Electric Picnic preview: The kids from the flames

An album like the Tindersticks or Interpol’s debut, or Mercury Rev’s Deserter’s Songs, or The Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin.
This year’s model, and a shoo-in for end of year poll topper: The Arcade Fire’s Funeral. Impassioned, epic and avowedly un-ironic, the Montreal band’s sound sweeps from the semi-orchestral to post-punk, from strings to squeezeboxes, from Talking Heads and Pere Ubu to Spector, Scott Walker and Nino Rota.
Yet despite the apparent overnight success story, the band, led by husband and wife Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, have managed to maintain a somewhat elusive profile.
"We’re pretty boring people," laughs bassist/guitarist Tim Kingsbury. "I grew up in Ontario. Win and Will are the only people who actually aren’t from Canada. But Régine grew up here and she can speak French. I actually grew up going to church a lot and making church music."
And at what point did they realise they had something special on their hands in the form of Funeral?
“It was a gradual thing. Actually as soon as we finished recording the record, before it came out, we were opening up for this band called The Unicorns, we toured down into the US with them, and the response to the shows was so good, we were playing all this stuff that no-one had ever heard before and it felt really good, like there was a reaction to the record.”