Arcade Fire has completed its tour WE Saturday evening in Montreal on a high note, which however did not manage to stifle the concert of pots and pans that his coach had been dragging since the revelations, published last October by the Pitchfork site, about misconduct – and in one case of sexual assault — targeting songwriter and singer Win Butler. We will especially remember from this generous performance of more than two hours the interpretation, on recall, of a song by Leonard Cohen which, in the mouth of Butler, sounded like a form of repentance.
Just before the start of the concert, colleague Ian Mc Gillis of the Montreal Gazette shows us on the screen of his phone the list of songs that the group planned to offer to fans. “Did you see the second song on the encore? “, he asks us, his eyes surprised. Oh yes : Bird on a Wireimmortal by Cohen, taken from his second album Songs From a Room (1969). Here then.
Arcade Fire had never done it in concert that one. The band ended their singing tour with Everything Now, the crowd dancing with the musicians, drunk on the disco groove playing in the arena. After the courtesy break, the members gathered on the small central stage, under the mirror ball, to bring us to the painful reminder of the extension suite End of the Empirefrom his latest album WEreleased last spring.
Then Bird on a Wirewhich goes as follows in the chorus: If I, if I have been unkind / I hope that you can just let it go by / If I, if I have been untrue / I hope you know it was never to you “. And further, in the second verse: I have torn everyone who reached out for me / But I wear by this song / And by all that I have done wrong / I will make it all up to you “.
Allow this carefully chosen song to sound something like a public admission of something he claimed in a statement released last August after the revelations of the three women and a non-binary person (a fifth person s recently confided to Pitchfork about her “toxic” relationship with the musician). “I have never touched a woman against her will,” defended Win Butler, who has not yet been the subject of any complaint to the authorities. “While these relationships were all consensual, I am truly sorry to anyone I hurt through my behavior.”
The majority of fans gathered at the Bell Center on Saturday evening were certainly aware of the affair. In recent weeks, several ticket holders have tried to get their money back, refusing to take part in the scene. Visibly, the arena was filled to a third of its capacity (promoter Evenko told us a total of 10,500 spectators), unheard of for an Arcade Fire concert in his hometown. The resellers certainly did not make a profit: the day before, on certain websites, several tickets in the bleachers were offered at less than $20, while around fifty were requested for seats on the floor, displayed at more than $150 on Evenko’s website.
Another sign of the disavowal of the fans, this concert took a long time to get up, and not only because of a laborious sequence at the start of the show, yet launched with Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) from Funeral (2004), the recent Age of Anxiety and Ready to Start (from The Suburbs, 2010). Met in the bleachers, Fanny and Martin obviously had the allegations against Win Butler in mind when they set foot in the enclosure: “You can find pleasure in music while regretting the actions of the person who made it”, reasoned Fanny. Our conversation during the intermission, which revolved around the theme of distancing – to do or not – between the work and its creator had also animated their discussions in recent days.
And among the band’s fans since the start of this tour in Dublin on August 30, three days after the publication of the Pitchfork text. Canadian singer-songwriter Feist, who was to open for the European leg of the tour, withdrew on day two. Beck was announced for the North American section; he too left the ship, replaced at short notice by the Haitian orchestra Boukman Eksperyans, which includes singer and guitarist Paul Beaubrun, who had already joined Arcade Fire last summer.
This will be, after Cohen’s song, the second thing that will be remembered from this evening: the revolutionary group of mizik rasin burned the boards of the Bell Center in the first part. A group of seven musicians — two percussionists, a DJ, a dancer and backing vocalist, Paul on electric guitar, accompanied by his parents Théodore and Mimerose. The rara rhythm at full speed, the guitar pushing down the rock argument, the energy to recharge Creole pride even in the performance of Arcade Fire which saw the Beaubrun clan come back up brandishing the Haitian flag during Here Comes the Night Time (Reflector2013) and Haiti (Funeral) at the end of the concert. We understand Beck fans to be disappointed, but Boukman Eksperyans was not just an alternative.
And the performance of Arcade Fire? Not so different from the one offered last July at Osheaga — comparable song list, disco segment in the middle, scenography already chosen with the arc of the decor drawing the outline of the iris of an eye —, except for the atmosphere. Six months and a scandal sapped the electricity in the air, at least during the first third of the concert, as the band’s repertoire finally won over the crowd. Even that apart from Butler arriving on stage with the intention of putting all the gum there, the other musicians seemed extinguished, without the energetic outpourings to which the group had accustomed us, and gained over the years. Exhausted? End of tour, we said, with this question that was also running through Fanny and Martin’s head: would this be the last time we will see Arcade Fire at the Bell Centre?