Arcade Fire
Sidney Myer Music Bowl
Wednesday 22 January 2014
$100
Arcade On Fire
It was a hot, balmy night in Melbourne,
perfect for Arcade Fire at the Bowl as well as the men’s quarter final of the Australian
Open – Roger Federer was playing
Andy Murray just over the river at Rod Laver Arena.
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| Win Butler - photo by Jodie Meier - muscifeeds.com |
There was a friendly, good humoured buzz
as fans for both events blended in the city before parting at Princes Bridge to
stroll down their respective sides of the Yarra River. Even without the river dividing
us, it wouldn’t take a social ethnographer to work out who was going to which
event, for although both groups exhibited a certain middle class prosperity –
enough that they could each fork out $100 plus for a night out – there is very
little crossover in the fashion of hipsters and tennis fans. One set was
wearing black denim and some variant of tour t-shirt, while the other opted for
chinos or pressed shorts teamed with polo shirts, and the optional extra of a
flag depicting the white cross of the Swiss or the Scottish St Andrew’s cross
worn as a cape. Plus the tennis fans had better tans.
The Sidney Myer Music Bowl is a large outdoor
amphitheatre on the edge of the Botanical Gardens. It hosts free orchestral
concerts every year and is famous for The Seekers homecoming show in 1967 that
attracted 200,000 people. It is also where ABBA played on their 1977 Australian
tour. It is infamous for an AC-DC show in 1980 when people without tickets
brought down the fences and there were battles between fans and police. That coupled
with complaints about the volume brought about a ban on concerts at the Bowl
that lasted more than 10 years.
There is seating for a couple of thousand
people at the front and general admission for several more thousand on the lawn
behind. From my perspective, you either get a seat at a Bowl gig, or you
reconsider going. Not that I mind standing for the show, but I’ve outgrown the
early queuing and pushing and shoving required to get a good vantage spot in
the general admission area, and worse, keeping it. So I was happy that I
secured a seat in the front section for this gig.
All the usual members of my concert
cohort were on holidays so I was on my own for this one. Having a seat meant
that I didn’t have to arrive early, so I missed the support act, a DJ named
Diplo, but I was keen to see Arcade Fire who I had missed on their only
previous tour of Australia.
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| The Butler Bros. - photo by Jodie Meier - musicfeeds.com |
Arcade Fire were here on the back of Reflektor – a sprawling dance oriented
double album produced by LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy. After the massive
critical and commercial success of The
Suburbs, which won the Grammy Award for album of the year in 2011 – Arcade
Fire were in the enviable, or unenviable position, depending on how you look at
it, of having to follow-up a career defining album. Like Radiohead after OK Computer, R.E.M after Automatic For the People, U2 after The Joshua Tree, or Bowie after every
album in the 1970s, Arcade Fire elected to follow The Suburbs by changing their sound entirely. This is a strategy
that carries some commercial risk but when the band is adventurous enough and
good enough, like Arcade Fire and their predecessors, they end up creating
another classic. Reflektor is just
that – a record that with its emphasis on rhythms is quite different, but every
bit as good as The Suburbs and Funeral. Plus it has Bowie doing a guest
vocal on the title track.
The lights dimmed, the intro music faded
and the familiar bass rumble and percussive keyboard motif of Rebellion sounded to welcoming cheers. Stage lights picked out
the members of Arcade Fire wearing oversized papier-mache caricature bobble heads
of themselves, as seen in the film clip for Reflektor. The audience were just getting their legs
moving and beginning to mouth the words to the song when the show was
interrupted by a group of stage invaders wandering on from the wings demanding
to know what was going on. Of course it was the actual band members who
collected their instruments and shooed away their masquerading dopplegangers.
Public speakers often open with a joke,
but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a band open a gig with such an elaborate hoax.
It certainly set the tone that this was not to be a cerebral, shoe-gazing gig,
though given the Caribbean rhythms and dance beats of their latest album, there
was never much chance of that anyway.
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| Diol Edmond & Tiwii Duprate - photo by Jodie Meier - musicfeeds.com |
Once the actual members of Arcade Fire
took up their instruments they immediately launched into Normal Person from Reflektor, a rollicking examination of youthful uncertainty,
non-conformity and casual cruelty, from which they ripped into Rebellion proper and Wake up, two of the best known tracks from their debut album,
Funeral. Both tracks got the audience up and involved,
particularly Wake Up’s soaring
“Whoa…Hoh!” sing-a-long refrain. They followed this with a trinity of songs
from The Neon Bible: an abbreviated, My Body is a Cage, Keep the Car Running and Ocean of Noise.
There were upwards of 10 people
regularly on stage (is that a dectet or just an orchestra?) and with roadies
invading from various corners between songs, it was nearly as crowded up there as
on the lawn. Lead singer Win Butler was the consummate frontman, roaming across
the stage wearing a golden jacket and exhorting the audience to join in the choruses.
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| Will Butler in mask & Tim Kingsbury - photo by Jodie Meier - musicfeeds.com |
Even with 10 people, multi-tasking was
the order of the day with most members jumping between instruments every couple
of songs. I’m not sure whether they suffer from a specialised form of musical
ADHD whereby they get bored playing the same instrument for more than one song
at a time, or whether there’s some sort of union ruling about job variety
they’re required to observe. Perhaps they’re just showing off. Regine Chassagne
must have played at least six different instruments during the course of the
show, as well as taking lead vocals on Sprawl
II and whenever possible, breaking out into 80s dance moves to match the
80s big hair and leggings look she was rocking. At one point she even twirled streamers
rhythmic gymnastic style.
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| Regine Chassagne - photo by Jodie Meier musicfeeds.com |
In addition to guitars and bass, I
counted at least eight keyboards - more than even Emerson, Lake & Palmer
could have managed at once - two drum kits and a percussion section, including
steel drums. For Keep the Car Running
two of them were sawing away at violins, Win Butler was playing a mandolin and
Regine Chassagne was playing something that might have been a hurdy-gurdy.
Whatever it was, it required regular winding up.
With every song being an indie anthem of
sorts, the audience was up and bellowing out the words for each one. It was
like a 10,000 strong Glee Club, but with iPhones aloft. Things settled down a
bit for The Suburbs – my favourite
Arcade fire song – perhaps because it is a more sedate number requiring Win Butler
to take a seat at the piano, or because the audience was less comfortable
singing its falsetto chorus than shouting out ‘Whoa Ho!’
Afterlife began with the stage awash
with swirling white lights, like the Milky Way, or the reflections of hundreds
of disco balls. This song afforded the audience another big ‘Whoa-ho’
sing-a-long moment as Butler stood on the foldback speaker holding the mike out
to the crowd.
It seemed that every song was a classic;
Afterlife and Sprawl II led into the anthemic No
Cars Go and the rock-a-billy of Joan
of Arc. Then they busted out a cover of INXS’s The Devil Inside with Butler donning his bobble head and miming
while guitarist Richard Reed Perry took the lead vocal. I’d rather hear them do
one of their own songs, but it was a nice gesture and maintained the mood of
uninhibited revelry they had built up. Perhaps they also wanted to make up for
Butler’s quip that if it wasn’t for Australians, who would make coffee in Montreal.
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| Win Butler - photo by Jodie Meier - musicfeeds.com |
Except perhaps the three song encore
that followed: Ready To Start, Reflektor and Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out) that ended things in a fittingly
raucous manner.
I’ve been to some great gigs at the Bowl
over the years, R.E.M. in 1995 and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds in 2003 and
2013, and this was Arcade Fire gig every bit as exhilarating.
Encore: Roger Federer defeated Andy Murray in four sets.
Setlist
Normal
Person
Rebellion
(Lies)
Wake
Up
My
Body Is A Cage
Keep
The Car Running
Ocean
Of Noise
The
Suburbs
It’s
Never Over (Hey Orpheus)
Afterlife
Sprawl
II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)
No
Cars Go
Joan
of Arc
Devil
Inside
Here
Comes The Night Time
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Ready
To Start
Reflektor
Neighbourhood
#3 (Power Out)
The photos above were taken by Jodie Meier and were sourced from musicfeeds.com
http://musicfeeds.com.au/photos/arcade-fire-sidney-myer-music-bowl-melbourne-220214/#/slide/1
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