The Arcade Fire, Alexandra Palace, London, November 2007
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There can't be many bands around whose instruments of choice include a hurdy-gurdy, a crash helmet and a megaphone. Nor can there be many acts who thought of melding Motown basslines, Abba piano chords and Handel choruses. But to do this and become the darling of both critics and public alike, as Arcade Fire have done over the last few years, is quite a trick. So in order to see how they managed it, I roped in two authentic Canadians as company, put on my crampons and
made my way up the far-flung mountain on which you'll find Alexandra Palace.

It's just as well that we passed up the opportunity to queue up to buy beer tokens only to have to join a second queue for the actual beer, for we made it just in time to see a montage of televangelists hectoring us from the big screens. It's an appropriate introduction for a band whose most recent album was primarily recorded in a church and is suffused with religious allusions (not to mention a hefty dose of church organ). The opening number, "Black Mirror", is delivered with the commitment for which this band have become renowned, and I find myself getting goosebumps, and not for the last time this evening.

The set is a mixture of material from their two full albums to date, and is naturally biased towards this year's "Neon Bible". Most of it gets an airing, although I'm slightly disappointed that "Windowsill"
is omitted, as they managed to find room for what in my view is the album's only real duffer, "Black Wave/Bad Vibrations". Regine Chassagne is clearly a very talented multi-instrumentalist and hugely
charismatic on stage, but she can't sing well enough to carry the first part of this song, and I'm sorry, but the second half is pure Meat Loaf.

We were treated to two new songs, the names of which I unfortunately can't provide as they didn't see fit to tell us, but I can tell you that the first featured an uncharacteristic amount of spiky guitar
shenanigans, and the second was gentler. Neither made much of an impact on me, I'm afraid. Certainly nowhere near the impact of the crowd favourites rolled out towards the end of the set, such as "Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels)", "Rebellion (Lies)" and, of course, the mighty finale "Wake Up". Massed hands-in-the-air singalongs are usually the preserve of witless plodders such as Oasis or the Kaiser Chiefs, but when ten thousand people lend their voices as wordless accompaniment to these songs, the effect is something bordering on the religious. Certainly, the girl stood next to me seemed to be having a personal epiphany of some sort. For me, that happened at Glastonbury this year more than it did during this set, but Arcade Fire remain a must-see live act, a band who throw
themselves into every gig as though their lives depended on it. We wandered off as the wind carried away those wordless mantras which the faithful were still intoning long after the lights had gone up, not quite born again but certainly intent on spreading the word.

Editorial : Neil Calderwood



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