December 5, 2005 11:30

The Arcade Fire go to church

Band start recording in unlikely venue

Photo Gallery: Arcade Fire

The Arcade Fire have spoken about their plans to record their second album in a converted church in Canada.

Instead of going into a ‘traditional’ studio, the group have splashed out their own money and bought a church near to their home city of Montreal.

Recording was due to start this month, with the band hoping to release the record in 2006.

Guitarist Tim Kingsbury told NME.COM: “We’re going to start recording. We just bought an old church just south of Montreal and we’re turning it into a recording studio. Win (Butler) and Regine (Chassagne) they both sort of had a fantasy of buying a church.

"In Quebec there’s a lot of old churches and over the last 30 years, church attendance has gone down significantly. Especially Catholic churches. We’re so they found it on the internet and we all went and looked at it and it’s amazing. It’s just a little country church. Maybe at most 150 people [could fit in there].”

The band say that the church dates back to around 1900, and has an interesting history.

"It’s an old Presbyterian church from maybe around 1900 or so and then it was a Masonic lodge for some time so there’s a mason’s logo in stained glass in the window,” he laughed. “We’re pretty sure Mary Magdalane is buried under the cellar!”

The band say they still have “a lot of work” to do on the songs for the follow-up to ‘Funeral’, which means it might not be out until next autumn.

Kingsbury added: “We have a few (songs) that we’ve sort of started working on. We have a lot of work to do. I think a lot of this record, we’ll just start working on something and take it from there. I think our goal is to have a record out in about a year.”