Music
Pavement call Arcade Fire "cultural phenomenon"
by Ciaran Thompson
July 30, 2010
This weekend Arcade Fire, a band certainly in their prime thanks to their third album The Suburbs, and Pavement, one of the most notorious ‘indie’ bands from the past 20 years, will play together at Osheaga in Montreal. Pavement are set to go on right before Arcade Fire on the BlackBerry main stage and ‘pass the torch’ to one of the greatest bands to emerge in the last decade.
In an interview with AUX during their current reunion tour, Pavement member Bob Nastanovich spoke about playing with Arcade Fire and how excited he is to see them for the first time.
“I think they’re a pretty cool band and am interested to see what they are all about live,” Nastanovich said. “They’re pretty big so it’s always interesting to me to see these cultural phenomena at work. They seem like they’re one of the more successful interesting endeavours that’s come around in the last decade.”
Rising in the early ’90s and becoming one of the leading bands in the burgeoning independent rock scene, Pavement have seen all the buzz Arcade Fire are getting now and are used to seeing the ‘indie rock royalty’ handle being past from act to act.
“We were always a well-liked band and treated well by critics,” he said. “Always very comfortable with our success in terms of sales and live tours and size of followings. This ‘indie rock royalty’ type thing I think that might have more to do with when Pavement started than anything else. To be considered as one of the spearheads of a respected genre of rock ‘n’ roll, whether it be punk or new wave or techno or indie or whatever, a lot of that has to do with making good songs and having them fit into a genre. Indie rock royalty is a pretty modest state of being I’ll tell you that much.”
Photo by Sophie Samson, AUX TV
