Unforgettable fire

For possibly the first time in her life, Barbra Streisand was at a loss for words. “And the Grammy,” she said, tearing at the lacquered envelope, “goes to ... The S-S-S-S-Suburbs?”. If Streisand was surprised at Arcade Fire’s unexpected album of the year win at the music industry’s annual backslapper pow-wow earlier this year, it was nothing compared to the disbelief felt by the group themselves. Sloping up to accept their gong, clad in their regulation Amish wedding band vestments, they didn’t so much resemble gate-crashers at an exclusive party as recent arrivals from another planet (let’s call it Angsty Indiepop IV).

“It was shocking,” frontman Win Butler said as he tried to process their defeat of Eminem and Lady Gaga to claim the most prestigious prize in mainstream music. “Like something from
outer-space.”
Reflecting several months later, the band’s co-songwriter Jeremy Gara believes Arcade Fire were in essence staging a populist uprising, comparable to what Nirvana did when Nevermind changed the face of the music industry 20 years ago.
“It definitely felt like a bit of a coup,” he says. “The nice thing is that it’s all about the record, it isn’t about us. It is more important for us to be recognised for what we’ve done than for who we are, or what we’re wearing. We don’t really fit into the role of famous rock people.”
Glittering awards, stadium-sized audiences and the undying adoration of critics and music lovers across the globe – Arcade Fire have come impossibly far since their days playing for friends at pokey Montreal art galleries, dreaming they might one day sell 10,000 records (current tallies have The Suburbs at somewhere north of two million units shifted).
Along the way, several landmark events have story-boarded their rise. The gushing review in online magazine Pitchfork that catapulted them into the alternative culture spotlight in the United States. The time Springsteen called up and asked Butler did he want to come hang, maybe get on stage and sing a few songs (um... yes, he did). Their cameo at the final LCD Soundsystem show at Madison Square Garden this past spring.
Few occasions in their history are more cherished, though, than the group’s Irish debut at Electric Picnic in 2005. Stepping out in front of an audience not so much adoring as insanely in love with the band, they had their first sense they were no longer simply another indie group. Just thinking about it half a decade later is enough to induce goosebumps Gara says.
“That was one of our first massive shows,” he recalls. “We had this crazy experience where Win went into the crowd and this young girl, she caught an elbow and was knocked out. We met her backstage and she was really cool about it. The energy of the concert was one of the earliest totally chaotic experiences we’d had.”
When Hot Press resumes acquaintance with Arcade Fire, the group are backstage at Kansas City’s storied Starlight Theatre, where in a few hours they will play to a 10,000-strong crowd. The last time we met was at Dublin’s Morrison Hotel, where a furrow-browed Butler was coming to terms with the group’s slow, but inexorable march towards the status of arena rock über-group. In the years since, the sense that this is the first band since the heyday of U2 with the ability to connect meaningfully to a mass audience has grown even more acute (no matter that The Suburbs is a rather dense and arty record, at pains not to strike an overly populist note).
Whatever else, it’s clear Butler – a man who could brood for his country – still isn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of Arcade Fire amounting to something more important than a mere rock ‘n’ roll troupe. In particular, he has become sensitive to the school of logic which has them set to inherit the Bono mantle. To suggest he’s another Kurt Cobain, a highly emotional artist tortured by fame, is probably going too far (for starters he doesn’t take drugs and isn’t married to Courtney Love). What’s undeniable, however, is that all of this ‘biggest band in the world’ chatter leaves him, and the rest of the group, profoundly nonplussed.
“If it stops feeling organic,” multi-instrumentalist Regine Chassagne (Butler’s wife) said last year, “we’ll stop doing it. I have no ambition to be the biggest or the best-selling. That kind of thing is not why I, or any of us, play music. There was a time when selling even 10,000 records would have seemed like the greatest, most unimaginable thing in the world but now we’re here at this mad point. We’re just going with it to see where it leads.”
For all that, Arcade Fire are clearly artists on a mission – to connect with their audience in a way other independent rock outfits, obsessed with retrograde concepts of ‘cool’, would never dare try.
“I was really sick of bands just ignoring the audience as a posture in rock music,” Butler mused several months ago. “And I think we fed off each other in terms of trying to engage the audience, not in a hammy way, but actually trying to be aware of the space that you are playing in, and trying to connect in some way through the music.”
Surprisingly, Gara says that Arcade Fire have never felt under any pressure to match or exceed previous accomplishments. The success of their 2004 debut, Funeral, in no way intruded on their thought process as they returned to Montreal to write 2007’s rather overwrought and Springsteen indebted Neon Bible (which, in retrospect, suffered the classic second album syndrome of failing to live up to expectations). Nor did that record’s inability to meaningfully progress the group’s sound gnaw at them as they convened to start work on The Suburbs. With seven in the line-up, Arcade Fire are enough of a self-contained entity to ignore the exigencies of the outside world. Honestly, says Gara, all of this ‘next U2’ chatter never once caused them to lose a moment’s sleep. They shut the door, plug in their guitars and create their own private universe.
“We’re pretty good at closing out the world. It’s easy ‘cos we are a big gang of people,” he insists. “It was the same with making Neon Bible. We didn’t answer the phone. When we aren’t doing interviews we basically aren’t aware of any of that.”
He will allow, however, that The Suburbs probably benefitted from the band taking a year off. Neon Bible was put together as they came to terms with success and the insane touring schedule that followed and, in places, it tells (surely not even the most ardent Arcade Fire lover needs to hear the grunting, sub-Nebraska ‘My Body Is A Cage’ again).
“It was important to us that we spent as much time as we needed making a record,” Gara resumes. “That was the difference with The Suburbs. Neon Bible happened on the heels of Funeral and all of the shows we had to play. We didn’t really take a break.
With The Suburbs we got together casually and just started it.”
A concept record about the alienation of 21st century life, The Suburbs finds Butler reflecting on the Houston sprawl where he and his brother William (the group’s keyboard player and sometime guitarist) spent their childhood. The scion of a wealthy Texan oil family, it would be a mistake to believe that Butler’s experience of ‘suburban’ life is anything like yours or mine. Raised in the exclusive planned community of Woodlands, Butler – born Edwin Farmer Butler II – had a true silver-spoon upbringing. The median annual income for Woodlands households is $115,000, although Butler’s family were far wealthier than that. In his teens he went on to attend the exclusive Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where yearly fees are in the region of $40,000. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and authors Gore Vidal and John Irving are graduates, as are fictional characters such as The Da Vinci Code’s Robert Langdon and American Psycho’s
Patrick Bateman.
“There is no problem with growing up middle-class,” Gara said last year. “We all grew up middle-class. We all came from families with no divorce. We had comfortable childhoods. It’s a strange thing to be criticised about... We’re not denying where we come from. If people think we are denying our background, because they don’t know our background – I mean, come on. On the other hand, the fact that people would be surprised about something in our lives means they don’t know everything about us, which is good. It’s important bands should have some mystique.”
In Canada, there was further controversy this summer as guitarist Richard Reed Parry, via the group’s website, urged the public not to vote for Conservative party leader Stephen Harper. In a relatively buttoned-down country, the idea of a rock band actually stepping up and advising fans who they should support in a general election jarred and Arcade Fire were embroiled in a major league shitstorm.
“It sort of blew up,” says Gara. “People went crazy about it. Sure, it was one of the first really big political statements we made. I don’t know why it became so big. You know, we did some shows for the Obama campaign. But in all honesty, people in Canada – they genuinely freaked out. Which is strange. I mean, what’s less surprising than a rock band being left-leaning politically? What’s
the fuss?”
Of course, snark over the group’s well-to-do backgrounds and political leanings have been thoroughly eclipsed by mutterings about how they are to deal with on a daily basis. For a bunch of people who seem relatively unchanged by fame, they have an uncanny habit of rubbing others up the wrong way. The stoic Butler has been accused of being aloof – in 2008 the music blogosphere almost exploded after Flaming Lips man Wayne Coyne told a Rolling Stone journalist that the band were uppity and unpleasant to their road crew. Flashes of a violent temper were certainly visible when a mandolin wielding Butler smashed a TV camera on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross in 2007, allegedly fed up with being patronised by Ross’ back-room staff.
“I’m a fan of [Arcade Fire] on one level, but on another level I get really tired of their pompousness,” Coyne, known for his unrelenting sunniness, commented. “We’ve played some shows with them and they really treat people like shit. Whenever I’ve been around them, I’ve found that they not only treated their crew like shit, they treated the audience like shit. They treated everybody in their vicinity like shit. I thought, ‘Who do they think they are? They have good tunes, but they’re pricks, so fuck ‘em.”
This brought some rather heavy blowback from Arcade Fire.
“Unless I was way more jet-lagged then I remember,” Butler said in a statement. “I hope I was less of a ‘prick’ than telling Rolling Stone that a bunch of people I don’t know at all are really a bunch of assholes.”
Speaking to Hot Press not long afterwards, Owen Pallett, a sometime member of the group who orchestrated the strings on Neon Bible, didn’t hesitate to point a blunderbuss in the direction of the Flaming Lips.
“When Arcade Fire were starting at the very beginning of 2003 or something, I remember Win telling me he saw Wayne do the bubble thing. It’s like fucking 2009 and I’m seeing them play ‘Do You Realise?’ and do this thing in the bubble. It’s like Arcade Fire’s entire career existed while Wayne has been walking over crowds in a bubble. I know there are a lot of people out there who really like [The Flaming Lips]... but I’m not hearing it, I’m not feeling it. The whole drug thing, too. I know they’re against the drugs and all that. But their entire thing is about the drugs you know.”
It’s unclear whether Coyne happened to be in their orbit on a bad day. However he’s not the only one to have had an unpleasant experience with the group. In 2010, French filmmaker Vincent Moon, vowed never to work with Arcade Fire again after shooting them in concert. In particular, he appeared to direct his vitriol at Butler.
“They’re not good people, that’s it. And I don’t mean the whole band – I mean the leaders of the band and their management,” he charged. “The way they deal with their business is really disgusting for me. The way they deal with things is awful. Their management are awful, awful people, and I know what I’m talking about.
I have some really terrible stories
with them.”
In Kansas, Gara is unruffled by the hate coming Arcade Fire’s way. Let the cynics say what they want, he avers. The band know they are decent people, that they do their best by others. Which is all that really matters.
“I think people need to have an angle for us,” he concludes. “We’re not that interesting as people. Nobody is a drug addict. We’re not in the tabloids, we’re not beautiful models. We’re some dudes who are good at what we do. We’re passionate about music. That’s a hard angle to spin. If people are writing about our personalities... well, you know, they can write whatever they want. A lot of people actually think we’re vampires!”

Arcade Fire headline Electric Picnic on the Saturday.For possibly the first time in her life, Barbra Streisand was at a loss for words. “And the Grammy,” she said, tearing at the lacquered envelope, “goes to ... The S-S-S-S-Suburbs?”. If Streisand was surprised at Arcade Fire’s unexpected album of the year win at the music industry’s annual backslapper pow-wow earlier this year, it was nothing compared to the disbelief felt by the group themselves. Sloping up to accept their gong, clad in their regulation Amish wedding band vestments, they didn’t so much resemble gate-crashers at an exclusive party as recent arrivals from another planet (let’s call it Angsty Indiepop IV).

“It was shocking,” frontman Win Butler said as he tried to process their defeat of Eminem and Lady Gaga to claim the most prestigious prize in mainstream music. “Like something from
outer-space.”
Reflecting several months later, the band’s co-songwriter Jeremy Gara believes Arcade Fire were in essence staging a populist uprising, comparable to what Nirvana did when Nevermind changed the face of the music industry 20 years ago.
“It definitely felt like a bit of a coup,” he says. “The nice thing is that it’s all about the record, it isn’t about us. It is more important for us to be recognised for what we’ve done than for who we are, or what we’re wearing. We don’t really fit into the role of famous rock people.”
Glittering awards, stadium-sized audiences and the undying adoration of critics and music lovers across the globe – Arcade Fire have come impossibly far since their days playing for friends at pokey Montreal art galleries, dreaming they might one day sell 10,000 records (current tallies have The Suburbs at somewhere north of two million units shifted).
Along the way, several landmark events have story-boarded their rise. The gushing review in online magazine Pitchfork that catapulted them into the alternative culture spotlight in the United States. The time Springsteen called up and asked Butler did he want to come hang, maybe get on stage and sing a few songs (um... yes, he did). Their cameo at the final LCD Soundsystem show at Madison Square Garden this past spring.
Few occasions in their history are more cherished, though, than the group’s Irish debut at Electric Picnic in 2005. Stepping out in front of an audience not so much adoring as insanely in love with the band, they had their first sense they were no longer simply another indie group. Just thinking about it half a decade later is enough to induce goosebumps Gara says.
“That was one of our first massive shows,” he recalls. “We had this crazy experience where Win went into the crowd and this young girl, she caught an elbow and was knocked out. We met her backstage and she was really cool about it. The energy of the concert was one of the earliest totally chaotic experiences we’d had.”
When Hot Press resumes acquaintance with Arcade Fire, the group are backstage at Kansas City’s storied Starlight Theatre, where in a few hours they will play to a 10,000-strong crowd. The last time we met was at Dublin’s Morrison Hotel, where a furrow-browed Butler was coming to terms with the group’s slow, but inexorable march towards the status of arena rock über-group. In the years since, the sense that this is the first band since the heyday of U2 with the ability to connect meaningfully to a mass audience has grown even more acute (no matter that The Suburbs is a rather dense and arty record, at pains not to strike an overly populist note).
Whatever else, it’s clear Butler – a man who could brood for his country – still isn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of Arcade Fire amounting to something more important than a mere rock ‘n’ roll troupe. In particular, he has become sensitive to the school of logic which has them set to inherit the Bono mantle. To suggest he’s another Kurt Cobain, a highly emotional artist tortured by fame, is probably going too far (for starters he doesn’t take drugs and isn’t married to Courtney Love). What’s undeniable, however, is that all of this ‘biggest band in the world’ chatter leaves him, and the rest of the group, profoundly nonplussed.
“If it stops feeling organic,” multi-instrumentalist Regine Chassagne (Butler’s wife) said last year, “we’ll stop doing it. I have no ambition to be the biggest or the best-selling. That kind of thing is not why I, or any of us, play music. There was a time when selling even 10,000 records would have seemed like the greatest, most unimaginable thing in the world but now we’re here at this mad point. We’re just going with it to see where it leads.”
For all that, Arcade Fire are clearly artists on a mission – to connect with their audience in a way other independent rock outfits, obsessed with retrograde concepts of ‘cool’, would never dare try.
“I was really sick of bands just ignoring the audience as a posture in rock music,” Butler mused several months ago. “And I think we fed off each other in terms of trying to engage the audience, not in a hammy way, but actually trying to be aware of the space that you are playing in, and trying to connect in some way through the music.”
Surprisingly, Gara says that Arcade Fire have never felt under any pressure to match or exceed previous accomplishments. The success of their 2004 debut, Funeral, in no way intruded on their thought process as they returned to Montreal to write 2007’s rather overwrought and Springsteen indebted Neon Bible (which, in retrospect, suffered the classic second album syndrome of failing to live up to expectations). Nor did that record’s inability to meaningfully progress the group’s sound gnaw at them as they convened to start work on The Suburbs. With seven in the line-up, Arcade Fire are enough of a self-contained entity to ignore the exigencies of the outside world. Honestly, says Gara, all of this ‘next U2’ chatter never once caused them to lose a moment’s sleep. They shut the door, plug in their guitars and create their own private universe.
“We’re pretty good at closing out the world. It’s easy ‘cos we are a big gang of people,” he insists. “It was the same with making Neon Bible. We didn’t answer the phone. When we aren’t doing interviews we basically aren’t aware of any of that.”
He will allow, however, that The Suburbs probably benefitted from the band taking a year off. Neon Bible was put together as they came to terms with success and the insane touring schedule that followed and, in places, it tells (surely not even the most ardent Arcade Fire lover needs to hear the grunting, sub-Nebraska ‘My Body Is A Cage’ again).
“It was important to us that we spent as much time as we needed making a record,” Gara resumes. “That was the difference with The Suburbs. Neon Bible happened on the heels of Funeral and all of the shows we had to play. We didn’t really take a break.
With The Suburbs we got together casually and just started it.”
A concept record about the alienation of 21st century life, The Suburbs finds Butler reflecting on the Houston sprawl where he and his brother William (the group’s keyboard player and sometime guitarist) spent their childhood. The scion of a wealthy Texan oil family, it would be a mistake to believe that Butler’s experience of ‘suburban’ life is anything like yours or mine. Raised in the exclusive planned community of Woodlands, Butler – born Edwin Farmer Butler II – had a true silver-spoon upbringing. The median annual income for Woodlands households is $115,000, although Butler’s family were far wealthier than that. In his teens he went on to attend the exclusive Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where yearly fees are in the region of $40,000. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and authors Gore Vidal and John Irving are graduates, as are fictional characters such as The Da Vinci Code’s Robert Langdon and American Psycho’s
Patrick Bateman.
“There is no problem with growing up middle-class,” Gara said last year. “We all grew up middle-class. We all came from families with no divorce. We had comfortable childhoods. It’s a strange thing to be criticised about... We’re not denying where we come from. If people think we are denying our background, because they don’t know our background – I mean, come on. On the other hand, the fact that people would be surprised about something in our lives means they don’t know everything about us, which is good. It’s important bands should have some mystique.”
In Canada, there was further controversy this summer as guitarist Richard Reed Parry, via the group’s website, urged the public not to vote for Conservative party leader Stephen Harper. In a relatively buttoned-down country, the idea of a rock band actually stepping up and advising fans who they should support in a general election jarred and Arcade Fire were embroiled in a major league shitstorm.
“It sort of blew up,” says Gara. “People went crazy about it. Sure, it was one of the first really big political statements we made. I don’t know why it became so big. You know, we did some shows for the Obama campaign. But in all honesty, people in Canada – they genuinely freaked out. Which is strange. I mean, what’s less surprising than a rock band being left-leaning politically? What’s
the fuss?”
Of course, snark over the group’s well-to-do backgrounds and political leanings have been thoroughly eclipsed by mutterings about how they are to deal with on a daily basis. For a bunch of people who seem relatively unchanged by fame, they have an uncanny habit of rubbing others up the wrong way. The stoic Butler has been accused of being aloof – in 2008 the music blogosphere almost exploded after Flaming Lips man Wayne Coyne told a Rolling Stone journalist that the band were uppity and unpleasant to their road crew. Flashes of a violent temper were certainly visible when a mandolin wielding Butler smashed a TV camera on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross in 2007, allegedly fed up with being patronised by Ross’ back-room staff.
“I’m a fan of [Arcade Fire] on one level, but on another level I get really tired of their pompousness,” Coyne, known for his unrelenting sunniness, commented. “We’ve played some shows with them and they really treat people like shit. Whenever I’ve been around them, I’ve found that they not only treated their crew like shit, they treated the audience like shit. They treated everybody in their vicinity like shit. I thought, ‘Who do they think they are? They have good tunes, but they’re pricks, so fuck ‘em.”
This brought some rather heavy blowback from Arcade Fire.
“Unless I was way more jet-lagged then I remember,” Butler said in a statement. “I hope I was less of a ‘prick’ than telling Rolling Stone that a bunch of people I don’t know at all are really a bunch of assholes.”
Speaking to Hot Press not long afterwards, Owen Pallett, a sometime member of the group who orchestrated the strings on Neon Bible, didn’t hesitate to point a blunderbuss in the direction of the Flaming Lips.
“When Arcade Fire were starting at the very beginning of 2003 or something, I remember Win telling me he saw Wayne do the bubble thing. It’s like fucking 2009 and I’m seeing them play ‘Do You Realise?’ and do this thing in the bubble. It’s like Arcade Fire’s entire career existed while Wayne has been walking over crowds in a bubble. I know there are a lot of people out there who really like [The Flaming Lips]... but I’m not hearing it, I’m not feeling it. The whole drug thing, too. I know they’re against the drugs and all that. But their entire thing is about the drugs you know.”
It’s unclear whether Coyne happened to be in their orbit on a bad day. However he’s not the only one to have had an unpleasant experience with the group. In 2010, French filmmaker Vincent Moon, vowed never to work with Arcade Fire again after shooting them in concert. In particular, he appeared to direct his vitriol at Butler.
“They’re not good people, that’s it. And I don’t mean the whole band – I mean the leaders of the band and their management,” he charged. “The way they deal with their business is really disgusting for me. The way they deal with things is awful. Their management are awful, awful people, and I know what I’m talking about.
I have some really terrible stories
with them.”
In Kansas, Gara is unruffled by the hate coming Arcade Fire’s way. Let the cynics say what they want, he avers. The band know they are decent people, that they do their best by others. Which is all that really matters.
“I think people need to have an angle for us,” he concludes. “We’re not that interesting as people. Nobody is a drug addict. We’re not in the tabloids, we’re not beautiful models. We’re some dudes who are good at what we do. We’re passionate about music. That’s a hard angle to spin. If people are writing about our personalities... well, you know, they can write whatever they want. A lot of people actually think we’re vampires!”

Arcade Fire headline Electric Picnic on the Saturday.