If you regularly attend live music shows, you will be familiar with an encore. The band finishes up, they say goodnight and, usually, the audience screams and claps until the band comes back on stage and performs a few more songs.
It’s a little routine between the audience and artists that everybody is in on and for some people, it’s an exciting part of the show and for maybe more cynical, seasoned concertgoers, it’s a little... tired.
One of those people is somebody called Claire that wrote to podcast The Rest Is Entertainment and said: “Why are there encore at concerts? and what do artists do while they’re waiting to come back on stage? It’s usually obvious that there’s more to come. So why the drama?”
Why there are encores at concerts
Host Richard Osman explained: “All it is, is drama. It goes back to opera, which is where they first had it. They would always have an aria in their back pockets or an aria that they were gonna repeat. And so, you know, everyone would shout Encore and brava and, back [the performers] would shuffle on and do another one.”
Richard went on to explain that it isn’t actually more deep than that. It’s simply what we have always done and what audiences tend to love.
This is also why bands tend to leave their biggest songs until the end, too. He said “You don’t want [your audience] to walk off and think ’I’m done, they played Mr Brightside, let’s beat the traffic.”
What bands do backstage before an encore?
Richard added that when he asked his brother, Mat Osman, the bass guitarist in Suede, what artists do during encores and the answer was... not as exciting as I’d hoped, to be honest.
The band simply have a drink, maybe a smoke and if they need to, they run to the toilet.
I don’t know what I expected. Maybe a little dance? A big hug?