Sunday, July 1st. Canada Day (not over-celebrated in Quebec though). España supporters flood the Boulevard Saint-Laurent and explode in outbursts of raging joy, all yellow and red after the victory of eleven men on a lawn. Tonight we’ve been invited to play two gigs on one of the festival’s main stages on the Place des Arts, surrounded by the art museum, the national theatre, and a few highrise towers, In the program we’ve just been announced as « concerts surprise »: no one in the 30000 people there tonight will know in advance who’s playing…
from the stage it looks unbelievably immense, the sun is setting over the city and reverberates off the windows of the hyatt hotel, over the concrete ziggurat of the Théâtre Maisonneuve like a ministry of propaganda from Blade Runner. the square fills up with thousands of people like a human river. We’ve probably never played in front of so many. Plus we know that most of them have never heard about our band… As we start the show with Private Lily, the story of a 19-year old girl who has to enroll in the US army to pay for her studies, we hear the din of pots and pans being hammered by the « carré rouge » students marching through the crowd to protest against the excesive university fees in Canada… is it a mere coincidence?
Moriarty on tour: Montreal Jazz Festival, Quebec, Canada, July 2012.
