Do Sunglasses Make You Play Better? A Brief, Slightly Silly History of Shades On Stage
Let's deal with the easy part first. If you are stood on a festival stage at 4pm in July, the sun sitting exactly where your monitor engineer's face should be, squinting like a mole who has taken a wrong turn, then yes. Sunglasses absolutely make you play better. You can see the fretboard. You can see the setlist. You can see the person in the front row filming the whole thing on a tablet. Visibility is, it turns out, quite useful when playing an electric guitar in front of two thousand people.
The rest of the time? That's where things get gloriously daft.
A short history of the stage sunglass
Roy Orbison is the patron saint of the accidental icon. The story goes that he left his regular glasses on a plane before a tour in 1963 and was left with only his prescription sunglasses. He wore them, the audience assumed it was mystique, and a legend was welded into place. Behind the shades was a man with an astonishing voice and a Gibson slung across him, quietly inventing the idea that a singer could look like a secret.
Ray Charles wore his for reasons that were never about theatre, and yet no one has ever looked cooler behind a piano. Anyone who has sat at a weighted-key keyboard or digital piano and tried to play "What'd I Say" with any of that swing knows the glasses were not doing the heavy lifting. The hands were.
Bono turned them into a whole character. The Fly, Zoo TV, wraparound insect lenses, the lot. He has also spoken about glaucoma and light sensitivity, which rather takes the wind out of anyone doing a smug impression. Meanwhile The Edge stood beside him wringing cathedral-sized delay out of a Stratocaster and a rack of effects pedals, wearing a hat.
Neil Diamond brought tinted-lens showbiz warmth, all sequins and "Sweet Caroline" and an acoustic strummed with total conviction. Corey Hart wore his at night and then wrote a song about it in case anyone missed the point. John Lennon's round teashades became shorthand for an entire decade. Bo Diddley paired his with a rectangular guitar, which is frankly a level of commitment the rest of us can only admire. Slash layered shades under a top hat and somehow made a Les Paul sound like weather. Jack Bruce, Stevie Wonder, Elton John, Joey Ramone, Robert Smith, Liam Gallagher, most of ZZ Top, and roughly ninety percent of every ska and reggae horn section ever photographed. The brass and woodwind players, it must be said, wear them best.
So do they actually help you play?
Here is the unscientific truth. Sunglasses do not improve your alternate picking. They do not tighten your timing. They will not fix the bar of 7/8 you have been fluffing since rehearsal. What they do is change how you feel, and how you feel is not nothing.
Behind dark lenses you cannot see individual faces. You cannot see the bloke at the bar talking through your ballad. You cannot make accidental eye contact during the quiet bit. For a nervous player, that is a small portable stage-fright shield, which is why so many first-gig guitarists reach for them alongside a decent strap and a tuner. Confidence is a real variable in live performance, and anything that raises it genuinely does improve the show.
The downside: you also cannot see your amp controls, the setlist taped to the floor, your bassist's panicked signal that you have skipped a verse, or the step at the edge of the stage. Many a fine bass guitar has met the boards because its owner prioritised mystique over depth perception. Indoor pub gigs are lit by three bulbs and a fruit machine. Wearing shades in there is not cool, it is a hazard.
What happens when they take them off?
This is the real experiment, and the results are consistent: nothing happens to the music, and everything happens to the myth.
When Bono takes the glasses off mid-set, the arena does that odd little gasp, as if a magician has removed a hat. He sounds exactly the same. When Roy Orbison was photographed without his, people genuinely struggled to place him, which is a remarkable thing to say about one of the greatest voices in popular music. The shades had become the album cover.
And that is the joke at the heart of it. The sunglasses never made anyone play better. They made people look like someone who plays better, which bought the artist a few seconds of the audience's goodwill before the first note. After that first note, you are on your own, and no lens tint on earth will save a badly intonated acoustic guitar or a drum kit tuned by optimism.
The verdict from behind the counter
Outdoor stage, summer festival, sun at eye level: wear them, and enjoy actually seeing chord shapes. Dim back room of a pub on a Tuesday: take them off, look at your audience, and let the playing do the work. Wedding function band: read the room, then take them off before the first dance.
If you want to genuinely sound better next gig, the boring answers still win. Fresh strings. A proper setup so the action is right and the notes ring true. A tuner you actually use. A little practice with a metronome. We do in-house repairs and setups for most string instruments here at the shop, and a well set-up guitar, violin, ukulele, banjo or mandolin will do more for your playing than the finest pair of shades ever made.
Though we accept that it will not look half as good in the photos.
Pop in and see us at 17 High Street, Alford, Lincolnshire, LN13 9DS, or give us a ring on 01507 838 448. Sunglasses optional.
