A microphone hangs on the stage ceiling in the Royal Albert Hall in London, right in front of the drums. It swings on a long cable from left to right. Win Butler kept sticking it up, it continues to strike. It swings over his head. Regine Chassagne also gives the slopes a thrust again and again. What does it look like? Like a pendulum! The pit and pendulum! Or like a Damocles sword?
Between reading and stage choreography
You can’t help yourself, you are looking for signs and symbols at Arcade Fire. Signs that explain their situation. Because they don’t want to talk about what came to the public three years ago. Win Butler was exposed to abusive behavior in 2022, two women described their alleged experiences. There was no indictment, Butler spoke of mutual acts. The thing is unclear.
The concert as a mirror inner conflicts
Since then, the question has been the question of how well these women are doing, how well Win Butler is doing, and of course also how his wife Regine Chassagne is doing. Not to mention the shared son. “We live in an open relationship,” says Chassagne at the time, it was her only statement. It looked like a pitiful, forced attempt to rescue her husband. And your own honor. View of the stage: every dance together, every duet of the two is under observation. Quite a few had declared Arcade Fire as completed according to the allegations of abuse. Perhaps it explains why you are already setting up this year with a new work (three years of break are nothing for you).
Return with “Pink Elephant” – a new album
In the Royal Albert Hall, Arcade Fire presented the songs of their seventh album “Pink Elephant” at their only European concert on Wednesday evening (May 14th). And then, after a dramaturgically adorned 20-minute break (my goodness, the plate only takes around 40 minutes, nobody can be exhausted afterwards), a best-of set.
Stage magic despite staffing losses
Win Butler can be considered a scented, his self -scourge articulated in the new texts are applied to thick. But Arcade Fire also stays on this evening: a very, very good live band. Perhaps the best live band of the skirt that has produced the new millennium. Even if they have shrunk from twelve musicians to seven. Win Butler’s little brother Will, co-composer and musical director, got out. Richard Reed “Malachai” Parry, The Red Threat, paused.
Win Butler’s performance between closeness and escape
The Royal Albert Hall is awe, but it is not as big as you think from the outside. It can also be explained that Win Butler boots the entire hall. Didn’t work at the Berlin Waldbühne. Here he runs singing through the interior. Through the first upper parties. Already with Song four, “Circle of Trust”, he dives in the crowd (provided that with a two-meter man at all). “Circle of Trust” is a song about ecstasy in the club, fraud, distrust (like Rolling Stone at least suspected – we would have liked to ask him about this song. However, interviews would have been tied to not talking about it). It is noteworthy that with this pogo-like “Circle of Trust” only men hop around Butler and tap his shoulders appreciatively. A male bundle.
Regine chassagne – backbone, support, resonance
Regine Chassagne had opened the evening with her lonely walking on the stage. She was wearing a hat on which garlands hung down, so long garlands that chassagne looked like a weeping pasture. But chassagne is Butler’s back, no question. Their joint stage positions have changed compared to the last tour. They are often close together, and when they face each other, butler in the audience, they on stage, look at themselves while singing.
On the organ: alone between space and sound
When she sits on the organ, Chassagne does the greatest service. Finally she turns her back on the band and the audience. So she could not absorb the emotions of all other people in the Royal Albert Hall. Applause, dynamics, everything is far behind her. So in the sense of: really far away. As far away as maybe never. Because Arcade Fire made use of the Royal Albert Hall. Chassagne sits on the house organ, around ten meters increased and ten meters from the stage. What a sight. Like organ play in heaven. Made for songs like “Rococo”, “My Body is a Cage” and of course the divine “intervention”. Every hall in which Arcade Fire occurs would need a house organ. A win-win situation (sorry for the pun).
From the sacred “intervention” to indie anthems
“Intervention” provides what was lost at Arcade Fire by turning to electronic music from “WE” from 2022. The feeling that it is always about life and death. They only convey this feeling through the orchestra drama. Lines like “Working for the Church While Your Family Das / You Take What They Give You / And You Keep It Inside / Every Spark of Friendship and Love Will Die Without A Home” from “Intervention” are something different than new, improvised rapidly reminiscent seals such as “In the Year of the Snake / I Made a Car Break ”from“ Year of the Snake ”. And can the magic of childhood be formulated more beautiful than in “The Suburbs (Continued)”, that 15 year old song? “If I Could Have It Back / All The Time that we wasted / i’d Only Waste it again / if i could have it back”.
Classics and mistakes in the second set
In the second set, hit by HIT is part of the AF back catalog. Not everything was successful. The “End of the Empire”, which was already being raised on the “WE” album, a ten-minute melange from Lennon’s “Imagine”, Newspeak criticism and meaningless streaming vocabulary (“Fuck Season 5”, “I Unsubscript”) should have flyed out of the setlist, “reflector” in it. But this is just a single misery of pieces such as “Creature Comfort”, “Black Mirror” and “Afterlife”, those classics of the “Indie Rock”. In between, Win Butler, the American, who accepted Canadian citizenship a few years ago, calls a good cause. And against the US president. “We can snatch the power again!” He calls, based on the Arcade Fire duet with Mavis Staples, “I Give You Power”. Butler sings lines from David Bowie’s “I’m Afraid of Americans”. Bowie wrote the song in 1996, but of course, it never fit better than now.
Indie, idealism and the broken trust
But what does it actually mean to be “indie”? This definition, as spongy it has always been, was also questioned by the allegations of abuse. Arcade Fire were indie, so always on the right side. Against “those up there” and always for the fans. Arcade Fire were the good ones. Couple. A family business. Family on tour. Family offers security when Rock and Roll is full of temptations. You don’t really take that away from them anymore.
What remains of the rebellious ideal?
One should not describe arcade fire fans uncritically, even if no apologet likes to talk about the allegations of abuse against Butler. At Rammstein concerts, demonstrators had gathered in front of the stadiums. They don’t exist in front of the Royal Albert Hall. On the contrary, people wear, the “pink elephant” motto according to, clothing in pink, the color of childlike innocence.
And yet the appearance Regine Chassagnes is celebrated the most. She sings her own song, “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)”. And this song? Belongs in the top five of Arcade Fire. But people also celebrate them for another reason. Because she’s still there. In spite of everything. Without them the band would be dead.
Fans, forgiveness and the pink elephant in the room
Rolling-Stone colleague Marc Vetter says: “She also forgiven him because of the band. It’s her baby too.” And nobody should ever forget that who wants to know Arcade Fire.
After the performance, Arcade continue. They drum in front of the hall, it is a post-concert ritual that they often offered. The focus is on an unplugged version of “Wake Up”, only Percussions and the “Wake Up” Chant. A polonaise of the hipsters. Noise at all costs, even without a microphone, extended into the night. Win Butler calls into the night. We will not find out what is really going on in him.