Songkick

We love setlists here at Songkick. Right now there are over 100,000 on the site, from the old…

Led Zeppelin, 4 Sep 1971, Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto:

To the more recent….

Mogwai, 25 Feb 2011, O2 Academy Brixton, London:

And then there are the even more awesome concert pages on Songkick that feature a photo of the actual setlist itself. There’s something priceless about the way this captures the excitement and anticipation you feel when watching your favourite artist perform. We think it’s great that there are fans who’ll do almost anything to get little pieces of music history like this (especially when it’s a hand-written one!)…

Electrelane, 29 Nov 2007, Koko, London:

One fan out there in particular, has made this her mission at pretty much every concert she’s been to in the past 17 years. Sofia Hagberg (who also happens to be organizer of the awesome End Of The Road, one of Songkick’s favourite festivals) has been collecting setlists since 1994 and now has over 600 to her name. From Nina Simone to Bruce Springsteen, the collection spans a range of genres, concert sizes and locations.

We were interested to know more about her collection and the inspiration behind it, and she was more than happy to oblige!:

When and why did you start your collection?

It happened at random. My friend Babette and I had hitchhiked from Gothenburg to Stockholm to go and see one of our favourite bands at the time – Counting Crows! This was in November 1994, we were 18 years old and very excited fans…so we went out to Circus (the venue) early in the daytime just to see if we could get a glimpse of Adam and the guys. And as we were hanging around, this man steps out of a bus and asks us for the way to Circus. We pointed him in the right direction, which wasn’t hard as the tour bus had conveniently parked right outside the venue. And we of course also asked him if he was with the band etc. – it turned out that this lovely fella was their guitar tech, Duncan. The show that night was amazing, and afterwards, we hung around by the front of the stage for a little while and Duncan came over and handed us picks and a setlist each.

At the time I had no idea what a setlist was, but it only took a few moments to work it out. And I’ve never looked back since, and pretty much tried to get a setlist from every single concert that I’ve attended after that, obviously not always succeeding.

How do you get the setlists? Any particular memorable moments?

It can be a bit embarrassing, as it often involves standing at the very front and shouting at the top of your voice to the people on stage after the show is over.  My standard phrase goes something like: “Please, can I have a setlist, please!”

And it often also involves trying to get eye contact with the techs/roadies, and pointing and gesticulating to show what it is that I’m after… and more often than not, they go and pick one up from the stage and bring it over, and make my day!

Memorable moments – there are literally hundreds! Maybe the most fun one was when me and two friends went to see Flaming Lips at the Forum in 2003… we didn’t have any tickets, but luckily the band were looking for volunteers, and my friends ended up dressing up in huge animal costumes and being on stage during the show. I was too small for the costumes unfortunately, but the band let me tag along anyways… and I ended up making friends with their sound engineer, Chris, while waiting for things to kick off. It was really amazing to see my friends dance around in crazy costumes on stage, but what’s been really special to me ever since, is that Chris, who got me a setlist at that show… has also pretty much saved me a setlist from every single one of their shows that I’ve attended. And throughout my setlist collecting days, there’s been a few people like this, that I’ve gotten to know and who I’ve kept in touch with and who I’m eternally grateful to, for all the setlists they’ve given me, as well as for being great people.

Best concert ever? Why?

Bruce Springsteen at Earls Court in 1999! Again, for some reason I didn’t manage to get a ticket in time, but decided to go along anyway. Standing outside, hoping to find a ticket at a decent price (not likely!), I spot this guy who’s also waiting around… we start chatting and it turns out that he’s the promoter and the person he was waiting for doesn’t seem to be turning up, so he offers me to come with him. Of course I say yes, and he literally walks us both past the ticket check, past two sets of security, all the way down to the front, past the barrier and another security, round the back of the stage, and then we finally end up next to the stage on the right and only a few minutes later… Bruce comes on and I start crying! It was just so unimaginably special, to see and experience everything from so close by and about five songs into the set he played my absolute favourite song – Atlantic City!  Definitely the best concert ever! It was out of this world, amazing, fantastic, magical… and I still can’t quite believe my luck to this day!

Sofia has kindly taken some time out of her busy schedule to upload a selection of the setlists to Songkick. Here are a couple of gems:

Animal Collective with Islaja at Astoria (01 Nov 07)

Pavement at Scala (12 May 99)

Kiss with Buck Cherry and Buckcherry at Wembley Arena (25 Mar 99)

With over 600 setlists, squeezed into 8 folders on top of a bookshelf…

…Sofia’s collection is now feeling a little neglected, so she has been toying with the idea of giving it a new home. If there are any avid music lovers out who’d be interested in talking with her about the prospect of buying this priceless memorabilia, let us know (in the comments section below) and we’ll drop her a line with your details!