Arcade Fire - Hyde Park, London – 30/6/11
5/5
By: Joe Daniels
Cementing their position as Springsteen’s spiritual heirs, Arcade Fire tonight prove that to make nostalgic, heart-on-your-sleeve, blue-collar rock really hit home, all you need is big choruses and 60,000 people.
It’s music built around an ethos: that we’re all in this together, that it’s us against them. The snobby art-scenesters try to make us feel dumb, the businessmen dine on our bones, and the politicians send us to die for lies. This is the world that forms the backdrop of Arcade Fire’s bittersweet stories of yesteryear – gone is the sweet innocence of kissing your first love in a park, now the world is just a system of industrializing machinations, estranging our emotions.
It is precisely this perpetual conflict, the ambition and curiosity of youth resisting the grim reality of existence that lends Arcade Fire’s music the earnestness it needs to support itself. Their songs are only strong enough because the sincerity is there: you know they mean it. Anything less and they would collapse under their own portentousness.
It’s for that reason that playing Hyde Park to a crowd so large that the numbers don’t really mean anything on paper is entirely appropriate. It’s also therefore excusable, almost, that they asked Mumford and Sons to support. Tonight, content mirrors form: big songs played to a big audience.
Opening with ‘Ready to Start’, the set is fairly Arcade Fire by numbers, which is by no means a bad thing. It’s the sort of set that has already seen them win over fans in their droves on their ascent up the festival ladder. ‘Rebellion (Lies)’, ‘Intervention’, and ‘No Cars Go’ all writhe in the scathing unity against our aforementioned cultural oppressors, and they do so gloriously.
That’s not to say there’s no room for some fun and surprises though. Throwing standard set-closer ‘Wake Up’ in second is a move nobody saw coming – making it it one of its most majestic outings yet – and new song ‘Speaking in Tongues’ was a bold choice at a gig so monumental. Nonetheless, the crowd lapped it up and not unjustifiably so; like album-title track ‘The Suburbs’, ‘Speaking in Tongues’ shows just how wonderful trundling along the middle of the road can be. The audaciousness of the song’s inclusion is acknowledged by frontman Butler ('That was the least time we've been scared doing a song we've only really played in rehearsal to 60,000 people, so thank you so much,') whose acerbic wit is certainly in attendance tonight. Mocking the Westminster wealth, he observes ‘You know all the rich people who live around this park, every year they try to buy up the rights so you can't make a little noise’, before interjecting in ‘Neighborhood #2 (Laika)’ ‘The neighborhood would like you to keep it down a little bit.’ His banter (though the word seems a little removed from this wiry, sensitive, bookish frontman) is emblematic of the whole point of the gig: a middle finger to those who are ruining our fun, our innocence.
Closing the first set with ‘Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)’, they return onstage for an encore consisting of their most gloriously nostalgic songs, soaked in a longing desperation for the sweetness of time remembered. ‘Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)’ with its story of a child’s snow-trapped love becomes even more poignant towards the end of the show, and ‘Sprawl II (Mountains beyond Mountains’) couldn’t be more apt as the show’s closer. Disco-beats and Abba-fused synths, this is a euphoric as it is tragic – and tows the Arcade Fire line of childhood imagination juxtaposed with grim reality in glorious Technicolor.
Not just a fine show then, but a career defining one, and a feat that will undoubtedly be repeated with every world-conquering album and subsequent world-stomping tour that they put out. It started here though, in a park next to the rich people, full of us poor, downtrodden kids, just wanting to stay young a little bit longer.
Artists in this article: Arcade Fire
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