How Arcade Fire taught us how to party
The magnificent Arcade Fire are finally back, with a new album out at the end of this month. They popped into the Radio 1 to play two stunning tracks, which should help tide us over while we wait for it.
Performing new track Everything Now with disco balls and an awesome youth choir, they turned the Live Lounge studio into a total party.
And while the band have always had euphoric and dancefloor elements within their sound, their new material nails a properly clubby, disco vibe. But just what is it that inspired this evolution in direction?
“Sadly the answer is so mysterious,” said the band’s Will Butler, speaking to Radio 1 Online after the Live Lounge recording. “I don’t know where it comes from –the muse of disco! I think we’ve always listened to disco, to Abba, to Donna Summer."
"We’re definitely music historians and so we’re very conscious of a lot of threads running through things," he continued. "I think we’ve always had that dancey element, from back in the day to the present. I guess we’ve gotten a little better at playing less, a little sparer, so I guess maybe it breathes a bit more now than it did 15 years ago?”
The festival atmosphere in the Live Lounge studio gives a little insight into Arcade Fire’s live shows, which are famously uproarious. Some of the inspiration for that comes from carnivals in Haiti - where some members of the bands have roots, and where they have all spent time.
“Richard in our band, his father is a British Medievalist,” says Will. “So he grew up learning about proper British Medieval carnival, which is actually quite similar to Haitian carnival - everything is topsy turvy. But the rest of us are all uptight Protestants! So I don’t know where that’s come from.”
Whether on stage of off, Will knows the key ingredient for a good party.”You just start with music and it kind of goes from there,” he says.
The band also performed a brilliant cover of Lorde’s euphoric single Green Light. Will talked to us about the differences between performing your own music live, or someone else’s.
“It’s just picking something good and then trying to make it real, which is generally a joyful process,” he said, of doing a cover. “It’s much less agonising than writing a song. It’s intense work, creating things, it’s hard. And then you always have the deep soul memories of how agonising it was when you play. You don’t have that when you’re playing a cover - which is nice - you just have the pure song.”
Watch and listen to the whole episode of Clara Amfo's show with Arcade Fire in the Live Lounge .
