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Every night, at early Arcade Fire club shows, there would be blood. “Every show I would bleed,” says tousle-haired multi-instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry, one of the chief agitators of the Montreal collective’s famed onstage art riot: eight players crammed onto tiny stages, throwing themselves around in an instrument-swapping fervour, tossing drums in the air or marching out through the crowd for a kerbside encore. “There was blood on the piano, everything was rusting from sweat and there’d be dust from broken plaster ceiling tiles in the keyboards because we’d just break stuff. There’s a lot of visceral memories of being on stages that could barely contain the band.”
