How 'Funeral' cost Arcade Fire blood, sweat and tears

Mark Beaumont talks to members of the band about how the seminal album was shaped by death, near-fatal live shows and the Montreal music scene, 20 years since its initial release

- Mark Beaumont

Every night, at early Arcade Fire club shows, there would be blood. “Every show I would bleed,” says tousle-haired multiinstrumentalist Richard Reed Parry, one of the chief agitators of the Montreal collective’s famed onstage art riot: eight players crammed onto tiny stages, throwing themselves around in an instrument-swapping fervour, tossing drums in the air or marching out through the crowd for a kerbside encore. “There was blood on the piano, everything was rusting from sweat and there’d be dust from broken plaster ceiling tiles in the keyboards because we’d just break stuff. There’s a lot of visceral memories of being on stages that could barely contain the band.”

Before long, alternative culture would struggle to contain them too. Arcade Fire’s seminal and influential 2004 debut album Funeral – released 20 years ago this week – was a huge critical hit on release, catapulting the band to instant fame thanks to such compulsive cult favourites as “Wake Up” and “Rebellion (Lies)”. David Bowie, David Byrne and U2 all paid their respects, either in walk-on music or guest performance: in Rolling Stone, Bowie hailed their “uninhibited passion” and “kaleidoscopic, dizzy sort of rush”.

In the intervening years, in critics’ poll after critics’ poll, Funeral has come to be regarded among the greatest records of the century so far, shifting the tone of the North American alt-rock of its age from the angular to the grandiose single-handed. Even 20 years on, with accusations of sexual misconduct against Butler that surfaced in 2022 having reduced the band’s cultural standing and somewhat marred the recent 20th-anniversary fullalbum tour, the sonic and emotional power of the record remains undiminished.