'Seen one show, you've seen them all': The raucous American band speak up for spontaneity at gigs

US rockers The Orwells have criticised the production of Arctic Monkeys' live shows, stating that in moving to bigger venues they have stopped being spontaneous, and repeat the same performances at their concerts and festival sets.



Watch the Orwells discuss the Arctic Monkeys in the video above

Speaking to Gigwise at Shoreditch pub The Fox, guitarist Matt O'Keefe said that they had learned good and bad things from supporting the band for their recent American tour. However he chose to point out that the show every night tended to be the same, including the between song ad-libs from Alex Turner.

"When you're playing arenas and everything, it's a huge production then the show has to become synchronised to work. Because you have all these people relying on these songs and this you're goin to do here," he said.

"So every night no matter how he was feeling he'd go into that opening riff . It was the exact same ad-libs he was putting between the songs. So we were with them for about 50 dates, you saw them once and you'd pretty much seen every date that they'd played."



The Orwells supported Arctic Monkeys on their 2013 American tour

Singer Mario Cuomo was much less comfortable with this idea however, choosing to stand up for his own necessity to treat every show as being unique. He said that knowing everything he was going to do on stage would make him extremely uncomfortable.

"You can reach that level without turning into that," he said. "Like Nirvana played bigger shit than that and I'm sure it wasn't like that and it's probably a different show every night. You don't have to take that route, you can get that level of success with those size venues, that sort of thing but still treat it as a spontaneous show at a small club."

"So it all just depends on the band, what they're going for and what they feel comfortable with. Like I would feel super uncomfortable if I knew what I was going to say in between songs."

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