The Reunion Tour Is a Séance

Three nights ago, on 2 December 2023, KISS finished. Madison Square Garden, twenty thousand people, two and a quarter hours of pyro and blood and platform boots, and then the four men in the make-up took their bow and walked off for the last time. Except they didn’t walk off. After the last chord of “Rock and Roll All Nite”, the screens read A NEW KISS ERA STARTS NOW, and four digital avatars — younger, taller, smooth-faced, laser-eyed — strode on to finish the encore. The band that had just retired was already back, rebuilt in polygons by Industrial Light & Magic and the Swedish company that runs the ABBA hologram show. The corpse was still warm and the séance had already started.

I mean séance seriously. Go to enough of these and you stop seeing a concert and start seeing a ritual — a room full of people gathered in the dark to summon something that is technically gone. The younger self. The dead drummer. The year it all mattered. The farewell tour is the most emotionally loaded product in live music, and it runs on a beautiful, slightly ghoulish machinery of money and mortality that almost nobody names out loud. So let’s name it.

The money is in the room, not the record

Start with the boring part, because the boring part explains everything. Recorded music stopped paying the rent a long time ago. A stream on the big platforms pays the rights-holders something in the region of three to five tenths of a penny, and the artist sees a slice of that slice. You can be a genuinely famous heritage act with a billion lifetime streams and still not clear a mortgage on the royalties. The catalogue has value — that’s why ageing rockers keep selling their song rights to funds for eye-watering nine-figure sums — but the value is a lump you cash once, not a wage.

The wage is live. The wage has always been live for touring musicians, but it used to be the thing you did to sell the record. Now the record is the thing you do to sell the tour. Merch, VIP packages, the £15 pint, the platinum meet-and-greet where you pay a month’s rent to stand next to a sixty-five-year-old man for the length of a photograph — that is the business. And the single most bankable object in that business is a heritage act on a farewell run. Look at any year’s list of top-grossing tours and it reads like a retirement home with a lighting rig: the Stones, Elton, Springsteen, Billy Joel, the reunited stadium warhorses. Old bands playing old songs to people who will pay anything, once, to be there for the end.

Because the end is the pitch. Scarcity is the oldest trick in retail, and “you will never see this again” is scarcity with the amp turned up to a howl. A farewell tour converts a band you’d been idly meaning to catch into a band you must catch now, at any price, or spend the rest of your life explaining why you didn’t. It manufactures urgency out of mortality. It is, commercially, close to perfect.

The un-final finale

Which brings us to the running joke, the open secret that everyone in the crowd knows and cheerfully ignores: the farewell tour rarely fares thee well.

KISS are the patron saints of this. Their first Farewell Tour ran in 2000 and 2001. They then toured, more or less continuously, for another twenty-two years before the actual farewell this month — and even that finale birthed the avatars, so KISS as a live entity will apparently outlive the human beings entirely. Mötley Crüe did it with paperwork. In 2014 all four members signed a “cessation of touring agreement”, a genuine legally binding contract promising that after 2015 they could never tour as Mötley Crüe again. In 2019 they released a video of themselves blowing the contract up with explosives, credited a Netflix biopic for the renewed demand, and went back out to the stadiums. Cher’s Farewell tour ran, gloriously, from 2002 to 2005 and she has toured since. The Who have been staging plausibly final tours since roughly the Carter administration.

My honest opinion: the repeat farewell isn’t quite the cynical con it gets mocked as. Some of it is simple economics — a retired musician who feels fine and misses the money and the noise is going to un-retire, the same as a boxer. Some of it is that “final” is an emotional weather system, not a legal fact, and weather changes. But the churn does corrode something. When the fourth farewell tour rolls into town, the séance curdles into a shrug. You can only summon the ghost so many times before the audience stops believing anyone died.

The grief is real, and it’s mutual

Here is the part the cynics miss, though, and it’s the part I’d defend to anyone. Under the merch tables and the surge pricing, the emotion at a farewell show is genuine, and it runs both ways across the barrier.

The crowd at a heritage gig is old now, and knows it. You go to touch a younger self — to stand where you stood at nineteen and feel, for the length of a song you’ve known for forty years, that the intervening decades haven’t fully closed. This is the deepest reason the crowd films everything on their phones: they’re not watching the stage, they’re building a reliquary. The reunion tour sells that transaction directly. Buy a ticket, get an evening off from being your current age.

And the band feels it too, harder, because they can see the arithmetic from the stage. Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road ran five years and finished in Stockholm in July 2023, and by the end it read as a man genuinely closing a book — the farewell was true because the reason was true. He’s in his seventies and doesn’t want to die in an airport. Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath called their last run The End and closed it in Birmingham, where they’d started, in February 2017; that homecoming symmetry is the séance done right, a band summoning its own beginning to bury it properly. When it’s honest, the farewell tour is a public grieving that lets thousands of strangers mourn their own passing time together, using four blokes and a back catalogue as the medium. That’s not nothing. That’s most of what ritual has ever been for.

When the ghost is literal

Then a key member actually dies, and the metaphor stops being a metaphor.

Sometimes the band carries the absence with grace. Queen tour with Adam Lambert singing and Freddie Mercury on the screens, and everyone in the building understands the arrangement — Lambert isn’t pretending to be Freddie, he’s the officiant, and the real man appears in projected footage for a duet with the living. It works because it’s honest about what it is. The Rolling Stones lost Charlie Watts in 2021 and went straight back out with Steve Jordan on the drum stool, and the shows became, in part, a wake for Charlie. Lynyrd Skynyrd have been a rolling memorial for decades — the 1977 plane crash killed Ronnie Van Zant, his brother Johnny fronts the band, and when Gary Rossington died in 2023 the last original member was gone, yet the name plays on, a Ship of Theseus in cowboy boots.

And sometimes the ghost is rendered in light. The Dio hologram — “Dio Returns”, 2017 onward — put a projected Ronnie James Dio on stage fronting his living former bandmates. There have been Roy Orbison holograms, Whitney Houston, Frank Zappa, the de-aged ABBA avatars packing a purpose-built London arena night after night. Now KISS. This is where I get uneasy, and I’ll mark it clearly as opinion: a hologram is a séance where the medium is a hard drive and the dead have no say. The ABBA avatars at least were built by ABBA, with their consent and their motion capture — that’s a self-portrait, and fine. A hologram of a person who never agreed to it, sold as a ticketed event, is something closer to grave-robbing with good lighting. The technology summons the image and leaves the soul in the ground, and the crowd goes home having communed with a rendering.

The honest verdict

So is the reunion tour a beautiful communion or a cynical cash-grab? Both, always, in the same building on the same night, and the ratio is what you’re actually buying a ticket to find out.

The tell is whether the reason is true. Elton finishing because he’s old and tired, Sabbath closing the circle in Birmingham, Queen letting Freddie sing from the screen — those are séances with a real body in the ground and real grief in the room, and they earn the ticket price and the scarcity and the whole loaded apparatus. The fourth “final” tour by a band that feels great and just likes the money is a séance with no corpse, a magic trick performed on people who want so badly to believe that they’ll pay to be fooled. The audience is rarely the mark, though. The audience knows. They came to spend an evening with a younger self and a room full of people the same age, and they’ll take that communion even knowing the band will be back in three years to sell it again.

That’s the thing about a séance. Everyone in the room half-knows it’s a performance. They gather in the dark and hold hands and summon the dead anyway, because the summoning is the point and the dead are really only a pretext for the living to sit together and feel something. The reunion tour understood this before the rest of the industry did. It sells you the most expensive thing there is — your own time, briefly returned — and most nights, ghoulish machinery and all, it actually delivers. The same instinct drives the festival that’s mourning its own past while charging you more for it, and it’s the same reason Metallica still comes home to Copenhagen to play for a city that watched them grow up. We are all just trying to touch the year it mattered. The bands worked out how to charge us for the reaching.