Pop-punk band Saves the Day played a huge fifty song set lasting five hours on October 3rd at Spinelli’s Downtown in Louisville, Kentucky. Front-man Chris Conley confirmed the marathon event via Twitter, saying “okay its official – last night we played from nine pm till two in the morning.” The set included seven covers from the likes of Tears for Fears, The Smiths and Weezer, as well as a rendition of well-known Metallica hit “Nothing Else Matters”. The band did bring down the tempo toward the end of the set, wrapping up with eleven acoustic tracks, which included “Eleanor Rigby” by The Beatles. The full set can be seen on setlist.fm.
The event was a private show, arranged as part of a pledge that was purchased during a crowd-funding campaign for the band’s most recent album Saves the Day. The band used PledgeMusic to raise funds to record the album, which was released in 2013. Artists can raise funds through PledgeMusic by allowing fans to ‘pledge’ money in return for a series of rewards, which increase in cost the more extravagant they get. The gig, held at Spinelli’s – a music venue and pizza restaurant – in Louisville, was Saves the Day’s top pledge, advertised as a “private electric full band house show… limited to 50 guests.”
Bands typically play for around an hour to an hour and a half per show, making this event particularly rare at five hours long. In fact, the Guinness World Record for the longest ever heavy metal concert clocked in at five hours and one minute, performed by Manowar in Bulgaria in 2008. However, unlike Saves the Day, who allowed themselves a very well earned rest period between the electric and acoustic sets, Manowar’s world record attempt saw them perform non-stop for five consecutive hours. Both concerts were just appetizers compared to the show performed by Canadian pianist Gonzales in Paris in 2009, which lasted for a bottom-numbing twenty seven hours, three minutes and forty four seconds. The performance earned Gonzales the Guinness World Record for longest ever solo performance, described by the man himself as an “irresistible … combination of the poetic and the useless.”