

They don't buy into the rock'n'roll lifestyle, their songs deal with big ideas, and their live shows – which now take place inside huge arenas – favour exuberance over irony and aloofness. And yet Arcade Fire, who emerged from Montreal's indie scene in 2004, are somehow the hottest band on the planet. Sean O'Hagan meets them on their world tour and asks whether they can keep evolving as they get bigger
Arcade Fire
Arcade Fire: 'the first rock group in a long time that have dared to be so unashamedly uplifting, to shun irony'. Photograph: Eric Kayne/

In a concrete room backstage at the Palau Sant Jordi arena in Barcelona, I am midway though a post-show interview with Arcade Fire's unfeasibly tall, quietly charismatic lead singer, Win Butler, when the door opens and his bandmate, Richard Reed Parry, enters. He roots around in a cupboard for a few moments, then exits again, having found what he was looking for – a yoga mat.

It strikes me later that this may be a small, but revealing, indication of a bigger pop-cultural shift that Arcade Fire exemplify: an illustration of just how far rock music has travelled from its rebellious roots, how much it has shed the emotional baggage – the angst, the self-destructive habits, the dissolute lifestyle – that once defined it. Suffice to say that there was a time, not that long ago, when yoga would not have been the preferred means of post-gig relaxation for a hip young rock star, but, my, how times have changed.

"The cliched rock life never seemed that cool to me," says Butler, who, as we chat, is eating brown rice salad from a small plastic container and sipping on a throat-soothing brandy. "We're not a band that's out to party until we die every night. We did a lot of shows with a lot of bands that were living that dream, but it's a dream I never bought into. It never seemed that fun. In fact, it was always kind of embarrassing to me. That isn't what I think is cool about rock."

In case you have not noticed, Arcade Fire – a multi-instrumental, mixed gender, seven-piece indie-rock group from the very un-rock'n'roll city of Montreal, Canada – are what is most cool about rock right now. The group's debut album, Funeral, was released in 2004 on the small independent label Merge Records. Initially championed by influential American music websites such as Pitchfork, it became one of the most critically lauded albums of the year, selling more than half a million copies globally.

Back then, Arcade Fire were famous for playing intimate venues – they often chose churches to suit the sombre subject matter of Funeral, a record whose underlying theme was death and grief. (Both Butler and his wife, Régine Chassagne, who writes, sings, drums and plays an array of arcane instruments, including the hurdy-gurdy, lost relatives in the year preceding the album's release.) Their live shows, which often began with the group marching though the audience while playing their instruments, or culminated with them leaving the stage to play among the crowd, attracted a growing legion of obsessive fans. Arcade Fire gigs became communal celebrations, uplifting to the point of congregational in tone.

"Even when we started out playing little art galleries in Montreal, we'd pick up on a certain level of cool stand-offishness in the crowd and just try and break though it," says Butler. "We wanted to connect with the audience in a way that other groups we played with didn't seem to really care about. I guess, in one way, every band ends up doing what they feel other bands should do for them as fans."

Now, though, Arcade Fire are being hailed as the biggest indie band in the world. The venues they play are no longer intimate but festival sites and huge concrete indoor arenas. (They arrive in Britain this week for a tour that includes two shows at the 02 in London.) The group are negotiating that dangerous hinterland where bigness often means a diminution of character, where nuance and intimacy are often sacrificed to the demands of the thousands that fill the stands.

"If it stops feeling organic," says Chassagne, "we'll stop doing it. I have no ambition to be the biggest or the bestselling. That kind of thing is not why I, or any of us, play music. There was a time when selling even 10,000 records would have seemed like the greatest most unimaginable thing in the world but now we're here at this mad point. We're just going with it to see where it leads."

If the 10,000-strong Catalan audience is anything to go by, though, the group's once ramshackle but now more streamlined live sound has not only survived the rapid transition from small venues to massive indoor arenas but connects on a deeper level with its ever growing fanbase. Win Butler explains the change in tone this way: "When we first played 'Wake Up'" – their most anthemic song – "we were the first band of three in a shitty club somewhere and it was like a 'fuck you!' song. It was like, 'Hey, asshole, we're playing – pay attention!' Now, it's less abrasive because it functions differently. It's like the big goodbye at the end of a set."

In Barcelona, there is the definite sense that this is the kind of noise – inclusive, uplifting, communal – that this hip, young audience have been waiting a long time to hear, at least since U2 toured in support of The Joshua Tree album way back in 1987. The crowd sing along to every single song and 10,000 voices carry the wordless chorus of the closing "Wake Up" long after the group have departed the stage following their final encore. "That was fucking wild," says a relieved, sweat-drenched Butler afterwards. His exhausted bandmates grin and nod their heads. You can feel the collective sense of relief.

Arcade Fire's trajectory is interesting for many reasons, not the least being that there is something refreshingly uncool about the band – their unflagging onstage exuberance, their typically Canadian politeness, their penchant for pre-show group hugs. What really sets them apart is how different they are to what went before. Almost single handedly, they have ruptured the tyranny of almost terminal hipness that has been the common indie-rock currency of late. As one of their champions, Bono, recently put it in the New York Times, their music "contains all the big themes and ideas that make all around them seem so vapid".

New album The Suburbs, like its predecessors, Funeral and Neon Bible (2007), comprises a series of songs linked by a single underlying conceptual theme, in this instance the global suburbanisation of youth culture. On a song called "Rococo", Butler sings of "the modern kids" who "build it up just to burn it back down" and who "seem wild but they are so tame". The album is not just a kind of bittersweet look back at his youth in the corporate suburbs of Houston, Texas, but a critique of cooler-than-thou neighbourhoods such as Williamsburg in New York or Hoxton in London, where everyone parades their hipster credentials by dressing the same and listening to the same music, while simultaneously priding themselves on being different.

"I think it goes way further than that," he says, "if you think of the sociological impact of the internet, which has led to this uniformity of taste, this homogenisation of a certain kind of coolness. It's scary because it spreads like a virus and it's hard to define yourself against. I think the very notion of the suburbs in the old-fashioned sense – that homogenised sprawl of corporate housing and malls – is like a metaphor for something much bigger."

Butler, as you have probably guessed, is not your regular rock songwriter. It is not often you come across an indie-rock songwriter who cites Orwell as his prime influence.

"I had a teacher at high school who gave me Orwell's short essay on how to write, and the thing I took from it is that you always have to find a specific person doing and thinking specific things in a specific place to illustrate something bigger," says the 30-year-old. "That kind of stayed with me: the notion that good writing is like a window pane on the world. Our music may sound big emotionally but that's more to do with the playing, the level of musicianship and the full-on energy. Often, the lyrics are often quite small and focused."

If Butler is Arcade Fire's cerebral anchor – he diplomatically describes his role in the group as "directorial" – then his wife, Régine Chassagne, a Haitian-Canadian who studied medieval classical music for 10 years, is its heart and soul. Whereas he is quietly intense, reflective and utterly focused, she comes across, initially at least, as someone who exists entirely in a parallel world of her own. She skips about a lot, offstage and on, and is given to thinking aloud in short, often cryptic, musings. (When I ask her if, pre-Arcade Fire, medieval music might once have become her chosen path, she looks at me in a slightly startled way, that says, "Is there such a path?" This was not untypical.)

Whether this otherness is natural, which I suspect it is, or a way of keeping the world at arm's length, or indeed both, she is certainly the most intriguing member of Arcade Fire. Interestingly, when the conversation turns to Haiti, she comes alive and her thoughts shift into focus. "I was literally packing my suitcase to go there when I heard about the earthquake," she says of events last January. "I went there in August. It's an epic catastrophe. The people are so resilient and optimistic and they will have to be because it is going to be really bad for a long time."

Chassagne, whose parents fled the Papa Doc regime in the 1960s, has been trying to raise public awareness about Haitian poverty for years, but, since the earthquake, both she and Butler have been tirelessly involved in raising funds for the beleaguered country. In January this year, Chassagne wrote an impassioned article on the Haitian crisis for this newspaper, in which she described her initial reaction to the bad news from her parents' homeland. It began and ended with words that could have been lifted from an Arcade Fire song – "Somewhere in my heart, it's the end of the world" – and included a plea for "compassion and respect" as well as financial aid.

Since then, the couple have been have working alongside the organisation Partners in Health, founded by Harvard doctor Paul Farmer, and Arcade Fire have instigated a "one dollar, one euro, one pound" ticket policy, which means that one unit of currency is donated to the charity for every ticket sold on their tours. By the close of last year, they had raised $800,000 for the organisation. This year, they aim to hit the $1m mark.

Chassagne has also helped launch an organisation called Kanpe (Haitian creole for "to stand up") to co-ordinate NGO responses to the ongoing crisis. "It's emergency after emergency in Haiti because the country's infrastructure is so weak, but one of the things we are working on is long-term aid and co-ordinated organisation. It's less immediately rewarding, but so important."

Together, Butler and Chassagne encapsulate the strange, almost contradictory charm of Arcade Fire. The couple met in Montreal, where Butler had drifted after college and where Chassagne grew up after her parents settled there. When I ask what her childhood was like, she says: "What should I say? It was regular to me. I grew up in the suburbs, playing in the backyard, going to the park, staying out a lot because the house was too small."

Music seems to have been her great escape, and, according to her husband, she has "an extraordinary innate talent for composition and arrangement that is crazy-wild and still pretty much untapped". She banged out pop songs on the piano at four, and later studied medieval and baroque music at college. "It was my own little thing that I wanted to do," she says, shrugging. "It was different, for sure, because none of the other kids were doing it. I didn't feel good or bad about it because I didn't ever get any feedback. My parents were focused on paying the rent, the bills, I was just off in the corner doing my stuff."

Win Butler's childhood could hardly have been more different. Born Edwin Farnham Butler III in north California, his father was a geologist and his mother a classical musician who played piano and harp. (Her father, Alvino Rey, was a famous big-band musician in the 1930s as well as the inventor of the pedal steel guitar.) Butler went to the best schools, including the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he played varsity basketball. He later studied creative writing and religious studies: "It was scriptural interpretation, mainly, reading the Bible in different translations. It was interesting but I couldn't cut it in Aramaic." His mother was a Mormon, and Butler was raised in the faith.



It sounds, I say, both from his conversation and his recent songs, like he still misses that faith-based sense of community. "Yes. I guess I do," he says, after some thought. "I'm not practising, I don't go to church, but what I got from it was a sense of belonging to something bigger. What I really miss is being forced to be in a community with people that aren't the same as you. Then, you really have to work through the ways that you're different. I think that's important and it's missing in youth culture. I guess some of the songs are a reaction against the tyranny of youth culture, where you only hang around with people who dress like you, think like you and listen to the same music as you. Even though we are seen as the quintessential indie band, I feel very far from that culture a lot of the time."

Butler's offstage presence is a strange mixture of the looming and the gentle. He looks like a younger, cooler, more towering – he is six and a half feet tall – version of the actor Christopher Walken. Chassagne has said before that what initially attracted her to Butler was his deep seriousness, his sense of focus and ambition. That certainly remains intact. On their first date, they wrote a song called "Headlights Look Like Diamonds", which duly appeared on the first Arcade Fire EP. Until then, she had played and sang in jazz bands, while pursuing a degree in communications. "It was the closest I could get to the arts that was a real job," she says now, laughing. "We had rent to pay so I couldn't imagine telling my mum I was going to try to make a living from music. That would have been like the end of the world to her."

Instead, it was the beginning of one of the unlikeliest partnerships and the greatest adventures in contemporary pop. To spend any time around Arcade Fire and their extended circle is to witness a genuine camaraderie of spirit while sometimes wondering if you have wandered into a kind of better-living-through-happiness-style cult, so determinedly good mannered and optimistic everyone appears to be.

"When I look at a lot of other bands, it does seem that we're the strange minority," says drummer, Jeremy Gara, who, with his standy-up hair and dishevelled clothes, seems the most old-school indie musician of them all. "We're a disparate bunch but we're similiar, too, and we are all friends who respect each other enough not to start jostling for position. It's all very healthy."

Inevitably, the group that Arcade Fire have been most compared to is U2. What's more, the veteran rockers have embraced the younger group as their spiritual heirs, inviting them on tour, joining them on stage and even using "Wake Up" as their pre-show fanfare. One senses, though, that not everyone in Arcade Fire is altogether happy with the comparison. When I speak to Win Butler's younger brother, Will, keyboardist, synth player and drum banger, he says: "Every so often someone will say we're the new U2, but we really make some pretty weird music a lot of the time. Sure, we have some straight-up rockers, but there's a strangeness there too and a musical diversity that a lot of bands don't have. We're not straightforward."

This is true. The group's music merges indie artiness with the optimism of early Springsteen, but it also nods to other, older musical forms: folk, jazz, the ambient swirl of fairground music and the chanson tradition of Quebec. On The Suburbs, you can hear definable traces of various disparate sources: the controlled power of Joy Division, the electro-disco of Giorgio Moroder, the keening voice of the younger Neil Young, the quirkiness of Kate Bush, but they are traces that never come close to homage or pastiche. Arcade Fire's sound is all their own, and it has become – even with its moments of ramshackle amateurishness, and its merging of the raw and the refined – one of the key rock signatures of recent times.

The U2 comparison, though, holds in an altogether more interesting way, and one that says a lot about the circularity of rock culture. Back in the early 1980s, when U2 began to hone their widescreen sound, the quasi-religious undertow of their big music defied the tenor of the downbeat post-punk times. Arcade Fire are the first rock group in a long time that have dared to be so unashamedly uplifting, to shun irony, and, in doing so, to run so contrary to the drift of contemporary indie-rock culture in all its self-defeating hipness and endless pastiching of older forms. The question is whether they can they keep evolving as they grow bigger.

"I think we'll have to keep changing in order to keep going," says Win Butler when I ask him how long his band can sustain the energy and commitment that currently defines Arcade Fire. "When it stops being meaningful, we'll have to change. I'm in it for the long haul, though, and so is Régine. This is our life now. It's what we've done since we met. And, it's a good life, a great life."

Arcade Fire tour the UK from 1-12 December