Arcade Fire’s Win Butler shares how their friend David Bowie made his presence felt on new record

Win Butler may not believe in ghosts but he does believe Arcade Fire’s biggest champion is still “showing” his support.

“I don’t believe in ghosts but I do believe in David Bowie.”

Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler claims not to be a “ghost person” even as he shares goosebump-inducing spectral stories about the legendary pop pioneer.

Bowie famously declared he “discovered” the band in 2004 as they released their critically-acclaimed debut album Funeral.

Back then, the pop chameleon had slipped into New York’s tiny cult venue the Bowery Ballroom to see them, watching mostly unobserved from the balcony.

The pop star’s patronage of the rock band flowered into a friendship and fostered occasional collaboration until his death in 2016.

Butler, wife Regine Chassagne and their bandmates returned to the venue last month for the first time in 18 years for a series of surprise Ukraine benefit shows, where they previewed songs from their sixth album WE, including Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole).

Arcade Fire in their New Orleans home studio where they made WE. Picture: Supplied / Sony

“We’re (about) to play Rabbit Hole and I’m saying ‘Oh it’s nice to be back at the Bowery, like I remember when we met David Bowie, he was standing right there’, and Regine is playing the opening chords on the digital piano,” Butler recalls.

“And I’m like ‘Hi, David’ and I swear to god, the piano just cut out. It just stopped. I said to Regine ‘What happened?’ and she goes ‘I don’t f … ing know.’

“He was saying hi, and not even in a weird ghost story way. Like of course he was there.”

And of course Bowie was spiritually and creatively present as Butler and Chassagne worked on the album in their compact home studio in New Orleans as the world shut down in 2020.

He “watched” over the proceedings from his portrait on the studio wall, as Butler tinkered with Rabbit Hole.

“That song happened quite quickly in this room when Regine started playing these chords and then (we had) this little drum machine thing going,” Butler says over Zoom from the studio.

“The song has a Bowie reference in it to plastic soul, which is what he called fame, and I always thought that was a clever turn of phrase, so the lyric is ‘rabbit hole, plastic soul’ over and over.

“I’m doing the first vocal take and as I finish it, I heard this weird sound in the room, the engineer heard it too. My phone was like across the room here, and it had just started playing of its own volition, a song from Low, a David Bowie song.”

Arcade Fire draw from a rich musical heritage for their new album WE. Picture: Supplied 2022

Arcade Fire’s sixth record is a reset, perhaps putting to rest the ghost of their previous electronica-heavy album Everything Now.

After a charmed run of critical and commercial success, its most digestible album was wildly polarising, with many critics regarding it as a flawed misstep by the indie rock heroes.

WE maintains glimmers of the Everything Now electronic experiment but its first single, The Lightning I, II also heralded a return to the big-sky, stadium rock drama reminiscent of another of their champions Bruce Springsteen.

Elsewhere on the record are many of the unique signatures of the band’s melting pot, particularly multi-instrumentalist Chassagne’s love of classical and chamber traditions and the Haitian rara street festival music from her parents’ homeland.

Butler believes the long periods between their records – Funeral (2004), Neon Bible (2007), The Suburbs (2010), Reflektor (2013) and Everything Now (2017) – negates the weight of expectation from their passionate fans and adoring critics.

Lovers of the surprise gig, Arcade Fire played an unannounced gig at Coachella. Picture: Getty

“I think we’ve run the bus into the ditch enough times … but I pray that people are still willing to listen to shit that initially seems strange to them,” he says.

“We worked with Charlie Gabriel, he plays on End of the Empire on the record, he’s 90 years old and plays with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, he played on every Motown record, he played with Aretha Franklin and we were talking the other day about jazz and how it’s like a language.

“And he said ‘If you don’t understand what I’m saying, I’m probably not talking to you.’ And I really like that.”

While it took some months in between lockdowns to reunite with the band and producer Nigel Godrich to finish off the songs he and Chassagne had started in New Orleans, there was one collaborator who was readily available to add whispers on End of the Empire.

Their nine-year-old son Eddie is also the inspiration behind the soaring, tender ballad Unconditional I (Lookout Kid).

A proud Butler declares his son to be “the best dude.”

“It sort of feels like he’s in the band in a lot of ways, he’s always around the band,” he says.

The imminent arrival of WE and the obligatory world tour to follow has the 1.94m tall musician reconsidering his future as an amateur basketballer. He suffered a serious knee injury during a game in 2020 just before the pandemic hit and “spent a year in rehab building my body back up.”

“I’ve just turned 42 and that’s the exact age you may as well just die when it comes to playing sports; just put me in the ground and put dirt over my body, I am f … ing useless,” he says, laughing.

“At least with music, you can still do good shit, right?

“I think this record is pretty f … ing good for a bunch of middle aged people.”

Arcade Fire’s album WE is released on May 6.

Originally published as Arcade Fire’s Win Butler shares how their friend David Bowie made his presence felt on new record