRIS tour was also perfect, because we for sure had a timeframe that we had to be done in. Having that whole bit where my tour manager came out and we begged him for an extra two minutes to do an extra song, even though everyone knew we had exactly two more minutes to do a song, was playing into the whole ridiculousness of encores.”
On Scene Queen’s UK headlining run last year, she had posters that said ‘pre-planned encore’. “Instead of making the fans chant ‘one more song’, we literally turned our backs towards the crowd, picked up poster boards… and then made them chant ‘pre-planned encore’ instead of actually getting offstage,” she says.
Photo: India Fleming
Since she uses
backing tracks, it would be hard to play an unrehearsed song or to add one in
on the spot, so she found other ways to get creative. “I always say that my
shows are probably 70 per cent music, 30 per cent a comedy act,” Hannah
continues. “I like the challenge of trying to do something weird and different
every show to make people laugh.”
Whether they skip the encore or try to subvert expectations, artists are looking at encores as less of a convention now. “In the future, I think if we encore, it’s going to be because we’re trying to make a separate moment happen that we wouldn’t have been able to without a couple minutes of black stage, and less because it feels like we’re supposed to,” Dan concludes.
“If we’re trying to make a moment happen, then it makes a lot of sense, and if we’re just doing it because those are the rules, well, then we might just keep playing.”
