Arcade Fire plod on at the O2 Arena amid allegations against singer

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What an odd turn this is proving to be for Arcade Fire. Just before it began, Pitchfork, the online bible of US indie music, published testimony from three women and a gender-fluid person alleging episodes of sexual misconduct on the part of the bands lead vocalist, Win Butler. Their support act, the singer-songwriter Feist, quit amid calls for the tours abandonment. True to the juggernaut character of their music, however, the Canadian-US ensemble have ploughed on only to find themselves taking to the stage in Londons O2 Arena just hours after the announcement of the Queens death.

The show began with a hastily assembled tribute, in the form of a recording of a New Orleans funeral march by Louis Armstrong, followed by a moments silence. The hush more or less held in the 20,000-capacity venue. It wasnt sold out: Arcade Fires popularity has waned since their commercial zenith in 2010 when they played two nights at the O2. But the arena was sufficiently populated, and enthusiastically so, to cast doubt on notions of a boycott following the Pitchfork report, whose claims are disputed by Butler.

He made no reference to the controversy during the show. But the bands initial grouping, standing in a tight huddle on a compact island stage in the auditorium, seemed designed to emphasize the nine musicians togetherness. They opened with the first two songs from their debut album Funeral. It was a statement of continuity with their earlier selves, the youthful idealists who emerged from Montreal in the early 2000s with ardent vocals and a righteous blaze of instrumentation.

The US-Canadian band presented a united front John Barry/Shutterstock

Following this foot-to-the-floor acceleration back to their origins, the band decamped to the arenas main stage. There they arranged themselves in a more typical rock hierarchy, with the drummer at the back and other musicians in the flanks. Butler stood out front, jackknifing his body while he cried out as though possessed by a higher force. He was joined as a focus by the multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Rgine Chassagne, who co-founded the band with Butler and is married to him.

The timeframe shifted to the present with the debuting of tracks from their latest album, WE. It seeks to recapture their classic sound, a return to form gambit often attempted by veteran bands when theyre on the slide. But the songs do so in fits and starts, jumbling up pounding chords, declamatory singing and outbreaks of musical sprinting like a jigsaw puzzle of past glories. Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole) built into a gripping electronic anthem, with Butler making an excursion into the audience with his microphone. But Unconditional I (Lookout Kid) mawkishly recapitulated themes of childhood that run through their work, while End of the Empire I-III was a pompous plodder about American decline. It came across as a proxy topic for their own fading powers.

Around these new numbers were well-performed reminders of just how forceful those powers once were; the intensely driven dance-rock of the title track of 2013s Reflektor was a highlight. They finished back on the island stage with a signature anthem, Funerals Wake Up. Chants rang out as the band filed off the stage and up one side of the arenas raked seating, singing and playing percussion as they went. Butlers back was slapped heartily by audience members as he passed by. Arcade Fire are a once formidable band suffering a slow puncture, not cancellation.

arcadefire.com

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