Arcade Fire: The cliched rock life never seemed that cool to us
In a concrete room backstage at the Palau Sant Jordi arena in Barcelona, I am midway though a post-show interview with Arcade Fire’s unfeasibly tall, quietly charismatic lead singer, Win Butler, when the door opens and his bandmate, Richard Reed Parry, enters. He roots around in a cupboard for a few moments, then exits again, having found what he was looking for – a yoga mat.
It strikes me later that this may be a small, but revealing, indication of a bigger pop-cultural shift that Arcade Fire exemplify: an illustration of just how far rock music has travelled from its rebellious roots, how much it has shed the emotional baggage – the angst, the self-destructive habits, the dissolute lifestyle – that once defined it. Suffice to say that there was a time, not that long ago, when yoga would not have been the preferred means of post-gig relaxation for a hip young rock star, but, my, how times have changed.
“The cliched rock life never seemed that cool to me,” says Butler, who, as we chat, is eating brown rice salad from a small plastic container and sipping on a throat-soothing brandy. “We’re not a band that’s out to party until we die every night. We did a lot of shows with a lot of bands that were living that dream, but it’s a dream I never bought into. It never seemed that fun. In fact, it was always kind of embarrassing to me. That isn’t what I think is cool about rock.”
In case you have not noticed, Arcade Fire – a multi-instrumental, mixed gender, seven-piece indie-rock group from the very un-rock’n’roll city of Montreal, Canada – are what is most cool about rock right now. The group’s debut album, Funeral, was released in 2004 on the small independent label Merge Records. Initially championed by influential American music websites such as Pitchfork, it became one of the most critically lauded albums of the year, selling more than half a million copies globally.
Back then, Arcade Fire were famous for playing intimate venues – they often chose churches to suit the sombre subject matter of Funeral, a record whose underlying theme was death and grief. (Both Butler and his wife, Régine Chassagne, who writes, sings, drums and plays an array of arcane instruments, including the hurdy-gurdy, lost relatives in the year preceding the album’s release.) Their live shows, which often began with the group marching though the audience while playing their instruments, or culminated with them leaving the stage to play among the crowd, attracted a growing legion of obsessive fans. Arcade Fire gigs became communal celebrations, uplifting to the point of congregational in tone.
Read more at Guardian.
