Vampire Weekend‘s bassist Chris Baio narrowly escaped a flare to the head as one was thrown onstage as the Vampires rang in 2014 with their headlining set at Falls Festival in Lorne.
Fasterlouder reports a video of the incident, which you can watch below, has emerged online which shows the band celebrating the new year with their 2008 track A-Punk before cutting to the crew trying to put out a mass of flames on the side of the stage. Consumate professionals as they are, the band continued playing.
The band descibed the incident in an interview with triple j‘s Veronica and Lewis yesterday, explaining how the flair missed Baio and landed in a tangle of wires next to the stage. “They wasted a whole fire extinguisher on it, but because it’s a flare it wouldn’t go out. Then our badass guitar tech Andre reached in and grabbed it, and put it in a champagne bottle,” explained drummer Chris Thompson. According to frontman Ezra Koenig “the conspiracy is that someone tried to kill Baio.” You can listen to the interview in full below.
The band also said that while they’re looking forward to having a break, new material is definatly on the cards in 2014. Koenig said the the band’s next album would likely mark a change in direction for Vampire Weekend. “For a variety of reasons we all saw the first three albums as going together,” he said. “Whatever happens next will be interesting. We’re just as curious as our fans to see what happens next. It could be another trilogy, it could be a prequel.”
Watch: Vampire Weekend at Falls Festival
Listen: triple j interview with Vampire Weekend
