Will Butler has spoken to NME about the future of the hit play Stereophonic as it reaches the end of its West End run, as well as looking back on his final years in Arcade Fire and life since.
Stereophonic was a hit on Broadway and won five Tony awards this year before it arrived to great acclaim on London’s West End. Created by playwright David Adjmi, the play centres around a fictional British-American band making an album in the ’70s and the many tensions that arise that come from grappling with success, ego, drug abuse and having couples within the band. It is set entirely within a studio setting as they battle to complete their record.
The synopsis reads:
“It’s 1976 and one band are about to break through, break down, or break up…
“Plug into the electric atmosphere as one up-and-coming rock band record the album that could propel them to superstardom. Amid a powder keg of drugs, booze and jealousy, songs come together and relationships fall apart. The mics are on, the tapes are rolling, but with this band, someone’s always out of tune…”
So realistic is the portrayal that it faced a lawsuit from producer Ken Caillat and Steven Stiefel claiming that they copied from their Fleetwood Mac book, while Butler – who penned the stunningly authentic ’70s music for the play – said his many musician friends felt the show was far too close to the bone.
“I send my friends, people in bands, engineers and even former bandmates to it and they all say, ‘That was horrible! That wasn’t a play. Why did you make me do that?’ The dynamics of it are horribly real and accurate,” Butler told NME.
“David, who wrote the script, has never been in a band and he’d never been in a studio, until the play had already been on stage. It’s also very realistic technically. I’ve had a lot of uptight engineer friends watch it and say, ‘Wow, I’m so used to feeling like an asshole and being such a nitpicker and that felt very real to me’.”
Arcade Fire were formed by Butler’s brother Win in the early 2000s in Montreal, with Will joining the line-up in 2004 ahead of their seminal debut album ‘Funeral’. He remained in the group through their next five albums, and confirmed that he would be leaving around the same time that they announced their sixth album, ‘WE’.
Speaking to NME before his former bandmates Win and Régine Chassagne announced that they would be ending their marriage, Will explained how much he related to the source material of Stereophonic.
“I was in a band with couples, fighting and relationships,” Will told NME. “David wasn’t in a band, he was in a family, and it’s the same vibe.”
Check out our full interview with Will Butler below, where he told us about entering the 1970s world of the play, more material from the show coming soon, hopes of it hitting the big screen, his reasons for leaving Arcade Fire and what’s coming next.
NME: Hello Will. What can you tell us about how you came to be a part of Stereophonic?
Will Butler: “I met with David 11 years ago now, before he’d done a word of the play. His basic pitch was a vision of the recording studio as a dramatic space. I knew very instinctively what the shape of the music would be. We’d be hearing a demo, rehearsals, one or two great takes – maybe one gets thrown away – maybe we’d be hearing something really great but then it gets stopped either for a stupid technical reason or maybe the drummer is being an asshole. Maybe they’re just mad at their dad, or maybe everything’s fine but it’s just nobody ate lunch and they’re all on drugs.
“The physiology of the music was very clear, and that it would be a composition within the text as well. The whole thing would be this crazy puzzle piece. We knew we were in to make some kind of Moby Dick-esque creation about creative life.”
One of the props is a remarkably large bag of cocaine – the size of which probably hasn’t been seen since in decades…
“My friend’s mom came and saw it. She was a studio manager in the ‘70s and she said, ‘Oh that was a very accurate-sized bag of coke. Also I think those are the clogs that Bette Midler threw at me’!”
How much of this music was written in the character of the band, and how much was just feeling it out?
“I would send David demos over the years, just as vibe tracks. The script was finished around 2018-2019, then it was clear what the puzzle pieces were. It was like a triple puzzle where it had to work dramatically within the arc of the structure, it had to serve a purpose, and it had to reveal things about the characters that they didn’t know either.
“I was recently listening to The Beatles song ‘Don’t Let Me Down’. Part of why it’s a great song is that you can hear John Lennon losing his fucking mind. The lyrics to the verses in particular are so empty. It could be total garbage but you want to music to be expressing things, and it’s a combination of the composition and the performance from the actor. It was like an insane puzzle piece with so many moving and static parts.”
How much did you have to immerse yourself in 1970s music and culture?
“One touchstone for me was Bruce Springsteen when he was working on ‘Nebraska’ or ‘Born In The USA’. Just after ‘Born To Run’, he was trying to make Phil Spector girlgroup music from the ‘50s, and he was friends with the band Suicide. He wasn’t trying to make ‘70s music’, this was just the shit that got to him as a teen. I’m still hung up on [Radiohead’s] ‘Kid A’ and The Smiths. I don’t know any artist that’s primarily plugged into the year they’re creating their art. They’re always dredging up the shit that their parents listened to.
“Fucking Paul McCartney in the ‘70s was writing 1940s music hall music! People are always working from their past, so I really tried to figure out where these characters came from. People say it sounds like California, but to me it’s more New York, it’s more Patti Smith just at the cusp of punk: manic, filthy, trying to be a poet in the studio.”
There was an opulence to everything back then. What does that age and that rich seam of music and culture represent to you?
“It was the peak of this material culture where there were the resources to spend $1million on making a record and have that much cocaine along with all those machines, microphones, wiring and the people. It was a peak physical culture. It’s like writing about King Tut’s tomb or something where you still have all this physical evidence.
“Things have gotten easier and cheaper in a good way, but microphones haven’t gotten any better since the ‘70s. The actual path that electrons have to go through via wires hasn’t gotten better. It’s just exciting to focus on the golden era of a thing.”
Do you feel as if something has been lost? In 50 years, could you imagine someone making a Broadway/West End play about bedroom pop or someone making a record on their phone?
“It’s hard to tell when you’re in it. Just looking at theatre, people are still doing Oedipus from 2,000 years ago. They’re still doing Sophocles and Euripides, but they’re not doing the people that came 20 years after Euripides. It’s like, ‘Those people can fuck off!’ There was a golden age that was pretty rad and there are other great things that have happened in history, but it’s really hard to tell what’s going to pop in the moment.
“It doesn’t always happen contemporaneously – particularly in music. Think of someone like Nick Drake. He was recording and some people liked him at the time, but his reputation didn’t blossom into the Nick Drake we know today until 20 years after he was dead. It’s just hard to tell what’s going to read as ‘the thing’.”
There’s a new, unreleased single from the play arriving soon. What can you tell us about ‘Dark Night’?
“I’m new to theatre and cast recordings. We were rehearsing with the actors and they were just a really good band with a great energy to them. We were rehearsing the full songs from the play just so they’d have that frustration to draw on when they were forced to stop for the recording in the show. They were hungry to play more songs. The text mentioned the song ‘Dark Night’ so I just took a swing at writing it in the hope it would help them become a proper band.
“They liked it, so we workshopped it together and were riffing a lot in RAK Studios in St John’s Wood in London. The board is from 1975 which was perfect. It was really restorative for me to sit down with artists and actors and just bounce ideas off them.”
Part of the arc is the band members growing apart from each other. When you left Arcade Fire you said “I’ve changed and the band has changed”. What can you tell us about that profound shift that made you realise it was time to do something new?
“I’m now very firmly in middle-age, and I’m very happy to call myself that. I had never considered leaving the band, but I was 39 and thought, ‘I’ve got a little gas in the tank and right now have the capacity to do something that’s scary for myself, I don’t know if I’ll have that capacity in 10 years’. I might have later been too scared to work without a safety net. Arcade Fire, to some extent, was a net. It wasn’t comfortable, but there was a comfort to it. The only way to do something new sometimes is to stop doing the old thing.”
Watching the band go on without you – is that an out of body experience like watching a play or a movie?
“It’s strange, but it’s no stranger than anything that happens in life. Right now I’m literally in a hotel room in Las Vegas. We’re doing the tour version of Stereophonic and just had our opening night. I just did an opening night in Vegas! I’m looking out at the desert right now! Life is strange. It is strange to watch something you’ve done for 20 years roll on without you, but it’s also strange to do something for 20 years!”
How is your band Sisters Squares different in terms of your approach to the band and how you fit inside it?
“It was an experiment in trying to be Neil Young in Crazy Horse or something. This is a band I’ve played in for 10 years with my wife [Jenny Shore], my wife’s sister [Julie Shore], and Sarah [Dobbs] and Miles [Francis]. I wanted to give them a name and see what it felt like to collaborate in that way, as opposed to just having my name on a thing. It becomes its own creation. I just wanted to experiment and collaborate with an entity.
“Miles is a great record producer, and it was exciting to treat him like an outside entity, like the boss.”
What’s next for you?
“We’ve just opened the tour in America and the single is coming out, and I’ve literally just finished my work on this play after two years. As of 12 hours ago, my work is 100 per cent complete. I’m going to take a couple of weeks off, come to the UK for the closing of the play because I have a very avuncular relationship with that cast – they’re my children, my peers and my friends. I’m going to chill out. I’m going to make another record soon enough either for myself or with Sister Squares, but I’m just going to try and clear my mind, read some books, read some poetry and see what happens.”
Do you think we’ll see Stereophonic on the big screen soon?
“I think it’ll be a movie. People want to make it into a movie and me and David want it to be. We want it to be a good movie, so that will take a little bit of time. I think it can live as a gorgeous theatre piece that people keep making throughout the years, but it can also support something on the screen. There’s something in the language and the music there that would make it really exciting.”
New single ‘Dark Knight’ from the Stereophonic soundtrack arrives on Wednesday (5 November). Stereophonic continues its run at London’s Duke of York’s Theatre until Saturday November 22. Visit here for tickets and more information.
