 |
| Arcade Fire |
St John’s stands with unassuming grace in Smith Square, Westminster,
among houses worth several million pounds gathered around the former
Conservative Party headquarters. Since its restoration after WWII it
has functioned as a concert hall, with its events covered in the
Classical section of Time Out. The three Arcade Fire shows there
at the beginning of this year were exciting anomalies. That the
ten-piece chose to play here and at Porchester Hall was not wholly
unpredictable (given their taste for playing churches in Canada and the
USA), but it was an excursion from the norm made, fittingly, by a band
out of step with their contemporaries.
Feature continues
If
your first point of reference for these gigs was a paper, you probably
think they resembled obscure, private ceremonies congregated with those
sharp enough to get tickets in the five minutes before they sold out.
The view from within the band is more down-to-earth. ‘The idea was to
play warm-up shows that were really small,’ explains nominal frontman
Win Butler. ‘We were looking for spaces that suited where we were at,
which was fresh from our studio in Montreal.’ Richard Parry, whose
duties range from double bass to celeste, agrees that ‘It’s as much
logistics as anything,’ but acknowledges that unusual venues do have an
effect on ‘the way an audience feels and experiences something. If the
place has maybe more of an interesting history or architecture, it’s
always better, I find…’
The venue frames the relationship
between the band and their audience, described by Butler as ‘very
physical’. In St John’s this confluence was maintained so proficiently
– the band even playing on the outdoor steps – that the shows have
become legendary. At their UK festival dates over the summer, this
frame was more ‘hit and miss’ according to Parry. ‘Sometimes I don’t
find big, outdoor rock festivals that great… A lot of the times we
play, we’re not headlining so people will have been in the sun or rain
all day waiting for the Chili Peppers, and you can feel that,’ he
laughs. ‘You connect much faster at your own show. You know why you’re
there; people know why they’re there.’ At the Latitude festival this
July, where they headlined the last night, the exceptional
responsiveness of their audience was demonstrated when the band’s
request for the drunken clapping to cease was abruptly, apologetically
heeded. Parry remembers it fondly, sort of: ‘If you can’t hear the
music ’cos people are clapping wrong, that’s a bummer. We don’t stop
people dancing… [Laughs] I think it was an exceptionally loud display
of exceptionally poor clapping.’
Growing mainstream acceptance
should see them top more festival bills, but will the close-knit
community of the church shows be lost? They don’t think so. ‘We’re just
trying to make it so that people can actually come and see us and not
just whoever’s fastest on the internet,’ says Parry. ‘It requires
bigger venues. We can’t play in a giant cathedral ’cos that would be a
nightmare, so we play the Brixton Academy or Ally Pally or whatever.
It’ll be fine, don’t you worry.’ On returning to the subject however,
he does note some problems with London’s bigger venues, Brixton Academy
comparing roughly to ‘Red Rocks near Denver, Colorado’, apparently:
‘It’s a really beautiful old amphitheatre carved out of these crazy red
boulders, just a really interesting, special place. Over here there’s
barriers which we don’t have where we live. It’s kind of a drag from a
performing point of view ’cos you want to be right in people’s faces,
connecting. It wasn’t so bad at Brixton, but you do feel a little
distanced.’ In recognising the importance of proximity to the crowd,
Parry, like his singer, describes the band-audience relationship as a
physical one. ‘I don’t know what the politics of most of our fans are,’
says Butler. ‘Just having any fans at all feels pretty good.’
Butler’s
admiration for ‘music coming out of the Congo that uses these old,
beat-up guitars and home-made amplifiers’ suggests that he holds
enthusiasm and independence as the only two rules of the creative
process. Such independence is visible in the band’s resolve to ‘never
play Nottingham again’, having been bottled a fortnight ago, and in the
way they go about choosing venues. ‘We had our booking agent scouting
for rooms,’ Parry explains. ‘He’d send us pictures and we’d pick based
on what would be beautiful and interesting and also not an acoustic
nightmare. When you play as a ten-piece, the best you can do is rein it
in enough that you can actually hear everything. When we plug in
anywhere it sounds insane ’cos there’s kinda too much going on.’
This
pragmatic outlook challenges the perceived mysterious quality in
Arcade Fire’s performances which, with thanks in equal parts to the
venues, album titles and journalistic fancy, often get compared to
religious experiences. ‘I think when you go to a show or go see art
you’re looking for something bigger than yourself,’ says Parry, ‘and,
if you experience that, it can feel like a religious experience… which
could also be called an “art experience” in a different time or a
different culture. But we’re not like, “All right guys, lets have a
religious experience”.’ Butler, too, is aware of journalists’ eagerness
to scrutinise this aspect of the band: ‘It’s like they’re caught up in
a mission to find the truth of Arcade Fire and they’ve forgotten to
hear the music. I appreciate it’s their job, I just didn’t realise we’d
create such confusion.’
For a band so thoroughly inspected for
hidden meaning, both seem to totally ignore interpretation of what they
do. ‘That’s what’s cool about art,’ concludes Parry, ‘the significance
comes afterwards a lot of the time. We don’t have any control over it,
like you don’t have any control over who your family is; we just make
music. There’s no masterplan.’
Arcade Fire play Alexandra Palace on November 17, 18, 19
