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Tonight they have sold out Manchester Central, a venue that can hold thousands. Lead singer Win Butler acknowledges this, thanking the crowd for coming and claiming that for the rest of the tour “we had to beg everyone else to come”. It’s a bit hard to believe, considering that Arcade Fire are now one of the biggest bands on the planet, with a number one album (The Suburbs) on both sides of the Atlantic, have performed at Madison Square Garden, and boast famous rock friends including U2, David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen.
Opener Devendra Banhart charms the crowd with his brand of folky indie-rock. As Banhart leaves and the stage is set up for the headliners, the gap in front of the stage fills up and finally at 9:15pm Arcade Fire arrive and lurch into ‘Ready to Start’ from the new album. They are incredibly energetic, particularly Win Butler’s brother Will, who runs around on stage playing everything from guitar to drums to keyboard. Indeed, the sheer array of instruments played over the course of the night is nothing short of dizzying. Megaphones appear during ‘Month of May’, while Win Butler’s wife Regine Chassagne plays accordion during crowd favourite ‘Laika’ from their debut album Funeral. Elsewhere, Butler acknowledges his debt to Manchester’s famous music scene during ‘The Suburbs’ by singing a few lines of The Smiths’ ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’.
The crowd are loving it, with lots of dancing and crowd surfing. After playing five songs from The Suburbs, the band dip into their back catalogue and start pulling out the big guns. Indeed, “big” is the perfect adjective for their music – every song is soaring and epic with impossibly grandiose crescendos. Shouty rocker ‘Power Out’ is performed under eerie red lightning, and the band does the old “false finish” trick, roaring back with the song’s main riff after they finish to segue into a beautiful ‘Rebellion (Lies)’. Neon Bible’s ‘Intervention’ closes the main set, one of my favourite Arcade Fire songs but a much slower number and perhaps an odd choice of a follow-up to the emotionally-draining diptych they had just performed.
The band return after a brief break for their encore, Win Butler playing a mandolin for a lively ‘Keep the Car Running’, which leads into Chassagne’s crowd-pleasing turn on lead vocals for the new-wavey ‘Sprawl II’. The night finishes with ‘Wake Up’, the band’s most recognisable song, with the wild-haired Richard Reed Parry pounding away on an enormous bass drum with the force of a thousand suns. The venue echoes with the sound of several thousand people chanting along to the song’s wordless chorus. It is a beautiful way to end a beautiful night.
As we file out of the venue I remark to my friend that this is probably the best gig I’ve ever been to. You can cue the cynical remark “oh, you probably don’t go to a lot of gigs then” all you like. For nearly two hours I remained transfixed by the sheer excellence of a band who can just about do no wrong at this point, and it will take a very special performance by someone else to even match the kind of beauty I experienced that night.
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