Arcade Fire: 50 Geeky Facts You Never Knew

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Arcade Fire will bring their immersive live act to newly launched NYC Festival Panorama as headliners this summer. Did you know when they played Hyde Park in 2011, they were supported by behemoth band Mumford And Sons? Here’s 49 other geeky facts about the band.

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Arcade Fire

Butler’s grandmother was a member of an all female swing band called The King Sisters who starred in a weekly variety show called The King Family Show.

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Arcade Fire

The band purchased an old church in 2005 and used it as a studio up until January 2013 when they had to sell it on because the roof began to collapse. They Recorded both ‘Neon Bible’ and ‘The Suburbs’ there.

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Arcade Fire

The band’s third album ‘Suburbs’ was initially inspired by a letter Win Butler received from a childhood friend back home in Houston, Texas.

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The band teamed up with Google to create the first ever HTML5 – powered music video for the single ‘We Used to Wait.’ The video uses visual data of your hometown using Google maps, street view and 3D graphics.

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Swing era bandleader and self styled “king of guitar’ Alvino Ray is the grandfather of the Butler brothers.

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The band recorded a special film version of ‘Wake Up’ for the movie trailer of ‘Where The Wild Things Are’.

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Within 48 hours of winning the Grammy for album of the year, the band took home two Brit awards and received honors for best international group and best international album.

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William Butler almost missed Arcade Fire’s appearance on the Conan O’Brien show. He had to ask his professors at Northwestern for permission to miss class.

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David Bowie made a guest appearance at the Fashion Rocks event in New York for ‘Wake Up’. The track was available for one week only and all proceeds went to the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.

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They also teamed up with the NFL in 2010 by licensing their signal and all the proceeds went straight to Haiti relief. (Where Chassagne originates from.)

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‘Funeral’ was the fastest selling record in Arcade Fire’s record label, Merge’s fifteen year history.

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The Suburbs was released with eight different cover designs.

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In 2009, Arcade Fire accompanied Jay Z as musical guests at the Obama staff ball under the request of the President himself.

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‘Wake Up’ is played at the end of sportscaster Dan Patrick’s show.

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The band members play a total of 16 different instruments, all of which are taken on tour with them.

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After Arcade Fire won the Grammy for album of the year, a Tumblr titled ‘Who is Arcade Fire?’ was created.

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‘Reflektor’, the follow-up to 2010’s ‘The Suburbs’ was produced by LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy and featured David Bowie’s vocals.

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Chassagne is also involved in a medieval band called Les Jongleurs De La Mandragore and a Jazz band, Azucar.

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She alsp wrote the music for David Uloth’s two minute long, Stanley Kubrick-inspired sketch, The Shine.

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Win also established a something called the ‘Winter Thaw’ in which students in New England got an extended weekend during the areas’ typically gruelling winters.

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Win and Regine both featured in the Unicef charity single, ‘Do they know it’s Hallowe’en?’ inspired, obviously, by ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’.

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‘Funeral’ was ranked second in NME’s list of 2005’s best albums.

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Arcade Fire began performing in 2001 and one of their first gigs was at a Christian music festival called ‘Inside Out Soul Festival’.

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Richard Parry from Arcade Fire has also made musical contributions to numerous albums by the likes of The National, Little Scream, The Unicorns, Islands and Sufjan Stevens.

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William served as the poetry editor for Northwestern’s literary magazine, Helicon. And an excerpt of a poem from his senior year thesis is quoted in Brian Bouldrey’s book, ‘Honorable Bandit: A walk across Corsica.’

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Win and Regine co-wrote the music for the 2009 film, The Box, which starred Cameron Diaz and James Marsden.

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Arcade Fire have been called ‘the greatest band in history’ by Coldplay’s Chris Martin.

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Win describes his perfect supergroup to be “The Beatles with Leonard Cohen as the lyricist and Perry Farrel as a vocalist”.

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Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler performed with The Rolling Stones on stage in Montreal earlier this year. He provided vocals on ‘The Last Time’ alongside Mick Jagger.

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Arcade Fire

The Butlers were brought up as Mormons.

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Win Butler’s brother, William Butler and his wife, Regine Chassagne are both members in the band.

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The band are due to reveal something at 9pm on September 9 with the video again confirming the time and date to viewers. Details beyond that are scant, with repeated use of the ‘Reflektor’ imagery and name throughout.

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