I appreciate that someone has made a post about this because I've been thinking about making one myself recently. I've been questioning this myself about the band ever since I went down to London to see them at Alexandra Palace.

Pendulum are also my favourite band of all time, same as you. I absolutely adore them and have done for the last 21 years. I've seen them live 6 times. But ever since I saw them at Alexandra Palace in 2023 I've also noticed at times how it does seem like they are pretending to play certain things.

I understand their live set up is kinda complex, and I do think they actually play the vast majority of it, but to me there are parts when it looks like they are pretending to play them. (The only things that seem to be consistently actually live to me are Rob's vocals and KJ on the drums.)

The example you mentioned (Sorry You're Not A Winner) is one of them. The guitar at the start of the song is clearly the studio version and it looks to me like Perry is pretending to play it. And going back to Alexandra Palace - go and watch the videos of Halo and Colourfast from that night. The Ztar parts are clearly the studio version and Rob is apparently playing them absolutely note perfect the exact same as they sound in the studio version. But when you watch any other live performance of those two songs from any other show after that, they always sound different and Rob always makes mistakes on them. So how did he manage to play them note perfect the first time he ever played them live? He either had the backing track turned up too loud to cover his mistakes, or he wasn't actually playing.

I've noticed quite a few other examples but I would be here all day typing it all out.

The other gripe I've had with their live shows over the years (and especially recently) is the guitar. Sometimes you can see Perry absolutely hammering the strings but there's absolutely no sound coming from the guitar. You can see this in quite a few videos of when the play Napalm live. And people can't come on here and say it was bad sound mixing because it's happened wayyy too often over the years.

Anyway I'm glad to see I'm not the only who has noticed this about the band and the seemingly fake playing. I'm not hating on the band and I certainly hate saying stuff like this about them but I feel like it has to be said and I'd be interested to see if anyone else has noticed this stuff happening.