Throughout the festival’s 21-year history, perhaps no other artist in the Coachella-verse has produced as many of those elusive Coachella moments — those special memories that only happen in the desert — as Arcade Fire.
And you can go ahead and notch the band’s surprise set at the Mojave Tent on Friday, April 15 – the first day that the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival returned since the pandemic – as the latest feather in the band’s festival cap.
The tent overflowed as the sun dipped behind the Santa Rosa Mountains and the band took the stage for a set that went slightly over an hour, which, if you’ve ever seen Arcade Fire at Coachella, was to be expected.
And it wasn’t just the thrill of seeing a former headliner of the festival in a far more intimate space of a tent, but Arcade Fire exemplifies what Coachella is at its core, a taste-making festival.
The band first played the festival in 2005, on the Outdoor Theatre, memorialized in the original Coachella concert film, and frontman Win Butler referenced the show on Friday.
“The first time we played here was in 2005 when we were children,” he said during the set.
Beyond that original turn, the band made another of those Coachella moments during the sunset set in the main stage in 2007 in support of “Neon Bible.” By 2011, they headlined with one of the most epic Coachella sets yet with hundreds of LED balls falling from the sky. And in 2014 they capped their headlining set with a second line into the crowd with New Orleans’ Preservation Hall Jazz Band with no power to end their set with “Wake Up.”
On Friday, as the band opened with “The Lightning I” off the forthcoming album “We,” Butler stopped the show and called for a medic for a fan in distress, to loud applause from the crowd, before restarting.
The performance brought together the highlights of the band’s catalog, including a raucous “Rebellion (Lies)” and “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” early in the set as well as “Ready to Start,” “Sprawl II” and “Everything Now.”
Throughout the set, Butler talked to the crowd about everything from a Coachella history lesson to how everyone should thank Pearl Jam and Eddie Vedder for the band’s 1993 Indio show fighting Ticketmaster for planting the seeds of Coachella to the appreciation of having fans in the crowd.
“I can’t overexaggerate how beautiful it is,” he said.
The feeling was mutual was the fans sang along to the end of “Rebellion (Lies)” and “The Suburbs,” and supported Butler as he went crowd surfing during “Afterlife.”
Near the end of the set, the band played and new song “Unconditional I (Lookout Kid),” after teaching the audience some sing-along parts and when the the band hit the first chorus, more than a half dozen of those inflatable car dealership figures shot up off the stage. However, one of the figures wasn’t fully inflated at first and the crowd roared when it was.
But when the band ended with staple “Wake Up,” the performance from the crowd was nothing short of goosebump-inducing and the flowing inflatable figures rose again.
I can’t wait to see what they do next time.
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