David Bowie light-heartedly threatened to steal Arcade Fire‘s ‘Reflektor’ for himself, according to band member Richard Reed Parry.

Bowie appears alongside the Canadian band on their new single, the first track to be taken from the forthcoming double album of the same name. Speaking to NME in a new interview in this week’s issue, available digitally and on newsstands now, Parry lifted the lid on what it was like to be in the studio with Bowie.

“It was just after ‘The Next Day’ had come out. He basically just came by the studio in New York while we were mixing, just to have a listen to the stuff we were doing,” explains Parry. “He offered to lend us his services because he really liked the song. In fact, he basically threatened us – he was like, ‘If you don’t hurry up and mix this song, I might just steal it from you!’ So we thought, well why don’t we go one better, why don’t you sing on our version? Thankfully he obliged, and we were really happy about that.”


Elsewhere in the interview, Parry states that the more dance orientated sound of the ‘Reflektor’ single “represents an angle of the record”, but does not tell the full story. “It’s pretty all over the map,” he says. “And that was the goal. We wanted to go to extremes. Sometimes it’s like a bluesy bar band, and others it’s more like a disco band in a weird old nightclub from a country nobody’s ever heard of.”

‘Reflektor’, the band’s fourth album, is set for release on October 28. Frontman Win Butler recently described the album, which is a double, as a “mash-up of Studio 54 and Haitian voodoo”.

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