Incubus live at VH1's Decades Rock Live 11/08/06

The show aired on October 20th.

Setlist:
A Kiss to Send Us Off
Anna Molly
Drive (with The Pretenders)
Message of Love
Middle of the Road

Drive (AVI ~41MB)
Message of Love (AVI ~35MB)

Drive was ok, I thought Chrissie Hynde sang pretty badly - she sounded as if her heart wasn't in it, or like she was drunk. I wish she decided not to sing it at all and ruin a great song. Though it wasn't ruined, really; I loved the two guitars, the second solo was good - though not as good as Mike's own extended solos that he's played in the recent past. I've not heard the original version of Message of Love, so I don't really know the song well, but they played it fine.

What really annoys me is that they didn't air the whole performance, more specifically the two new songs. This makes sense, as this was a show centered around the Pretenders. But there was TV quality footage and soundboard quality sound captured of these songs which you don't get usually with concerts, it would have been a perfect opportunity for those of us not able to go see them live get a glimpse of the new material. Now I'm suspecting we'll never see those songs, which is really frustrating.

This isn't the first time something has happened as far as I remember, either. Some years back they played two days at the Bridge Benefit, an acoustic set. Two of the songs made it on their special edition album DVD, the two new songs they played. No other video made it from that show, though we were lucky enough to get some bootlegged audio. They played a great cover of Massive Attack's Teardrop, and an awesome alternate version of Are You In. It would have been utterly kickass if they had released videos of those songs, but they never saw the light of day. A year or so before that, during their Lollapalooza tour, a few clips appeared on the Lollapalooza site, one of The Warmth and one of Nice to Know You. Both were really short, about 20 second clips but were of excellent quality. I found it extremely annoying that they had such great quality footage and all they'd show was some measly clips. Another wasted opportunity.