“Good evening. I’m pretty sure we were here twenty years ago.” Placebo singer Brian Molko symbolically opened the Main Square in Arras on Thursday night, which is celebrating its two-decade anniversary. This fundamentally “European” group, as its leader insists at every appearance, was at the very first edition of the festival, on July 3, 2004. It played for three hours in front of 15,000 people on the Grand-Place, which gives its anglicized name to the northern musical event. For the first of four days of this XXL edition, which will welcome around sixty artists until Sunday night, it is performing in front of nearly 30,000 spectators in the heart of the citadel of the Pas-de-Calais prefecture.
In 2004, Placebo was the only headliner. The idea of setting up a festival in Arras came from a Valenciennes concert producer, France Leduc. She proposed it to the mayor at the time, Jean-Marie Vanlerenberghe. “It was for one evening, and we had set up big black tarpaulins and shopkeepers around it,” remembers the centrist chief magistrate who succeeded her in 2011, Frédéric Leturque. “It was rustic and friendly. I was then the mayor’s chief of staff and three years later, when France Leduc proposed going to three days, I was one of the elected officials who pushed for it. The general services reassured the mayor about the logistics, and we took the plunge.”