When you’re as famous as Arcade Fire, you can pretty much do whatever you want. It doesn’t even have to involve recording music; sometimes you can just show up outside of famous places and run around, blasting some jams. Maybe bang on some drums, listen to some Bowie. And that’s exactly what Arcade Fire members (and husband and wife!) Win Butler and Régine Chassagne did this past Wednesday outside of a Paris landmark you may have heard of: the Louvre.
The two showed up at a performance during the Paris museum’s exhibition, “JR at the Louvre,” which highlighted the work of famous street artist JR. The exhibition seems to be all about interactivity on public spaces, so it makes sense that this performance, held specifically on Jardin des Tuileries, would have been part of it.
It’s an odd, disjointed thing to watch, though, as Regine and Win first play a part of some unreleased song (that sounds very much like something from Arcade Fire’s last album, Reflektor) and then, as Regine runs around the perimeter of a small body of water, stringing along a striped banner, songs by David Bowie (“Oh, You Pretty Things”) and Sinead O’Connor (“Nothing Compares 2 U”) begin to play through a sound system. In a way, it was an outdoor DJ set in the context of performance art, which is all good and fine — just like everything else Win and Regine touch. Even coffee!
Watch the video below. As far as new work from the group goes, late last year they said an upcoming album was “30 percent done,” but who knows what that means.