Contents

Information Page

Introduction    Who The Fuck Is Arcade Fire?

Chapter 1        The Al Rey Connection

Chapter 2        Making Plans For Edwin And William

Chapter 3        From Haiti With Love

Chapter 4        The Tolling Of The Bell

Chapter 5        Learning Fast

Chapter 6        The Arcade Fire EP

Chapter 7        Funeral

Chapter 8        Are You Ready World?

Chapter 9        Neon Bible

Chapter 10      Miroir Noir

Chapter 11      Heavy Load

Chapter 12      The Sound of the Suburbs

Chapter 13      Arcade Fire And Haiti

Chapter 14      The Crowds That Gather

Acknowledgements

Concert Listing

Discography

Cover Versions

Introduction

Who The Fuck Is Arcade Fire?

It was an awards ceremony like no other, but in many ways it was like all the others.

It is February 2011 and we are in Las Vegas amid a swirling mess of joyless sycophancy, excitable chatter, insincere smiles and the nervous undertone of cautious expectation. Scan the crowd and gasp at famous faces, all primed to bask their egos in shameless glory. They peer over vast, round, drinks-laden tables, a veritable orgy of smug celebrity, the full blast of paparazzi flash, all languishing in tabloid cheese. Baby-faced, miniskirted female television presenters prowl freely.

And look at those faces: Justin Bieber, Eminem and, of course, the omnipresence of Lady Gaga and her not-really-that-strange kookiness. All of them are surrounded by bobbing and swaying minions; important looking men trying desperately to look even more important and glancing nervously towards the stage. The mind loses track of reality as gong after gong is presented between stilted, scripted announcements. Everything, it seems, is clipped to a perfect choreography. The thoroughly stage-managed slice of contemporary music is spliced with glittery glances of stars of yesteryear, all here to play tribute – and gain kudos by association – with the fast rising stars of 2011.

Perhaps due to the growing realisation that the record industry is on its knees in subjection to file sharing, this year’s Grammys seems a little different. Record company nerves are more on edge than usual. A million sales can follow a Grammy, making that priceless CD sticker reading ‘Grammy Award Winner’ all the more important. In an age of universal uncertainty, with the entire music business shattered into fragments by digital downloads and the fast-moving listening habits of its audience, any chance of gong glory is no longer to be sniffed at.

Sell Out?

“Of course. Fucking hope so, maan.”

No longer is the concept of ‘sell out’ regarded with disdain. On the contrary, it is actively encouraged by companies and fans alike, even centrally placed in the marketing ethos of hip-hop and rap. Prestigious awards like the Brits and Grammys are merely a cog in this increasingly cynical game. Best Album equals best marketing too. People will keep their jobs. People will smile and, tonight, tumble into gleeful inebriation.

On this night, the honour of announcing the winner of the ‘Best Album’ category falls to Barbra Streisand, though even a star of such magnitude seems fazed when she rips open the envelope, her facial features noticeably contracting as a twinge of anxiety creeps in. She must not mess up this simple task. She mustn’t… and she is squinting at the name before her. She is momentarily nonplussed, a flash of panic, of unrecognition, crossing her exquisitely powdered brow. What is the name on this card?

“And the winner is…”

She is visibly fumbling at this point, clearly distressed. Her mouth closes around two words… two words delivered in a state of questioning terror. Was it an announcement? Was it a question? Her eyes are shining with “What the fuck?”

“The winner is… Theeee Suuuubuuuuuurbs?”

For once there is an eerie lull. Then a lonely squeal. Then the sight of a small excitable huddle. Of Arcade Fire’s Régine Chassagne spinning round in glee… and of an uncomfortable band lost in a state of collective embarrassment.

A chill ripples through the room, a low growl. Cameras flash on the less than exalted faces of disappointed superstars. Lady Gaga looks lost in thunderous disbelief. Elsewhere, there’s a sense of embarrassment. Will someone get sacked for this, tomorrow? We expected to win that. Who the fuck is Arcade Fire?

A band with no hits, that’s who it is. A band with no identifiable genre… which, in itself, makes them a dangerous property. A band rarely glimpsed on MTV. A band that looks like they don’t belong anywhere, especially at the Grammys.

The band with no hits takes the stage and begins to play ‘Month Of May’, performing before stunned, silent, stony faces. Nil movement. The sheer energy of suppressed hate. Horrified faces…

Then they play a second song. This time it’s ‘Ready To Start’ and, at last, there is noticeable crowd movement. An initial trickle has become an embarrassing stream aiming for the exit. It’s a protest of apathy, setting the seal on a thoroughly disappointing evening.

I mean. Who the fuck is Arcade Fire?

“I thought it was hilarious… at the ceremony,” Arcade Fire’s Win Butler would later tell Q magazine’s Simon Goddard. “I don’t think we have ever played to a more apathetic audience in our lives.”

The band flash rebellious faces on finishing, darting from the stage to the door, and Régine twice, three times, clashes with over-zealous security, their arms across the door. “You can’t go back there, miss… miss… MISS. You cannot go back there. That is for artists only.”

Eventually, and only after a series of phone calls, Régine is duly rescued from the ignominy of being the first Grammy-winning artist ever to be barred from her own awards ceremony. But, in another way, ejection from the ceremonial hall would have been perfect.

Régine: “It was kinda funny. I can see the funny side to that. And maybe a little symbolic too. I don’t really know the truth of it. Maybe that security guy hadn’t been briefed properly. Maybe he expected female musicians to look like Lady Gaga or something. Or maybe he was a Kings of Leon fan… I honestly don’t know.”

It may seem ironic, perverse in its stupidity perhaps, to object so much to an awards ceremony that you are moved to instigate a website dedicated to emphasising a band’s state of obscurity. ‘Who is Arcade Fire’ even became lodged as a top five Google search that catapulted their name through the digital catacombs of Facebook and Twitter, virtually creating for themselves a new cult status among the Gaga freaks and light hip-hop tribes – the very people who objected in the first place. So powerful was this electronic wave, so penetrative the new media, that one might have been forgiven for thinking it a record company scam, Machiavellian/McLarenesque in its subversive effectiveness, Suddenly the band with no hits, the band plucked from dense obscurity at the Grammy ceremony, were gathering pace. Could this really have happened by accident?

Win Butler: “I can understand why people might think that such a thing would be instigated by some scheming management but I can only assure people that it wasn’t the case. I might have been proud of it, if it had been. How strange to be at the centre of some kind of scandal without actually doing anything outrageous. It’s hardly the Sex Pistols, is it? Must admit, I did think the whole thing was really funny.”

In Q magazine, again, Simon Goddard wondered if this was true when Win saw the internet message claiming victory for Kings Of Leon, and calling Arcade Fire “faggots”.

Butler: “Um, I didn’t get too deep down on the comments because, really, it is the lowest of the low form of communication. Hmmm.”

More perverse, perhaps? The sight of a full page ad in the New York Times, costing New York-based marketing executive Steve Stoute £40,000 to promote that increasingly tired notion that receiving their Grammy between songs during the ceremony’s closing credits was evidence enough of the music industry’s ‘wayward marketing exercises’, the inference being that it takes an expert to notice such a blatant marketing scam, or an expert to be fooled by the sheer chance of it all.

The charge of unworthy obscurity had already worn redundant… it wasn’t as if this award was given to some upstart band enjoying a flash-in-the-pan hit album, either.

By the time of the awards ceremony Arcade Fiore had three American number one albums already under their belt. Tickets for the American leg of their world tour were already shifting heavily, 30,000 over three days in Chicago alone while, over in England, advance sales for their biggest single headline date – the biggest and most prestigious show of their career, at London’s Hyde Park, in June – zipped from Ticketmaster’s website with unprecedented speed. And this despite the gig taking place right in the heart of the British festival season, just one week after Glastonbury and during the same weekend as the highly favoured Hop Farm event in Surrey.

But it was Arcade Fire who would be the band to see in 2011 as, indeed, they had been for a full five years. Arguably – and it is arguable – the largest band in the world. If not so, then certainly the most intriguing and, as the NME noisily proclaimed, ‘The most exciting live act on the planet…’

But… who the fuck?

Dismiss that as crude, ignorant, naïve, juvenile or blandly streetwise, if you will, the fact remains that it is not a bad question. Especially to the eyes and ears of those – mid-teens to mid-twenties, perhaps? – whose musical and cultural advancement has been through the gloopy soup of contemporary R’n’B and the mainstream fringe of rap. I wouldn’t be openly dismissive of this ocean-sized genre, to be honest – Kanye West, Jay Z have both permeated the rockist wall of my listening habits, for what it’s worth – but, in league with the digital age, the visual effect has been to diminish instrumentation. Music, as such, appears as soundtracks to soft porn videos where rappers and scantily clad ladies frolic on beaches, in cars and bars, even on stage in some vast arena. The only noticeable instrumentation is often reduced to the sight of a spangly mic, as much worn as used; a shimmering item of bling and status. Generally speaking, award-winning males are elegantly black-suited and visually cruising. The females are mesmerisingly famous and iconic, shining beacons of elegance and poise. You know their names. We all suffer their omnipresence as the power of their influence filters down through to the crass global mimicry of X Factor ad infinitum.

This sanitised cultural arena offers nothing remotely like Arcade Fire, and even the competing and giant arena of rock and its myriad genres seems firmly slammed in reverse, amplifying the echoes of Black Sabbath or Neil Young or The Velvet Underground. Only in the recent emergence of Americana, which itself kicks back strongly to The Band and Grateful Dead, will you nudge within a country mile of anything remotely like Arcade Fire in terms of visuals, sound, lyrics, attitude and appeal.

But to the global audience of an awards show… who, indeed, the fuck are Arcade Fire? Just look at this lot. There are seven of them – sometimes more, but that is not the issue here – an awkward, ill-fitting seven at that, of all shapes and sizes, it seems; for English viewers a grown-up Bash Street Kids, none of whom assume the accepted traits of ‘contemporary icon’ or even attract attention in the accepted manner. The central husband and wife team, Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, seem oddly configured, awkward. He’s very tall and she’s quite small. Régine, petite and blessed with an increasingly commanding presence, is unquestionably attractive but her looks don’t conform to the pop star prototype. Win is lanky, powerful, passionate and looks ever-so-slightly uncomfortable. Beyond them is diminutive Sarah Neufeld, standing aside, openly mouthing the words while her arm slices across a violin. Alongside are Tim Kingsbury, Will Butler, Richard Reed Parry and Jeremy Gara. In an age and an arena where guitar, bass, drums and keyboards are regarded as fading tools of ancient lore – ‘dad rock’ accoutrements to use a particularly derogative label – what exactly is happening here? What are these people playing at on their guitars, drums, bass, piano, violin, viola, cello, double bass, xylophone, side-drum, French horn, flugelhorn, accordion, hurdy gurdy, harp and mandolin. One can only imagine the astonished and dismissive face of, say, Simon Cowell should such a dishevelled and unconventional troupe have the temerity to audition before him, or before a rigidly controlling global television regime that prefers its females to launch into a Mariah Carey warble or Shakira come-on, and its boy bands to perform a step-perfect dance-troupe formation routine.

And that is just the start. Those who so vociferously complained about Arcade Fire’s victory are unlikely to dig too deeply into either the bizarrely baroque music they play or, indeed, the lyrics that, at once, evoke the past and present… and, furthermore, appear to be launched from some oddball Gnostic heart. This is the sound of an ancient church, full of shadows and light, mystery and paranoia, dragged from a muse built from both academic immersion, the mysteries of childhood and, here is the twist, an unlikely eye for the futuristic. Generally speaking, this is not subject matter found in singles by Katy Perry, Avril Lavigne or Jay Z.

You would have to squint hard towards, say, the now existential and gloriously aloof figure of Tom Waits to find anything closely comparable to Arcade Fire; artists who, despite being accepted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame (whatever that is) rarely find themselves invited to a televised music awards ceremony. Arcade Fire construct their music with unconventional flare. Even many of the British indie bands who flicker in their influences – of which much more, later – did not and do not tread such mainstream boards with such bravado.

Who are they, indeed, this strange band that is getting stranger, despite moving deeply into the mainstream with their third album? There, indeed, lies a whole mess of paradox and contradiction. They are a band that flies between the black and the white. They speak in tongues.

At the time of that awards ceremony, despite a worldwide presence that had been increasing in focus since the launch of their first album, Funeral, in 2004 (2005 in the UK, thanks to Rough Trade), they were a hit band with no hit singles, though in reality they were no strangers to the concept of the awards ceremony. In 2008, they won The Meteors ‘Best International Album’ award and JUNO ‘Alternative Album of the Year’ award for their second album, Neon Bible, in addition to previous Grammy nominations in the same year for Neon Bible and in 2005 for Funeral. However, their subsequent appearances did not previously spark such bizarre and unwarranted objections. No one seems to know why.

If this was merely a story of a gang of young musicians evolving from a singular obsession with the music of Manchester and post-punk Britain, then the heart of Arcade Fire would seem achingly familiar. In fact, it is nothing of the sort, and in the softer echoes of the mainstream-friendly The Suburbs, it is something immediately identifiable, immediately uplifting, a rarity in this world of closed genre and, almost, universal lack of fresh musical ambition.

Arcade Fire do not create a sound that slots into any recognisable genre. It is a sound with roots that creep deeply into the past, long before anything with a slightly folksy, bluesy, country edge was referred to as ‘Americana’. It reaches back to a land of disparate complexity, where music forms would evolve and roll and mix and gather pace without push of media or hype or expectation.

So let us travel back to the cultural and racial melting pot of North America in the early 1900s, a time and place of harsh rural realities and comparative lawlessness, and where rampant and accepted racism was firmly entrenched into the underside of the Constitution.

Chapter 1

The Al Rey Connection

It is difficult to pinpoint the moment, the year or even the decade where the Arcade Fire story might have began. There are several points of entry. The moment, perhaps, when Win Butler met his future wife, jazz singer Régine Chassagne, at a Montreal art gallery? It could have been the moment he arrived in that bohemian city or, indeed, the final settling of personnel after various false starts.

But in truth, it is a story with powerful roots that run deep into American culture in the first quarter of the 20th century. This is not merely avenues of influence, either, although the fascinating myriad genres of unfolding Americana – folk, blues, swing, jazz, rock, Irish Appalachian and all the complexities therein – are built solidly into the basic bombastic ‘sound’ of the band. One could happily theorise for 30 pages in regard to roots and source. Mercifully, that’s not necessary, for one man’s story holds the key.

Alvino McBurney was born in Oakland, California in 1908 but his upbringing in the Bay Area of America’s West Coast was truncated at the age of eight when his family upped sticks to start a new life in Cleveland, Ohio. From an early age – before the move, even – Alvino had shown signs of exceptional innovative aptitude. His natural musicianly stirrings were born from obsessive tinkering with several cheap banjos he kept in his bedroom and before long he started to tap into music forms that would normally seem well off the radar of the average eight year old. Something mysterious was certainly happening to this precocious and intriguing young boy. From the earliest of ages, it became apparent that his natural talents were split equally between the aesthetic and the practical, for his desire to tinker away matched his musical experimentation.

Perhaps even more intriguing, at the point of the family’s move he had already managed to build himself a radio set. Indeed, just two years later he achieved exalted status as one of the pioneer – and surely youngest – ham operators in the country and, for that matter, the world.

Radio involvement certainly accelerated his thirst for music, the device leading him to early blues recordings of Eddie Lang and Roy Smeck. Energised by this distant exposure, and gifted his first banjo at the age of 10, Alvino taught himself the rudiments before graduating naturally to guitar by the age of 12.

Typical of his nose for invention, it took just three years for the precocious musician to create a device that could be seen as a precursor of the powerful music age to come. Unfortunately, his self-built electric amplifier would not be patented although, deeper into his career, his pioneering work on improved models would gain several succeeding patents, cementing him firmly in place in the pantheon of electric guitar innovation.

He was just 16 when he turned full-time musician, supplying banjo for Cleveland-born, later New York-based band leader Eve Jones. Further energised by the spirit and eclectic possibilities of the city, he spent two years supplying guitar for Phil Spitalny’s ‘Spitalny Orchestra’ before shifting his base to San Francisco to join Horace Heidt and his Musical Heights. During this spell he also managed to work alongside his childhood hero Roy Smeck and, by this time had changed his surname to Rey, presumably as a nod to the Latino craze that was sweeping America at the time.

It was during his spell with Heidt that Rey started to work on the development of a steel guitar and he has since been regarded as a true pioneer of an instrument that would feature heavily in country and blues music. There would be instant recognition for this work, too, as Heidt’s band featured heavily on influential national radio stations of the time, with Rey’s extraordinary work seemingly at the cutting edge.

By 1935, nationally famous and already hugely influential, Rey found himself hired by the Gibson Guitar Corporation. Arguably the most prestigious and influential company in electric guitar history, it had been alerted to Rey’s talents by discovering the old electric ‘pick-up’ he had fashioned for one of his series on banjos. Excited by the possibilities and eager to find out just how far this innovatory flair could go, the company asked him to work with Chicago-based engineers Lyon and Healy. The resultant pick-up would become recognised as a giant leap forward for evolution of the electric guitar and would be used on the groundbreaking Gibson ES-150, the prototype of which can be found in The Hendrix Museum, in Seattle. He also worked on the development of a guitar ‘talk-box’ – used by his wife, Louise, standing behind a curtain, singing along to guitar lines created on stage. Many regard this as the true prototype to a widely used rock’n’roll device which found prominence in the mid-seventies, most famously with Peter Frampton.

Tired of working for band leaders (and pioneering electric guitar companies) Rey formed his own band in 1940 and they worked as the Mutual Broadcasting house band for three years, bringing a raft of influential artists to the forefront of American radio. Among these were Zoot Sims, Billy May, Ray Conniff – all big names of the era – before famously filling in for Dinah Shore at New York’s Paramount Theatre.

By the early forties, now internationally famous, Rey enjoyed a run of Top 10 hits and Hollywood fame. Only a messy squabble with the Musicians Union and a resultant ban prevented further success at this point. Strangely, the band, including Rey, was obliged to work at the Lockheed Aircraft Factory in Burbank until Rey joined the US Navy for the duration of World War Two.

It is a measure of Rey’s esteem that his post-war orchestra secured an immediate contract with Capital Records, scoring a huge hit with a cover of Slim Gaillard’s ‘Cement Mixer’. The remainder of the forties saw him working in LA.

His later successes included time as musical director for The King Sisters, which resulted in a hot television series for ABC, and working as the leader of the band at Disneyland in Orange County.

A Mormon, Rey was received into The Church of Latter Day Saints in 1969. He and his wife, Luisa, moved to Salt Lake City, the home of the Mormon Church, in the nineties but even in semi-retirement he continued to perform with a jazz quintet and never lost his thirst for innovation, running a memoir website for his wife and, at home, endlessly ‘fiddling’ about with electronics. Their daughter, Liza Butler, is the mother of Edwin (Win) Farnham Butler III and William Butler, both later to become members of Arcade Fire.

In 1978, Rey was inducted into the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame in St Louis as “the father of the pedal steel guitar”, and continued to accept work for another 15 or so years, though at a reduced pace. “Well, we do touring and I do concerts,” he said. “I’m a guest with symphonies, I do a pop concert. We’ve done quite a few boat tours and I do conventions. And I do some jazz concerts; I like to do that, that’s fun.”

For example, he joined The King Sisters on a long tour booked by Columbia Artists Festivals, Big Band Cavalcade ‘85, which stopped in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, where he performed a variety of selections, including big band favourites, a medley of Spanish songs (“We call it our Spanish omelette,” he joked on stage), and the William Tell Overture. A few years earlier, in 1981, he had also displayed his versatility, along with singers Johnny Desmond and Connie Haines, on a similar tour, The Big Band Show, which came to my hometown, Alliance, Ohio.

The familial link with Arcade Fire was neatly sealed in March 2005 when the band recorded a version of Alvino Rey’s ‘My Buddy’ to be released on the ‘Neighbourhood (Tunnels)’ single.

Chapter 2

Making Plans For Edwin And William

Alvino Rey’s grandson-Edwin Farnham Butler III – was born into the Mormon tradition, in the community of Truckee, California, on April 14, 1980, and his brother, William Pierce Butler, was born two years later, on October 6, 1982. In 1984 the family relocated to the ‘planned’ conservative community at The Woodlands in south-east Texas where the brothers’ grew up and shared an interest in the dark secrets that lay behind the outwardly mundane life of the neighbourhood.

The American middle-class of the mid-fifties shared dreams of picket fences and perfect wives, of happy children pedalling their bicycles through leafy lanes, of besuited husbands returning from work each evening, of family trips to lakes at weekends, of car washing and vacuum cleaners. Behind all this was the stock cliché of repressed emotions that would surface so profoundly in American literature and cinema, from John Cheever and Raymond Carver to Stepford Wives and Revolutionary Road, wherein the apparent sheen of dull respectability masked repressed passion and flaming desire. Well, that’s the theory. It could, of course, be the relationship between a perfect, softly lit, middle-class lifestyle and active young minds that tended towards the mildly paranoiac.

Edwin and William slipped gently into Woodlands and, by all accounts, enjoyed a childhood that reflected this gentle but anaemic dream, their lives lovingly mapped out for them, even if the Masonic under-swell of such communities was never too far afield.

The musicianship within the Butler household really came together during Christmas parties when the base instrument, the mother’s harp, would provide the basic soundtrack for an evening of carol singing along with all sorts of musical accompaniment. There was a tenuous family link to modern day carols as a member of Artemo Rey’s band, Alfred Burt, had written a number of them, ‘Silver Bells’ arguably becoming the most famous though others had become firm favourites of the Rat Pack Christmas endeavors and, as such, integral to middle-class America. For many Christmases, Alfred would send the Butlers a recording of a self-penned carol, knowing full well that the family would immediately learn to play it and perform it as part of their Yuletide ritual.

One could perhaps read too much into the fact that The Woodlands is a ‘master-planned’ community-an architect’s view of a commuter-belt idyll, modern, bland and, some might say, heartless. Woodlands is situated just 28 miles to the north of Houston to which streams of commuters shunt grimly along Interstate 45, and then grimly back in the evenings, before splintering into the estates that, although mainly lying within the jurisdiction of Houston, also protrude into neighbouring Shenandoah and Conroe, names that still strike a note of fond recognition to anyone whose childhood encapsulated the age of the TV cowboy.

Win and Will Butler’s twin Woodlands childhoods might be seen as perfect grounding for lives led in successful if uniformed obscurity. Indeed, the very concept of this suburban idyll seems designed to repress the bohemian instincts that both inherited from their mother and grandfather. However, the area is not without built-in cultural and sporting outlets. Concert venues presenting live classical and rock music featured heavily in the local media and, indeed, the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion was the home of the Houston Symphony Orchestra while big rock acts like Aerosmith and Alice Cooper were among the many groups to perform there.

Meanwhile, music filled the Butler household, the family stereogram constantly blasting out the repertoire of Grieg, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms. The boys’ mother, Liza, was a harpist, pianist and vocalist of distinction, whose playing echoed around the house throughout the day, its gentility adding to the boys’ understanding of musical ambience. It wasn’t a completely classical household, however. The parents owned a copy of every Beatles album and at her piano Liza perfected the lighter end of their spectrum, the McCartney ballads like ‘The Long And Winding Road’ and ‘Let It Be’. Both boys would later admit to being ‘profoundly affected’ by this tasteful blend of classical and classic contemporary. It is not, after all, a bad place to start. It probably goes without saying that while the harp remained largely unplucked by the boys, the piano’s steely omnipresence offered an opportunity to tinker playfully away. As such, the natural musical stream continued to flow down the generations: before they had reached their teens, both boys could instantly copy and hold pretty much any tune they heard.

Win Butler would later admit to an unlikely 13-year-old fascination with Def Leppard – though his future wife, Régine Chassagne, would be horrified at the thought. The album in question was their career-defining Hysteria. A close friend of the young Win’s played ‘Pour Some Sugar On Me’ from that album constantly and the song certainly had an impact. While out driving with his grandpa one day, Win noticed a Def Leppard cassette on sale in a truck-stop garage. He convinced his mum to buy if for him, only to discover later that it wasn’t Hysteria at all, but an early Def Leppard album that left him totally cold.

“It was actually horrible, horrible music,” he said. “Some of the most horrible over-produced stuff I have ever heard and a real eye-opener. Probably a good thing that I heard it as it drove me completely away from that kind of radio-friendly heavy rock. It gave me a warning sign.”

At first Win tossed the cassette aside, vowing never again to listen to friends with less developed musical taste than his own, but then he changed his mind, picked it up and started to listen. There, perhaps, began Will’s rockier musical journey.

Naturally, both boys were fully attuned to rock on American radio, though several big acts were anathema to them. Neither, for example, could ever stand to listen to Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’, which they found objectionable in both imagery and phrasing. Equally offensive to their ears, and somewhat more surprising, was a shared dislike of Led Zeppelin, at the time essential listening for any American teen keen to delve into the history of rock music.

“It’s odd, that,” Will later admitted. “While we were both surrounded by music, there are a lot of classic rock albums that we simply never heard even though our friends played them all the time. An example, perhaps, would be Pink Floyd and The Wall, which was something that we just would never listen to. In fact, we never really have. As for Led Zeppelin… you know, I just don’t know them that well. Win perhaps more than me. I have no idea why this is because I was always a rock fan. Maybe I will, one day. Maybe it is my missing link.”

Win also developed a fondness for more off-the-wall acts from the seventies. A love of Jonathan Richman can be sourced to the first time he heard ‘Roadrunner’. He loved the way the seemingly mundane act of driving a car could be transformed into something magical by the simple power of the lyric. ‘Cars’ and ‘driving’ would later feature heavily, albeit metaphorically, in his own songwriting. Will became positively fixated with X Ray Spex’ underrated saxophonist Laura Logic – she of the erotic cap-at-jaunty-angle – whom he believed was one of the great ‘lost artists of punk’. He even kept track of her later – and largely unknown – solo work.

Win and Will’s memories of suburbia also include regular trips down Market Street, a string of shops aimed at re-creating the American ideal of ‘Main Street’ shopping. This was only partly successful because of the nearby, and more modern, Woodland Mall which, by comparison, must have seemed like ‘crystal rooms’ to the boys, a palace filled with doughnuts, jellybeans and all manner of retail distractions.

More exciting still, it bordered a large waterway which offered the brothers the thrill of the ‘Waterside taxis’ and pleasant meandering paths. This central retail core was supplemented by a series of outlying villages, where less-corporate businesses vied for the family shop. Once it had become firmly established as this sort of community, things started to happen to the area, expanding the original planning concept towards environmental principles way ahead of their time and not strictly in tune with the vaguely sinister notion of a place where lives were lived out in a somewhat rigid fashion. This concept of design with nature in a living, breathing community was based on ideas of visionary author and architect Ian McHarg.

It might also be noted that the Butler family arrived in the wake of Hurricane Alicia which, in 1983, wiped away many of the thousands of trees that had been planted in accordance with the design-with-nature concept.

Edwin was a tinkerer, be it with radio, hi-fi or messing with musical instruments. Both practical and aesthetic, he had inherited from his grandfather a thirst for invention as well as musical aptitude and a profound sense of musicality. He also inherited a work ethic that would place him firmly at the helm of his future band. By night, Edwin spent long hours attempting to copy music from his radio. He also seems to have developed a romantic view of radio, which harked back to the days of the sixties, fumbling with wireless knobs in the darkness, hoping to pick up specialist radio stations. As he stated to Pitchfork: “I had heard about the pirate stations in Britain in the sixties and always felt that I would love to have experienced that feeling that you are listening to something illicit. Unfortunately I had pretty much every form of music on tap. I was spoilt. Probably a really good thing but I do like the idea of the romance of old radio rather than all music being available at all times. That takes away some of the magic, though I guess it gets music instantly to areas around the world.”