Arcade Fire

2001–2003: Formation and early work[edit]

Win Butler and Josh Deu founded Arcade Fire in Montreal around 2001, having first met at Phillips Exeter Academy as high school students.^[10] Butler and Deu's musical ideas began to develop and the first incarnation of the band was born while they were attending McGill University and Concordia University, respectively.^[11][12] The duo began rehearsing their material at McGill where they met Régine Chassagne, a music student whom they asked to join them. Deu recalls, "Win and I played guitar. Everyone played guitar. We had no music to show her, but she ended up saying yes to joining us, and I don't know why. Maybe there was a little spark with Win."^[11] Halfway through 2001, the band consisted of Butler, Chassagne, Deu, multi-instrumentalist Tim Kile (later of Wild Light), bassist Myles Broscoe (later of Les Angles Morts, Crystal Clyffs, and AIDS Wolf), guitarist/drummer Dane Mills (later of Crackpot) and multi-instrumentalist Brendan Reed (later of Les Angles Morts and founding member of Clues), who lived with Butler and Chassagne in Montreal's Mile End neighbourhood at the time and was a collaborator with them on song-writing and arrangement (2001–2003). During a party in 2001, the band recorded a live Christmas album, A Very Arcade Xmas, which they are rumored to have hand-distributed to their friends as a Christmas gift.^[13]


The initial Montreal structure of the band began to dissolve in the summer of 2002, when they travelled to Butler's family farm on Mount Desert Island, Maine to record their self-titled EP.^[14] Tension between Butler and bassist Myles Broscoe led the latter to exit the band following the recording session. Richard Reed Parry, who had been enlisted to help the band record, began to collaborate with them during the sessions and would go on to join the band shortly afterwards. Around the same time, Joshua Deu left the band to resume his studies; he continued to collaborate on the visual aspects of the band.^[11] In the winter of 2003, the band celebrated the release of its EP with a show at Montreal's Casa del Popolo. Before a crowd packed beyond capacity, the band's set ended (in the middle of an encore) with an argument between Butler and Reed, who quit the band on-stage.^[15] Mills told gathered friends in the crowd immediately thereafter that he considered the band to have broken up, as such resigning from the band as well. Following the on-stage implosion, Butler's brother Will Butler (subject of the early Arcade Fire song "William Pierce Butler") and Tim Kingsbury were brought in to replace Reed and Mills so that the band could continue, and they set out to promote the self-titled EP. The eponymous release (often referred to by fans as the Us Kids Know EP) was sold at early shows. After the band achieved fame, the EP was subsequently remastered and given a full release.^[16]


Howard Bilerman joined the band on drums in the summer of 2003, and they began to play shows together, and record the album that would end up becoming Funeral. The promise shown by the new band in their early live shows allowed them to land a record contract with the independent record label, Merge Records, before the end of their first year together.^[17]


When asked about the rumour that the band's name refers to a fire in an arcade, Win Butler replied: "It's not a rumour, it's based on a story that someone told me. It's not an actual event, but one that I took to be real. I would say that it's probably something that the kid made up, but at the time I believed him."^[18]