Music

Watch rare videos of pre-Funeral Arcade Fire performances in Montreal and Toronto

by Nicole Villeneuve

There’s no shortage of live Arcade Fire footage to scope online, but feast your eyes on these rare clips—one of the band performing “My Heart is An Apple” in Montreal in 2002, and of “Une Année Sans Lumière” in Toronto in 2003. Guesses in the YouTube comments are that the Montreal show was at Concordia, and our AUX scientists have narrowed the 2003 Toronto show down to three venues—Horseshoe, El Mocambo, or the Rivoli. But we can’t quite tell. Any guesses?

As you can see in the clips, the band had a different line up at the time, and were just getting comfortable with the stage bombast we’ve come to be floored by time and time again (check the end of the “Une Année Sans Lumière” clip especially) . But the songs were always there. You can watch the clips—which were uploaded by Ryan Mills, who worked with the band early on and mentioned on his blog in November that he had some footage he’d like to share—below. [via Said the Gramophone]