Pop band hire in Australia: the complete guide

Pop is the category people book when they want the room singing along to songs from this decade rather than their parents'. It's also the category where one person carries most of the weight, because almost every modern chart song is built around a vocal that has nowhere to hide.

That changes what you should be watching for. In most band categories you're assessing a group. Here you're mostly assessing a singer, and then checking that the musicians behind them can reproduce records that were made in a studio with a lot of things a four-piece does not have.

Watch a video, close your eyes for thirty seconds and just listen. Modern pop sits high and exposed, and a vocalist who is straining in a clip they chose to publish will be straining worse at the end of a long night.

Two singers is a real upgrade if your budget stretches, and the harmonies are the smallest part of it. It means someone can rest, someone can carry a song written for a different voice, and a cold on the day doesn't cancel your booking.

A lot of current hits have programmed drums, synth parts and production layers that four musicians cannot reproduce in a room. Bands solve that in different ways. Some run backing tracks alongside the live playing, some rearrange the song for guitars and drums, and some simply avoid that end of the chart.

Ask which approach they take, and don't assume tracks are a compromise. Used well they sound like the record and the crowd gets what it expects. Used badly they lock the band into a fixed tempo and stop them stretching a song that's working, which is the one thing live music is for.

Twenty-firsts, engagement parties, school formals, university balls and any event where most of the room is under about thirty-five. A pop set assumes people recognise the last few years of radio, and where that assumption holds it's the fastest way to a full floor.

It is a poor fit for a mixed-age milestone where half the guests stopped following new music twenty years ago. In that room a pop band plays to a third of the guests while the rest wait politely, and you've paid for all of them.

This category dates faster than any other on this site. A song list assembled two years ago has holes in it now, and a band that isn't adding material regularly is quietly drifting into being a nostalgia act without meaning to.

So ask when they last learned something new. Ask too whether they'll take one specific request for a first dance or an entrance, and what notice they need. Most working bands will, given a few weeks. A few days is asking for a rough version of a song you'll be watching closely.

Who is singing on the video, and are they on our date? Do you use backing tracks, and for how much of the set? What have you added to the list this year? How do you handle a song we want that isn't in your repertoire? And what's the plan if the singer is unwell?

The last one deserves a straight answer. A band with a depping vocalist who knows the set can cover it. A band built around one irreplaceable voice should say so honestly, and then the risk is yours to weigh rather than theirs to hide.