Too many loops, lulling. Too many tap-tap-taps of delay and plucked string, and too many safe echoes, as if each note isn’t proud enough to stand alone. This is ‘The Golden Morning Breaks’, and I like it, but it’s all safety nets so far. Last night I went to see The Arcade Fire’s first UK gig. There were no safety nets, or restraint, or quiet bits. It was kind of refreshing.

We met in what we thought would be plenty of time, in an old pub. I downed whisky for my cold and you said I looked like an evacuee. I was wearing what I thought of in private as my land-girl dress, and the correlation between my chronological placing of said dress (a home-made affair, origin unknown, probably made in 1974, but 1940s in style) and yours was pleasing. You were rocking this kind of been-at-home-all-day, ruffled, studious beauty that made me smile. I told you a story about a gig I went to when I was 15, that I shouldn’t have gone to on account of being feverish with tonsillitis, but I went anyway and smoked Russian cigarettes and fucked my throat up so bad I had to take the rest of the week off school and I did think, kind of, at that point, that maybe I was a bit too into music. It was a good story, because I really did feel 15 right then; 15 and with a horrible cold but drinking whisky because I had a special band to go and see and wasn’t it exciting.

We were late. We dashed upstairs, We arrived at the wrong floor. In desperation I asked a white-shirted posh boy where the band were. Which band, he said. This is a student union bar, we don’t have bands on here. Yes you do, I cried, in disbelief. The Arcade Fire! They are playing here. He was like, who? He said, maybe try the next floor up. But I don’t think there are bands here. Throughout this exchange, I could hear a bass and drum thunk coming through the ceiling. There was a band here, whatever this boy said. He looked a little foolish and spoke like he ran the country. If this was King’s College, I thought, I’m glad I went to an ex-polytechnic.

Upstairs, the noise got louder and we saw people pressed into and out of a room, and we saw The Arcade Fire on the stage. We had missed half the set, crashing in on an audience wound up to a sweet frenzy, and a band shiny with sweat, yelling and playing for their fucking lives and yes, we missed the buildup to this, we just waltzed in on the peak of the high. And it felt good, although I couldn’t quite share it, not right away. Within minutes I’d fallen for the girl on violin. She sang too, but not into a mic, just because she liked to sing. Win and Regine already looked iconic; there was something in their faces, like a responsibility. Man, they were made for it, though. They played and sang way too hard and way too loud, like they didn’t care if they trashed their voices or shoulders or fingers. The audience breathed in the fervour generated on the stage, and the boys next to me gave back their own fervour, which consisted of singing along to the calls and responses in the songs, braying out woaahs and ahhs in ‘Rebellion’. It was an unfair exchange, I felt, but well-meant.

Maybe I was one step removed from it all, even there, pressed up against all these eager people and you next to me smoking and dancing and closing your eyes in happiness every now and then, and being way too smart to get caught up in the critical angst that I seem unable to avoid. The music was really only one of the things laid out for us. There was also the idea of the music, the idea of The Arcade Fire, the volume and exuberance of The Arcade Fire, the anticipation of finally seeing them, my nervousness that, live, they wouldn’t create the world that their record did.

In the end they created something better: a place that was populated by real, messy, funny, beautiful people who somehow channelled a series of amazing songs. Shorn of the pretty production, the songs from Funeral were the desperate pop missives I kind of wanted them to be; the glowing embers that you had to rake into flames with your imagination. Live, they sounded necessary; every note.

And we really did hang on to those notes; even me, cynical and old and mean and whose own experience of playing in a ‘euphoric’ pop band has kind of tainted it a little. And the band, I think, knew that we were hanging onto every note; the bass player with a bead of sweat on his chin, and the slightly ungainly frontman with his polarising holler and the little woman with the 80s mitts doing a sort of Kate Bush mime in the encore and belting out notes that broke my heart in three places. They knew - it must have gradually dawned on them - what people were doing with and doing to and feeling about their music. They knew it, but, crucially, were still figuring out what to do with that knowledge, and in the meantime just gave us more and more and more and more.

At one point I wanted to tell them not to, to look after themselves a bit, that we didn’t need everything they had. They could keep some back, it was OK.

But they were making such a big, beautiful noise they’d never have heard.

Posted on Thursday, March 10th, 2005by Frances May Morgan