The click track, like a metronome fed in through headphones, is essential for keeping the band in time with any pre-programmed music. But it’s also very rigid when you are playing a gig or even when developing a song in rehearsal. Roberston says that creating music requires a kind of ‘flow’, but it’s difficult to achieve in rehearsal when the band are so focused on keeping the tempo set by a click track. ‘A very important thing about music is surprise, and that’s the excitement factor, and you can lose that by playing to a rigid thing, like having a silent car alarm in the background.’opinion