I dont doubt Christy Moores sincerity when he sings the line: "If I get an encore, I go home feeling like a king." No matter how often it happens – surely every night in the great balladeer's case – a performer is entitled to feel gratified when a roomful of consenting adults demands "more" at the end of a concert, writes FRANK MCNALLY
But even Christy would have to admit that the whole encore system has fallen into disrepute from overuse.
Encores after concerts are like gratuities in restaurants now: given, and expected, almost regardless of the level of service.
Most performers follow the example of French waiters by adding 15 per cent “service compris” – two songs usually – to the bill. And it has almost reached the stage where if an audience refused to demand these, the musician could react as some untipped US waiters do by following the customer into the street and asking: “Did I offend you in some way, sir?”
The full extent of the sham was brought home to me last week, not at a musical concert, but at a performance by stand-up comedian Bill Bailey. Bailey is a very funny man and his show was frequently hilarious, although – in the opinion of some hardcore fans who were with me – not quite his best.
One of our company, for example, regretted that he made no allowances for being in Dublin as opposed to the many British venues he plays. And it’s true that, apart from once referring to the audience as “Thursday” – a refreshingly honest comment on the touring experience – he failed to customise his material in any way.
Even so, at the show’s official “end”, the audience obligingly requested an encore. Nay, they insisted on it. People who in everyday life might begrudge praise to their own children were suddenly on their feet desperately pleading for “more”, like Indian beggars outside the window of a first-class train compartment. And like a rich man to whom it was no real expense, Bill Bailey duly tossed off a couple of extra pieces, the content of which now escapes me.
Then, in response to continued demand, he added a third encore which proved to be the highlight of the evening. Even the most naive audience members might have guessed it was not spontaneous, because it was a film: a short, silent film that reprised most of the show’s themes in brilliantly concentrated form.
And considered in retrospect, it was so crucial to the performance that if the audience had taken leave of its senses and gone home the first time Bailey said “Thanks for coming – good night”, the floor manager would surely have intervened to stop us.
But of course there was no need for that, because as usual the audience’s strings were being pulled by the unseen, God-like hands of the lighting engineer. He or she lets us know exactly how many encores Bill had planned. Reduced to two-legged versions of Pavlov’s dog, we knew that continuing darkness in the theatre meant there was another bit scheduled, and that not until the house-lights came up should we stop asking for more and leave.
Thus we didn’t miss the unmissable part of the show, even though it posed as a casual afterthought, and we trooped out afterwards marvelling again at Bailey’s comic genius. It was only five minutes later, over a pint, that some of us started to feel a bit taken for granted. Nobody likes to have his emotions trifled with, even when the emotions are fake.
But never mind Bill Bailey or Christy or anyone else in what would broadly be termed popular entertainment. The emptiness of the encore charade is at its most transparent in the world of classical music. Here, often, the gratification is all one-way. Performers may not even do an encore, and yet the audience is still obliged to applaud them off the stage and then back on (slightly louder) and off again, and back for the flowers, and so on till everybody’s hands are sore.
In my experience, nobody ever asks for “more!” at a classical concert. But this is partly because, even when they abandon their usual crippling reserve, audiences are not allowed to speak English. No, under some obscure law dating from the 1700s, serious music fans may only ever express enthusiasm in Italian.
Hence they say things like “Bravo!” instead. The only other English speakers you ever hear saying “bravo” are members of the Garda with walkie talkies, eg: “Come in Tango Bravo, this is Foxtrot Romeo. Was it a cheeseburger you asked for – Over?”.
But I have seen people in the National Concert Hall apparently rendered incapable of saying anything else (apart, of course, from “Brava!” when the performer is female and the audience member is a show-off).
On foot of yesterday’s diary, Oona Linnett has requested a short encore, pointing out that the e-mail address I quoted was wrong. It should have been www.harpistsforpeace.com, not www.harpersforpeace.com, as I suggested. Apologies.
fmcnally@irishtimes.com