Arcade Fire @ Leeds Festival 2005
By Lauren Strain
Sunday morning. Absolutely done in. Solution. I overdosed on twice the maximum intake for 24 hours of some energy stuff or other in the space of forty minutes. The rush kicked in bang on time for The Sunshine Underground in the blazing heat of the gale force afternoon whereupon we made complete tits of ourselves at the front but loved every single millisecond of it. More of this later. First, we had Editors, who opened up a mixed bag of the good, the bad and the ugly - 'Blood' was a disappointing meander around the realm of nothingness with incomplete guitar lines and fuzzy bits, but 'Camera' and 'All Sparks' were ever-expanding anthems of glorious, shimmering proportions and 'Munich' pulsed with a gliding, throbbing brilliance. The Longcut arrived in a flurry of springy frizz to headbang their way through a raucous 'Transition', a sweeping 'Late Night Bus' and a generally squawked-out-tunelessly-in-an-itchingly-good-way set, as expected. Pretty blinding, 'twas.
Pretty damn smelly in the old NME tent n'all (gas masks and hoses were on standby in the wings) so we escaped to sit and listen to Clor's itty-bitty powerful blast in the rays of summer light before catapulting ourselves into the barricade-breaking spittle of Nine Black Alps. Sam Forrest thirstily shrieked out raging bullets of songs, 'Get Your Guns' and 'Not Everyone' embedding themselves in our flesh like chunks of burning shrapnel, a euphoric 'Shot Down' crashing through the finish line like a blazing chariot from the dark ages. Simple but deadly, they've got that deathly melodic concoction bang on. Proper rock, like.
Now then, here comes the clinch...the double whammy, if you will. Arctic Monkeys' back-to-basics alleyway working-class stamina was strung as taut as cheesewire and every single spat-out word was served up and rallied right back at them by a rabid, tongue-lolling, gagging crowd. The word-of-mouth virus has spread far and wide, infecting Yorkshire and beyond with their contagious capsules of dialect and diatribe, local jokes and no-nonsense noisy riots, to create an unbelievably phenomenal and obsessive homecoming type of reception that will wind up in one of those vaults of festival history labelled "Do You Remember When...?"
Finally, I don't need to bang on about The Sunshine Underground for you yet again but it really must be said that these boys probably aren't going to be around these parts for much longer. 'Borders', 'The Way It Is', 'Panic Attack', 'Raise The Alarm' - for god's sake, this stuff is better than anything else, anywhere, right now and for a long time. If you haven't seen them and gone ballistic a plethora of times already, then quickly hurl yourself down to the local bar/pub/basement before they explode. It's only a matter of weeks...
Unfortunately I wrecked myself so badly during their dynamite stick of a half-hour that I did nothing for the remainder of the day except giddily hobble about with a slapdash laugh scrawling itself across my cheeks and That Cowbell banging and snarling about between my ears. But all was fine, because as far as I and many fellow loons happily losing their marbles down the front to TSU were concerned, we'd already seen our headliners. What with the legions of Arcade Fire members then swooping onstage to choke the air with their depths and swirls of pounding, swooning skies and voids, it all got wayyyyyy too beautiful. Power out, my friends... power out.
