Sat 17 Mar – The Arcade Fire, Electrelane

So I did eventually get to see Arcade Fire, albeit two nights later than originally planned. There’s a long story behind that which I won’t bore you with, but it had a positive in that we got to stand down the front and jump around a bit, rather than sitting politely upstairs. It also had a negative in that we got Electrelane in support rather than Patrick Wolf and they were a bit rubbish. They started brightly enough, with a rocking piano led opening number, but the lead singer’s voice was whiney and annoying so the only real bright spots were when she stopped singing and they went into a couple of heavy breakdowns. It also led me to make up an on-the-spot theory: that whilst male singers can get away with not being very tuneful if they have an interesting character to their voice, female singers need to be a lot better. This may be complete rubbish but we couldn’t think of a successful front-woman off the top of our heads who didn’t have a pretty damn good singing voice. Feel free to tell me just how wrong (sexist?) I am if you can prove this to be incorrect.

Anyway, what superlatives can you utilise to describe the Arcade Fire live experience which haven’t already been used ad-nauseam? Suffice to say that they were very good indeed. I guess I have to say that it didn’t quite live up to the St John’s Church gig I was lucky enough to attend a few weeks back, but then very little could. Despite the rustiness of the band, the somewhat less than perfect acoustics and the quiet / awed reception of the audience on that occasion it was still a magical, once-in-a-lifetime kind of experience. It’s easy to understand what the Evening Standard journo present was on about when he wrote that it felt like being “at the centre of the universe”.

Back to Saturday though and the slightly less romantic surroundings of Brixton Academy. The set was expectedly storming – though since the opening section was pretty Neon Bible heavy the audience did take a while to warm up (obviously not everyone has had it for a month and a half already!) On a personal note I was also disappointed that despite the glut of new songs they chose to omit the Springsteen-esque (Antichrist Television Blues) on this particular night. But by the time they reached the Funeral double hit of Neighborhood #3 (Power Out) and Rebellion (Lies) the whole place was feeding off the remarkable energy produced by the band.

The encore was again the anthemic Wake Up, but this time on stage and with 3,000 punters enthusiastically joining in, rather than busked outside on the steps of a church. It’s an odd thing to say about a band who clearly have so much quality material but I genuinely would have felt cheated without Wake Up at the end - I’m sure there will come a point when they tire of closing shows with it, but I hope it’s not any where I’m in attendance! They actually came back once again after that to do an unplugged acoustic version of Guns of Brixton, which was appropriate I guess, but to be honest didn’t really work. It was always going to be ambitious in such a cavernous venue – I could hardly hear them and we were only about ten from the front so I feel sorry for anyone crammed in at the back. Nobody seemed to mind that much though and as we filed out a repeated chorus of the Ohhh’s from Wake Up reverberated round the foyer and out into the night. I’m reliably informed that this continued all the way back to the tube and onto the Victoria Line. That’s the kind of magical thing this band inspire – hopefully I shall get more opportunities to witness it over the summer when they return for the festivals.