I'm not a big fan of the rotating setlists. Sure, I get that it's nice if you see them multiple times on a tour, but my guess would be that most people just see one show near their hometown, and then I'd much rather have a consistent and well-planned show which they fine tune throughout the tour. As someone mentioned above, if I found out that the city before me got TGP, LTL and BTL, while my city got UAGM, WIMH/TTTSTA and NM, I would be very disappointed, even if I looked at all the setlists after I went to the show. I'm also not a huge fan of anniversaries within the show, since I think the ultimate setlist can't be created if you dedicate a huge chunk of it to one or two albums. For this tour, it was fine, since I hadn't heard the majority of the anniversary songs live before (only SDV), but I'm not a big fan of the principle of it.
I soooooort of agree with both of these, but not entirely with either. I think this tour's massively overdone the anniversaries - fine for a single show, it's special if it's a single show, but every night it just becomes ballast. The Awake section was huge, overdone. Space-Dye Vest alone would have been a hell of an anniversary present - play that every night, with a rotating lead-in.
Frankly, I'm not sure why an anniversary's a big deal. If you're celebrating anniversary years, every year's an anniversary year for every album. 20th Anniversary World Tour's different, because that's the band staying together through trials and tribulations. Awake hasn't had any, it was never going to stop existing, I don't really see why I should care if its year multiplies by five! Birthdays are nice, I get birthdays, but I'm not convinced anniversary years are much more than navel-gazing.
Rotating setlists, sometimes brilliant, but there's no equity. I caught them in Newport on the Systematic Chaos tour, and I think they must have thought Wales was a different country to England, because they played a set of classics like they'd never been here before:
1. Constant Motion
2. Panic Attack
3. Endless Sacrifice
4. Surrounded
5. The Dark Eternal Night
6. As I Am
7. I Walk Beside You
8. The Spirit Carries On
9. In the Presence of Enemies
Over the next couple of days, when they moved to England, they played Never Enough, Blind Faith, Forsaken, Another Day, Scarred, Strange Deja-Vu and The Ministry of Lost Souls... it seems a bit of a shame to have missed out on some genuine rarities for all the stuff they'd played like mad on the last couple of tours. It was only my second ever DT gig - I'd already seen a full third of those songs before, another third were new to this album and essential to this tour, and while TSCO was nice, I Walk Beside You turned out to be the biggest wildcard! Rotating setlists aren't necessarily better or worse, they're just more erratic.
That said, I'd happily take something like the 20th Anniversary World Tour, where there was a built-in structure but an incredibly flexible one. I think rotations work a lot better with An Evening With in general, actually, I'd have loved to have caught some of the more ridiculous setlists on the SDoIT tour. But there's a happy medium, and I don't think they've quite got there yet. The quality of the show has definitely improved, massively, since they fixed the set in place, but I think there's a way to work rotations in. Although Muse are one of the guiltiest bands, in terms of filling their sets with the umpteenth rendition of Starlight,
they've done rotations quite nicely in the past.