“Don’t move, don’t speak, even whisper,” Jesse Hughes sang into the microphone. No chance.
Some 900 survivors of a November terrorist attack on Paris’s Bataclan theatre had been invited to watch Hughes and his band, Eagles of Death Metal, “finish [their] set” at a separate venue, and they weren’t going to watch standing still and silent.
The band performed before a packed and lively house at the Olympia Tuesday evening, about two miles from the music hall where 89 concert goers were killed during EODM’s most recent performance in the City of Light. The environment Tuesday was “electric” and the show “cathartic”, according to media reports.
“What surprised me here was the utterly euphoric atmosphere,” the BBC’s entertainment correspondent, Colin Paterson, wrote.
There was both sustained cheering and solemn silence, 60 seconds of it: “A minute to remember,” Rolling Stone quoted Hughes as saying. There was energy on stage and in the crowd, evidenced by Hughes’s passionate performance—”This is an emotional moment for me, so if my voice [expletive] up on this song, you won’t be mad at me,” he said at one point—and the outstretched arms of fans, captured on camera.
Vive la musique, vive la liberté, vive la France, and vive EODM.
Thank you for this, Paris. pic.twitter.com/3W3GKT5qsk
— EaglesOfDeathMetal (@EODMofficial) February 17, 2016
The show, Hughes said, was inevitable.
“Hearing the stories of the survivors, the injured and those who have lost loved ones has been overwhelming,” he reflected in a December statement announcing the continuation of the band’s European tour. “Not returning to finish our set was never an option.”
Hughes was joined by the band’s regulars and a special guest, Eagles of Death Metal co-founder Josh Homme, whose primary group is the Grammy-nominated rock outfit Queens of the Stone Age. Homme took his place behind the drum set. And as he struck the snare and bass drums and high hat to kick off a rendition of “Don’t Speak”, which a 2008 Nike ad campaign made famous across the soccer-obsessed world, he tilted his head to the ceiling, mouthing the tune’s guitar riff.
As one Bataclan survivor told the BBC, “The music definitely won over—terrorism didn’t.”
The band’s performance of “Don’t Speak” from Tuesday night’s concert, via YouTuber TheHalfcentury, is below.
