Dropping A Knee With Arcade Fire
With a special guest appearance by Abbey Clancy
I was having a few beers the other night and talking celebrity war stories. I've two. The time I dacked Guy Sebastian at a Haviana's Xmas Party at Icebergs and when I dropped a knee with Arcade Fire and Abbey Clancy. My English mate Ed trumped both with a story of once heading back to Kevin "Bloody" Wilson's hotel room for a post gig afterparty. I mean you can't beat that, can you? Talk about not having an absolute cunt of a day.
Anyway, I remembered that I'd written the Arcade Fire story for a website that has long since died and been removed from the web. I reckoned it was worth a retell. What's it got to do with surfing? Fuck all. But to my recollection, it’s almost all true. It goes a little like this...
“Bit of a lame gig, will be home in an hour.” That was a text I sent to the wife about 10.30pm. She had every right to be surprised. It was a sticky hot July night in London and I was in Hyde Park standing four rows back from Arcade Fire. The sky was the hexadecimal colour code #87cefa and a sparkle shade of cyan blue. Or just fucking blue. The crowd was a seething semi-naked mesh and Hyde Park buzzed with the excitement that only a 28-degree twilight night provides in a European capital.
And I’m one of those arseholes that say that they liked Arcade Fire before every other bastard liked them. I liked them at Funeral, I loved them before their “breakthrough” Glastonbury set and even rated them before an 8-year-old Lorde did.
I had seen them half a dozen times and had never been disappointed. The opposite in fact, usually coming out of each gig sweaty and jubilant. Yet tonight was flat. For one, the volume was too low. I sensed trouble early on in the gig when a teenage kid asked if me and my 40-something mates, Baz, Tim and Steve, could perhaps keep our noise down as he was trying to enjoy the gig.
I skolled what was left of my secreted contraband vodka in one drag and told him, loudly, that it was in all of our interests, his mostly, if he enjoyed the gig somewhere else. Of course, he wasn’t the problem, or me, but the fact that we could hear ourselves converse. That shouldn’t be allowed to happen at a gig.
Or maybe it was the corporate smog that pervaded the air. It was a gig sponsored by a bank with a company address in an offshore tax haven. It was set up so that there were five heavily guarded semicircular rings of access whereby the higher the price you paid for a ticket, the closer you got to the action. We’d jumped them all, doing a fair impersonation of an Olympic hundred-metre hurdler. Who was in the Special Olympics and had drunk ten beers and swallowed half a pill. In any case, something was missing and by the time the encore Reflektor came on, complete with the band wearing their signature huge, paper mache masks, I was texting the missus and calling it an early night.
Of course, there was always time for one more beer. In my experience, there is always time for one more beer. We had procured some backstage passes and whilst we were hunting around the demountable and stage equipment looking for a bar, my mate Steve asked a posse of three ridiculously hot ladies for a cigarette. Whilst chatting I asked the tall blonde with the long pins if she wanted to drop a knee. When she responded in a thick Scouse accent, I recognised her as Abbey Clancy, a UK model and wife of former England footballer Peter Crouch.
“Drugs are for mugs,” she said. “I agree,” I replied, “I said, ‘Not drop an E, but a drop a knee.’” This an old gag passed onto me by mate Gezza Blake where under the pretence of taking ecstasy, you instead get down on one knee, form a circle and deliver an inspirational pep talk. It is often as unfunny as it sounds, yet Abbey, was up for it. She called over her mates, who I now saw was model and socialite Daisy Lowe (if you don’t know her, then check out the GQ clip here of her bouncing around in underwear) and we all dropped a knee.
Before my inspirational speech, Abbey piped up and said, “Can you see me gash?” Unfortunately, I couldn’t, but there was mild amusement and as we all stood up (“how’s the rush” is the post-knee gag) and at best, we’d had a minor celebrity brush with fame and a very dull story to tell.
That was until Arcade Fire founder and tall ginger dude Richard Parry walked by. It’s hard to say whether he was drawn by my witty repartee or Daisy’s very short skirt, but he sauntered over and started chatting. Well, he was chatting to the girls, but I was there hovering and when he asked them if they would like to join their backstage party, I interjected and said we would love to. Confused by my presence and drunken confidence, and perhaps assuming I was somehow attached to the girls, he agreed and I grabbed my Steve, Baz and Tim and we all sauntered in through the high-level security to the tour bus and outside bar like we owned the fucking joint.
After securing those free beers I was looking for, I bumped into lead singer Win and his band member wife Regine, who proved to be both charming and delightful hosts. Of course, I abused their grace, slightly bossing Win into dropping another knee, which Regine, to her credit, declined. Win was perplexed, but all Canadian in his politeness, getting his huge frame down on the bus carpet and even asking if he could take a photo. “No, Win, be quiet and focus,” was my obvious reply.
It was just after that Steve and Baz turned up, looking slightly sheepish and excited, a look I know means trouble. Turns out while I had coerced the leading members of Arcade Fire into boorish pranks, they had slipped backstage and found the iconic stage masks and had been walking around with them on.
By about three, a full three and half hours after the text to the missus, my new musician friends announced that they were pushing onto Soho House. I didn’t seem to be included in the invite, but I didn’t care... much. Upon leaving the park, we took a shortcut instead of the exit gate and jumped the fence. In doing so, Tim sliced the inside of his arm from shoulder to elbow on the wire. We weren’t going to Soho House to take cocaine and party with the band, but instead were in the back of a cab staunching blood flow. Sure it had been a shit gig, and my mate would be scarred for life, but I had dropped two knees, partied with models and made friends with Arcade Fire. And I've only told that story 600 times since.
Never heard it, not once. Swear
🔴