Just in Video

Yesterday, the Arcade Fire Play a special Secert warm up gig what should be long touring For there new album "Neon Bible" which is out on March 6th.

They played at a very unlikely venue Canterbury High School in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada to about 400 student in the cafeita, it was also a fundraiser for for the Canterbury Arts Centre Development Association, a charitable organization that raises arts funding for the school.

Not only that it also where Guitarist/percussionist Richard Reed Parry when to high school there as well.

Now there was no picture or cell phone cameras at the event, but don't tell that to the folk at pichtfork media where on there web sight at 5:22 PM post a Exclusive of all Exclusive a video from the gig on Friday night either from somebody from pitchfork or one of the student at the High School but what is whort, it sound good Here the video and after that a brief review From today Ottawa Citizen Newspaper.



From the Ottawa Citizen

Canadian supergroup Arcade Fire wows high school students

Melissa Arseniuk, Ottawa Citizen
Published: Saturday, January 20, 2007

Indie-rock super group the Arcade Fire pulled a 180-degree reversal on tradition Friday night and played for a cafeteria full of high school students.

Teenagers are often told they have to be 19 years old to see their favourite band live, so the event was somewhat atypical — but the Arcade Fire is not your typical band.

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past two years, the Montreal-based band — including Ottawa members Jeremy Gara and Richard Reed Parry — is about as hot as a still young band can be, and the follow-up to their hugely popular and critically acclaimed 2004 release, Funeral, is due out March 6.

The sophomore record, Neon Bible, is being anticipated by fans and critics to be one of the biggest rock albums of the year.

Tickets to all of the band’s 16 warm-up shows — warm-up appearances, not full-scale concerts — sold out. Passes to the dates in Montreal and New York sold out in minutes, and Friday night a pair for the Feb. 10 show at Montreal’s Ukrainian National Federation sold for $283.99 U.S. on e-bay.

Students, staff, and some alumni at Ottawa’s Canterbury High School got to see Canada’s biggest band-on-the-brink for just 25 bucks.

But getting in was no simple task. In order to get your hot hands on one of the 400 tickets, you had to be a Canterbury student or alumnus. Tickets were sold during the school’s lunch hour, and each student was allowed to bring a “guest” from another high school. Media were strictly prohibited.

“They would only let you in if you were in high school, and they checked your student ID at the door,” said 17-year-old Matt Bostelaar, who attends Bell High School.

Because he is an “outsider,” he said the Canterbury vice principal called his school to make sure he wasn’t a trouble-maker. “No cameras, or even cell phones were to be opened during the show, either,” he added. Mixed within the youthful crowd were “a few Canterbury alumni ... but the majority, by far, were high school students,” Matt said.

“It was meant to be very secretive,” explained Matt Nelson, 17, whose sister, Meredith, attends the arts-oriented school.

Those who were lucky enough to get inside were treated to just more than an hour’s worth of mostly new music, including their latest single, Intervention, and a handful of tracks from previous releases. Despite it being the band’s first warm-up show, their performance was said to be polished.

“I’m almost speechless,” Matt Nelson gasped after the show. “They played extremely well,” he added.

“They all knew their cues and the songs,” Matt Bostelaar added. “I can’t believe how they play those instruments ... It wasn’t the best acoustics, it being a cafeteria, but they still sounded phenomenal.”

“The instrumentation was simply amazing,” said 17-year-old Megan Miller.

“Their instrumentation is definitely the allure of the band, because that’s what makes them so interesting and so unique … They had two French horns going, three violinists, there was a bass clarinet, a clarinet, of course a bass guitar, they had a upright double bass going on, there was at least three keyboards … the drum set was amazing, they had the accordions, there was a mandolin... “

“The instrumentation was insane,” concurred Matt Bostelaar, who likened the arrangement of sounds to that of Broken Social Scene.

He said the new tracks are “darker” than those found on Funeral. “The basslines are a lot heavier and more pronounced,” he said.

“I think they added a lot more vocals,” said Megan Miller, who said that as many as seven of the 12 band members were singing in unison at times.

The band took to the cafeteria stage around 8:15 p.m. and played nearly non-stop for more than an hour. “They were able to fuse a lot of their songs together … I could count the number of times there was silence between songs on my hand,” said Matt Bostelaar.

While Megan Miller does not attend Canterbury High School, she said the school deserved the special treatment, and the students would appreciate the performance.

“They’re all studying classical music, she explained. “This was a very appropriate venue.”

Richard Reed Parry, a guitarist and percussionist with the group, provides the Canterbury connection.

He graduated from the school’s literary arts program in 1995. All money raised from the show will support the Canterbury Arts Centre Development Association, a charitable organization that supports arts programming at the school.

The Arcade Fire goes to London, England Jan. 29, where they will play five of their warm-up shows. The rest of the practice gigs will be split between Montreal and New York City before they kick off the full-scale European tour in Dublin, Ireland on March 5. The last time the group played Ottawa was in 2005, when they opened the Corel Centre for U2. A forthcoming North American tour has been announced, though dates and locations have yet to be released.