The snappy-dressing Glasgow boys—Alex Kapranos, Nick McCarthy, Paul Thomson and Bob Hardy—released their thrilling third LP, Tonight, in January. We called Franz Ferdinand frontman Kapranos in his hotel room in Seattle as the band prepared to kick off its U.S. tour. Ever amiable and chatty, the Scotsman turned out to be a big fan of the Midwest—he even adores Benton Harbor. All those trips to Oak Park with his girlfriend, Eleanor Friedberger of the Fiery Furnaces, must be rubbing off. Franz releases Blood, a “dub” version of Tonight, on June 1 via Domino Records. But don’t bust out the ganja just yet, these are more like “dance remixes” than Lee Perry treatments. Find more fun facts about Franz Ferdinand in this week’s Music section.

TOC: How are you?
Alex Kapranos: It’s a bit chilly in Seattle. I’ve come from Scotland, where it was really sunny and it’s supposed to be cold. I like the winters in Chicago. We went up the east coast of Lake Michigan. It was so beautiful, super super cold, but beautiful. The wind had blown the waves overnight into huge sculptures. I’d never seen that before. I really love the lakes. It’s so different from anything in the U.K.

Well, that lake is the size of Scotland.* {*not quite: Scotland is 30,414 sq mi, Lake Michigan 22,400 sq mi.}
No, we’re not the biggest nation in the world.

You’ve been to Chicago a good deal, I would imagine.
I’ve been quite a lot. My girlfriend [Friedberger] grew up in Oak Park, and her mom still lives there.

Do you come here often?
I do. There are a few places I always stop by in Chicago. Eleanor’s mom’s place, of course. There’s a guitar shop called Midwest Buy and Sell. They sell the most interesting things there. It’s not fancy shop at all. The Midwest is great for guitars. Kalamazoo is where Gibsons are made.

With a published food diary, Sound Bites, you’re known as quite the gourmand. What are your favorite places to eat in Chicago?
I usually eat Eleanor’s mom’s food. She’s a great cook. There’s a great Greek population in Chicago, too.

Nothing specific comes to mind?
There’s a place that Eleanor took me to.… She’ll kill me for not remembering. The hot dogs there are very different from the East Coast. And the pizza, of course. When I was writing, that was the food that I found most fascinating—not the most fanciest restaurants. What everyday people eat. The doughnut shops. Huevos Rancheros in Austin. That says a lot about the city that you’re in.

What’s the equivalent in Scotland?
Fish and chips. I can tell you where the best chippies are in Glasgow.

You were a chef, too, no?
I worked as a cook for a while, yeah. Bob and I started talking about getting a band together while working in a restaurant. Bob had never been in a band before; he had just been in art school, jumping from one bad job to another. I was a pastry chef, and Bob was the KP. We were always the last two in the kitchen. I’d be the guy who had to make the dessert for the last people in the restaurant—the romantic people staring into each other’s eyes into the small hours of the morning. I was waiting to make the dessert, and Bob was waiting to wash up afterwards. We’d sit there, after everyone else had gone home, and pull down the cooking brandy and play records. We’d talk about what we love about music and what we’d love our band to be about. The ideas of Franz Ferdinand were formed in that kitchen.

The band has a clearly defined aesthetic. Ever get sick of the color scheme?
The black and orange and crème seemed to be right, seemed to reflect the music. I think aesthetics are important, especially with the live show.

You can hear percussion from human bones toward the end of “No You Girls.” Did you fashion a xylophone from a ribcage?
There’s a strange rattling sound. It was all over the track, but it got a bit grating. So they just appear at that one moment. I had a clavicle inside a pelvis. Paul had two shoulders he was knocking together. Nick had the hands of the skeleton, held together with fishing line. Dan Carey, our producer, had a jar full of teeth. It’d come from an auction. When businesses go bust, Nick and I go down looking for old instruments. We found this skeleton for 12 quid from a doctor. We’re big fans of using anything that’s lying around.

Like what, for example?
Hitting bits of wood together. Dan has a great new technique. Attach one end of a car battery to the strings of the bridge of an electric guitar, and the other end to a wire brush for drums. Play the strings with the brush. You get the sound of the current hitting the strings. It’s amazing. I love things like that.

It sounds pretty dangerous.
Some of the gear we use is a bit dangerous. A lot of the amplifiers we picked up weren’t in the best of shape. There was an old [Gibson] Kalamazoo I picked up from Midwest Buy & Sell. It sounded amazing, but every time I used it I got an electric shock. That’s 240 volts in the U.K., mind. Eventually I said, I’m going to take this fucking amp apart and see what’s wrong with it. Somebody had blown a fuse, and instead there was a chewing gum wrapper holding two bits together.

Fact checking: Wikipedia claims you like to “craft abstract furniture.”
The things you see on Wiki. It said something about me having a massive back tattoo at one point! Wiki is a funny one. Sometimes I look at that page and think, Who the fuck put that up there? I don’t understand it. Even the things that are supposed to be sensible, like the genre of our band. Obviously someone couldn’t agree which genre we were. One of them was post-punk revival. Post-punk fucking revival? First of all, what a ridiculous sounding genre. Second, it’s something we never ever claimed to be. Who makes up these names? We were being interviewed by someone, and they literally had the Wiki page printed out in front of us. But I’m the same. I use Wiki, too.

So it’s no abstract furniture then.
I used to do a little bit of stuff. My grandfather was a cabinet maker. But I wouldn’t dare compare myself to someone like that who was a real craftsman.

I love the new Super Furry Animals’ single, “Inaugural Trams,” with [Franz guitarist] Nick [McCarthy] singing in German. Ever thought of doing an album auf Deutsch?
We did a version of “Tell Us Tonight” that Paul sang in German. I’m sure German will pop up again. It’s funny, because Nick, although he is English, grew up in Germany. I think German is his first language. You can tell. If he’s passed out, or if he’s woken up with a start, he’ll shout at you in German. I’m pretty certain it’s going to make an appearance on an album.

What’s the least fashionable piece of clothing you own?
To be honest, I don’t have an idea of what’s fashionable or unfashionable. I just wear what I like. Though I do have a soft spot for American Little League baseball jerseys. It’s probably because I’m English, coming to America, and it all seems rather exotic to me.

Like us with soccer jerseys.
I wear baseball jerseys and Eleanor has a laugh about them. The thing I love about them is that they always have sponsors on the back, little local companies. It’s always some sort of refuse-disposal company. I’ve got one called Paine Webber. What the fuck does Paine Webber mean? What an amazing word! It sounds like a DC Comics villain.

What do you have planned for the next record?
Nick and I are beginning to write. I’m trying not to talk about it. When we talked about the last record, before we finished recording, certain things got really exaggerated. All of us are pretty enthusiastic, so if we’re trying out an idea, were really tempted to talk about it. But I’ve got a firm rule now: I’m definitely not going to talk about anything until it’s finished. Nick and I are writing songs, but I’m not going to say what they are.

Do you think that pre-album talk ruined the critical assessment of Tonight?
The gossip before a record can really harm it. Some of the reviews I read have said, “Hey, we were expecting an all-out pop record, and this just sounds like Franz Ferdinand to me!” Or, “Hey, we were expecting an African record, and this is more like Franz Ferdinand.” Of course it’s going to sound like Franz Ferdinand, we are Franz Ferdinand! It sounds like a different Franz Ferdinand. Of course you want to progress, but if you try to be a completely different band, it’d be completely insincere, artificial. You have to be proud of who you are. You need to be able to retain your identity.

I’d love to send these critics back to the ’70s. “The Ramones’ Rocket to Russia sounds just like Leave Home! Thumbs down.”
It kinda gets me as well. You see reviews for other bands…like the new AC/DC got amazing reviews, which more or less said, “It’s really fantastic! It sounds REALLY like their old ones!” Oh, for fuck’s sake, you’re the same critic that said Franz Ferdinand should have changed.

Nine things you didn’t know about Franz Ferdinand

The Glaswegian boys—Alex Kapranos, Nick McCarthy, Paul Thomson and Bob Hardy—released their thrilling third LP, Tonight, in January. We called frontman Kapranos in his hotel room in Seattle to learn what the press release won’t tell us.

Time Out Chicago: The band was cooked up in a kitchen over cheap booze.
Alex Kapranos: “Bob and I worked in a restaurant. I was a pastry chef, and Bob was the KP. We were always the last two in the kitchen. I’d be the guy making dessert for the romantic people staring into each other’s eyes into the small hours of the morning. Bob was waiting to wash up afterwards. We’d pull down the cooking brandy, play records and talk about what we’d want our band to be.”

TOC: There’s a corpse on the band’s latest hit, “No You Girls.”
Alex Kapranos: “Nick and I went down to an auction, looking for old instruments. We got a skeleton for 12 quid. It’s a strange rattling sound on the track. I had a clavicle inside a pelvis. Paul had two shoulders he was knocking together. Nick had hands held together with fishing line. Dan Carey, our producer, had a jar full of teeth.”

TOC: But much of their regular gear is from Chicago.
Alex Kapranos: “There’s a guitar shop called Midwest Buy and Sell (6019 W Irving Park Rd). They sell the most interesting things there. It’s not a fancy shop at all. The Midwest is great for guitars. Gibsons are made in Kalamazoo.”

TOC: Some of it is shoddy.
Alex Kapranos: “I picked up an amazing amp at Midwest. But every time we used it, we got an electric shock. That’s 240 volts in the U.K., mind. Eventually I said, ‘I’m going to take this fucking amp apart.’ A fuse had blown, and there was a chewing-gum wrapper holding two bits together, shorting it out.”

TOC: They didn’t learn much from those electrocutions.
Alex Kapranos: “We’ve a great new technique—attach one end of a car battery to the bridge of an electric guitar and the other end to a wire brush from a drum kit. Play the strings with the brush, and you get the buzzing sound of the current. It’s amazing.”

TOC: They love our miserable weather.
Alex Kapranos: “We went up the east coast of Lake Michigan, to Benton Harbor. It was super, super cold, but beautiful. The wind had blown the waves overnight into huge sculptures. I’d never seen that before.”

TOC: Not everything they wear is so fashionable.
Alex Kapranos: “I have a soft spot for the American Little League baseball jerseys. It’s probably because I’m English, and it all seems rather exotic to me, with local sponsors on the back. It’s always some sort of refuse-disposal company. I’ve got one called Paine Webber. What an amazing word! It sounds like a DC Comics villain.”

TOC: Nick dreams auf Deutsch.
Alex Kapranos: “Nick, although he is English, grew up in Germany. German is his first language. You can tell. If he’s passed out or if he’s woken up with a start, he’ll shout at you in German. I’m pretty certain it’s going to make an appearance on an album.”

TOC: You won’t know about the fourth record until you hear it.
Alex Kapranos: “Nick and I are beginning to write. I’m trying not to talk about it. When we talked about Tonight, before we finished recording, certain facts got exaggerated. One review I read said, ‘We were expecting an African record, but this just sounds like Franz Ferdinand!’ Of course it does, we are Franz Ferdinand. It gets me. The new AC/DC got amazing reviews, more or less saying, ‘It’s really fantastic, it sounds really like their old ones!’ Oh, for fuck’s sake!”

Source: http://www3.timeoutny.com/chicago/blog/out-and-about/2009/04/on-the-record-deluxe-edition-franz-ferdinands-alex-kapranos/

They are hard to miss, these fans of Franz Ferdinand. Mulling about an abandoned street in downtown New York City during a late-July heat wave, they’re the short-skirted, raccoon-eyed, au courant clotheshorses taking a break from working as extras in the band’s “Do You Want To” video. It’s a task that involves standing around a giant studio and holding glasses of fake champagne, and they’ve brought along all kinds of lookie-loos. Not the most glamorous way to kill an afternoon, but hey, the pizza’s free, and the cellphone pictures will look totally awesome on their blogs.

Meanwhile, the band members themselves—singer-guitarist Alex Kapranos, 33; drummer Paul Thomson, 30; bassist Bob Hardy, 25; and guitarist Nick McCarthy, 30—are over in the corner, dressed in matching Japanese satin-styled jackets, working through their coordinated dance strut with a choreographer. Just a few days ago, they were picking out wardrobe designs and wondering aloud about the possibility of procuring some “babies and dwarves” for the set (there are no infants in sight, but there is a small-statured waiter wielding some fake bubbly in the corner).

On-set dance instructors? Midget servants? Franz Ferdinand may be four book-smart guys with art-school tastes, but even they find it hard to resist the lure of a decadent, high-gloss video shoot—especially now that they’ve got the success to back it up. Since the release of last year’s Franz Ferdinand, they’ve become one of the most successful upstart bands in the land. They’re name-checked by Snoop Dogg and covered by the Kidz Bop kids. Frat boys dig them, as do Grammy organizers. In fact, they are now the fourth-most famous Franz of all time, bested only by an Austrian archduke, the author of The Metamorphosis and a fictional weightlifter from Saturday Night Live.

All of this has happened awfully fast for Franz Ferdinand, who have gone from rehearsing in a freezing cold jail-turned-practice-space in Glasgow to having a private sit-down with Kanye West in Rome (“He said he liked our stuff,” relays McCarthy, “because we put hips back into music”). It’s a strange series of events for four blokes with zippy suits and sexually vague lyrics: What started with an independently released EP in 2002 has morphed into a big-label deal (with Sony) and an eagerly desired new album, You Could Have It So Much Better … With Franz Ferdinand. Even they find it a little weird.

“The strangest moment was when we won the Mercury Prize,” says Kapranos, referring to the prestigious English music award. “We were flying to New York, and they showed a little snippet of the news before the flight. I remember looking around this big jumbo jet, and everybody had a picture of Bob on their screens. And Bob was sitting beside me.” He pauses and crinkles his face. “I didn’t know what was real anymore.”

There are two widely held misconceptions about Franz Ferdinand, and the first one pops up because they wrote a rather intense tune about two men dancing with each other (“Michael”) and because they own some really fetching blazers. “I have a lot of friends in the U.S. who aren’t familiar with their music,” says friend Ana Matronic of the Scissor Sisters, who had a BBC hit with their lounge cover of Franz’s breakthrough single “Take Me Out.” “But they’ve heard ‘Michael’ and are like, ‘Oh yeah—they’re gay, aren’t they?’”

Nope—both McCarthy and Thomson are married, Hardy is single and Kapranos is currently dating Eleanor Friedberger of the Fiery Furnaces.

The other constant rumor is that they’re of full Scottish blood, which probably keeps springing up because, well, they’re always talking about Scotland. In fact, only Thomson was born in Scotland; everyone else came from England, though they’d all eventually meet up in Glasgow. Their adopted homeland has a rich but often ignored musical history, especially in the early ’80s, when wiry postpunkers like Josef K and Orange Juice combined white-soul vocals with crisp guitar lines.

“There were all of these bands that played this incredible music—the Monochrome Set, the Fire Engines—but never got big, which is this strange twist of fate,” says Kapranos, whose artfully matted hair and thoughtful expressions give him the aura of a man who has initiated many a late-night absinthe-bar coversation. “I always thought we were going to be a band like that.”

Source: http://www.blender.com/guide/68124/franz-across-america.html

The independent music sector is already feeling the impact of the credit crunch. A leading CD distributor collapsed before Christmas, and many small labels have laid off staff.

A collective sigh of relief, however, has been audible throughout the sector since the New Year, when a strong and confident new campaign from one of its biggest acts sparked into life.

Sharply dressed, intelligent, and never short of a rousing tune, Franz Ferdinand are just the band to blow away recessionary blues.

Their previous two albums, which carried belovedly bouncy hits such as Take Me Out and Do You Want To?, catapulted them from Glasgow’s art-school scene to global popularity.

The excellent news is that their third, called Tonight: Franz Ferdinand, is another big contender: a melody-packed re-affirmation of everything that has made the band so popular hitherto, but with a highly contemporary-sounding, keyboard-driven edge.

On Monday, to coincide with the release of its stompingly anthemic leading single, Ulysses, they made an in-store appearance at Rough Trade East, the biggest independent record shop in London, in trendy Brick Lane.

It was packed with kids with creative haircuts and other arty types, but the pre-show mood was muted. With bright interior lighting and no alcohol on sale, it was going to be a struggle to get people dancing.

As is their wont, the band gave as full-blooded a performance as if they’d been playing at Alexandra Palace (a cavernous venue which they sold out four times over in December 2005).

They rolled out half an hour’s worth of new songs, whose hooks and punchy choruses quickly wiped out the crowd’s reticence. Without labouring the point, in tough times, such commitment will be indispensable.

Over a pint afterwards in an East End pub, the four members of Franz Ferdinand exuded wit and up-for-it energy. Tonight arrives more than three years after its predecessor, and they seemed to be buzzing about finally putting more music out into the world.

“I really want it to have an impact on the world,” the band’s singer and guitarist, Alex Kapranos, told me. “I want to be in a town on the other side of the world, and somebody walks up and says, ‘That music you made in Glasgow, I listened to it every day, and it moved me.’ Is that a bad thing? Ambition is sneered at by some bands. It seems like a pretty good thing to me.”

If Franz Ferdinand’s activity this week, including an appearance on Jonathan Ross’s comeback show tomorrow on BBC1, resembles something of a cavalry charge, it’s worth noting that they are no novices in this kind of situation.

When they first emerged in 2003, there hadn’t been a new UK guitar group worth shouting about in years. Humblingly, when the Strokes and the White Stripes arrived from America with a fresh, brash take on rock, we had nothing to offer in return.

Finally, Franz Ferdinand landed with a self-titled debut album, which pushed all the right contemporary buttons, while also re-affirming the British art-rock tradition of bands such as Roxy Music, Magazine and Pulp.

The ensuing two years were a whirlwind for the band. They worked hard, touring furiously, recording a follow-up, and then immediately hit the road again – all without a decent holiday.

“It was totally thrilling,” reflects Kapranos, “but destructive at the same time. If we’d come off tour and just sat around, we would’ve gone insane. The best thing to do with that energy was to use it – make a record as fast as we could, and try to burn it off creatively instead of destructively.”

Their second album, rather winsomely entitled You Could Have It So Much Better, succeeded in keeping up their momentum, but lacked their debut’s joie de vivre. Once the band had finished promoting it, they were determined to do things differently.

“We had to put ourselves in a position,” said Kapranos, “where it was a joy – thrilling – to make this music.” To that end, the band took time off from each other, then hired some space in a crumbling Victorian town hall building in Govan, south Glasgow. There, they spent 18 months jamming together, brainstorming ideas, and knocking them into shape.

“It’s very rare that a song falls from your mind complete,” says Kapranos, going on to explain how he and the band’s guitarist, Nick McCarthy, would take their every melodic idea away from the band environment, and play them on “a crap upright piano, because then, it’s really obvious straight away whether you’ve got a decent tune or not”.

The strategy paid off: there’s barely a single 10-second stretch on Tonight that isn’t catchy.

Their guitarist, meanwhile, had become disenchanted with playing the guitar.

“I just like synths better at the moment,” says McCarthy, shrugging. “Plus, we didn’t want to use some of our old disco tricks, which sound a bit dated now that lots of other bands have used them.”

This time, they have taken some of their rhythmic inspiration from more hypnotic artists such as Fela Kuti and Can – very cutting-edge influences. In an effort to separate themselves further from other groups, they worked briefly with Brian Higgins from Xenomania, the production team behind Girls Aloud, but the collaboration didn’t work out.

If Franz Ferdinand return sounding like an updated version of themselves, they remain uniquely fascinating on the conceptual level.

Kapranos has been in bands for 20 years or more, and, at 36, certainly knows his way around a pop lyric. The album is sequenced to mirror a night of hedonism. Ulysses, he told me, is about today’s drug culture. “Songs always go on about how wonderful it is, but I wanted to try and capture the anxiety and paranoia of it.”

He adds that he sees his words as “like dialogue in a Robert Altman movie. I love that shot in The Wedding, where the camera pans over the room, and you’re hearing several conversations going on at the same time. That’s how I think about things, and how I want my lyrics to work.”

Perhaps his most striking device is spread across two tracks. On No You Girls Will Never Know, one of the album’s big dancefloor numbers, he writes about “guys and girls dancing with each other and turning each other on, and at the same time being completely inconsiderate to each other.

“I love the idea of people subliminally or unconsciously acting out the themes of the song, while they’re actually dancing to it,” he adds, laughing at the possible subversion.

Where the lyrical voices there are brash and heedless, on the final track, Katherine Kiss Me, much the same words are delivered against a sparse, acoustic-guitar backdrop – “How you’d recall the same events if you were on your own at home, and being stark in your honesty”. Thus, the night of hedonism concludes in a rather sobering mood.

Tonight, then, is a lot of fun, but with plenty of thought-provoking subtext.

On Tuesday, the night after our interview, Franz Ferdinand played a comeback show at London’s Heaven club. At the climax of a jubilant set, several hundred balloons were released over the audience’s heads. For a moment, the world’s financial woes were a distant worry.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/andrewperry/4313059/Franz-Ferdinand-back-to-blow-away-the-blues.html

Friday, August 29, 2003. Reading Festival.

It was a sweltering early afternoon in the Carling Tent, one of this huge three-day rock festival’s showcase stages for new bands. Franz Ferdinand’s first single, Darts of Pleasure, wasn’t out for another two weeks yet a sizeable crowd had gathered. It was immediately apparent that they were different from other British guitar bands.

They sported side partings, flicky fringes and patterned shirts more in keeping with earnest squares than new rock contenders. They wore trousers, not jeans; shoes, not trainers. Singer Alex Kapranos and his killer cheekbones jittered about the stage, board-stiff and forever staring intently at the crowd. Drummer Paul Thomson, all gangly skinniness and gappy front teeth, kept a rigorously martial beat. Nick McCarthy, the keyboard player, was wearing a neckerchief. When he got particularly excited during Shopping for Blood, he played with one hand, his other arm stretched up behind his head. The combined effect was of an effete bullrider. When a metronomic riff kicked in during Darts of Pleasure, three of these well-pressed young men – bass player Bob Hardy was plonking out the rhythm – raised one arm above their head. The song finished with the band hollering in pidgin German.

Kapranos and Hardy were standing backstage afterwards, drinking lager. ‘Reading is everything we hoped it would be,’ Kapranos gushed in a fruity, well-spoken voice. His accent betrayed a childhood in the Sunderland area and a move to Glasgow when he was 10. ‘Fantastic crowd today, so full of energy, we were getting so much back off them. Wonderful.’ Asked what this brand-new band sounded like, Kapranos replied, ‘Music for girls to dance to.’

‘Quite jerky,’ added Hardy in his mumbly Bradford strains.

Kapranos said that as a band they liked ‘a lot of that early-80s Scottish stuff’, meaning cult New Wave and punk-cum-funk bands such as Josef K, Fire Engines and Orange Juice. ‘That wiry kind of music. But we also really like stuff like Roxy Music and Sparks and Talking Heads.’

‘Queen,’ muttered Hardy.

Kapranos kept talking. He vigorously concurred with the suggestion that for cool guitar bands, ‘performing’ is a dirty word.

‘That’s something we’re kicking against as a band. When you see bands shuffling onstage and they look embarrassed to be there – what the hell are you doing up there then? Get off the stage and let someone who wants to be on the stage up there!’ Cheerfully indignant, Kapranos took another swig of his lager. They’d just come back from recording their first album in Sweden, he said. It was sounding good.

Within four months of their Reading appearance, Franz Ferdinand had become the hottest, freshest and most successful new band in Britain. Their second single, Take Me Out, entered the charts at number three in January. Their eponymous debut album repeated the chart feat a month later. Greeted with almost unanimous praise, it has already sold 300,000 copies, earning the band a platinum disc. America and Europe are going potty for them, too. It’s not hard to understand why. Franz Ferdinand are a band for all seasons.

Male fans see the urbane, vignette-sketching, theory-spouting lyricist Kapranos as the Morrissey or Jarvis Cocker du jour. Female fans see four poised and charming young men. Pop fans of both sexes like Franz Ferdinand’s way with a concise and thrilling melody, a skill that helpfully skewers any accusations of bumptiousness. This is serious stuff, but it’s also great fun.

Is it a mark of good art, that it can be appreciated and understood on different levels?

‘I don’t think it’s a mark of quality,’ Kapranos will demur. ‘But it’s something that pleases us. Think of the best moments in cinema. Think of Hitchcock, for example, how many levels people take that on. Or It’s a Wonderful Life – how much hyperbole has been written about that film, yet so many grannies just sit and watch it at Christmas time because they love it. You don’t need to talk about the cultural significance of the film to enjoy it – but you can if you want to. And to me, that’s an amazing thing. If there is a challenge, that’s a real challenge to rise to.’

Uniquely among young guitar slingers, this Glasgow-based four-piece also have well-formed ideas about presentation, a manifesto guiding their every move. When writing, songs should be pared back to the basic number of notes needed (no chords, no excessive solos); when performing, the band members must maintain eye contact with the audience at all times. With Franz Ferdinand, Kapranos likes to say, there should be excitement at every turn. ‘Every song we write has to be an event,’ the frontman will declare. ‘We’re intolerant of mediocrity.’

They are fond of portentous pronouncements. They have, for example, a declared interest in creating emotion ‘on the level of Field Marshall Haig’s tears that fell as he counted the statistics of the men he had sent over the top’.

Then there are their influences. Franz Ferdinand gleefully reel off their debts to the Soviet-era magical realist author Mikhael Bulgakov, landscape painters, pre-war Hollywood choreography, and to the Chateau – a Glasgow artists’ collective of which the band are founder members. It is also the name of Franz Ferdinand’s home base. In its first incarnation, this was a decrepit warehouse, where they put on various ‘happenings’ involving live music and art exhibitions. When the police chased them out of this squat HQ, Franz Ferdinand moved to the abandoned jail complex that is their current rehearsal and storage space.

None of which, in the greater scheme of things – we’re not talking Warhol’s Factory here – is mind-bogglingly radical. But in rock’s confederacy of dunces, it is.

Oh, and by the way, they are named after the archduke whose assassination sparked the First World War.

Monday, March 1, 2004, Glasgow.

The old courtroom in Bridgeton Jail has seen better days. The high ceiling is cracked and damp. The four plasterwork renderings of the Glasgow coat of arms and motto (‘Let Glasgow Flourish’) seem to be clinging on to the Victorian cornices with sheer west-of-Scotland stubbornness. Lord knows what’s keeping the huge, pendulous rose from succumbing to gravity.

‘When we did the gig we did worry about that coming down,’ Alex Kapranos says, gazing upwards and idly kicking a semi-deflated football with the toe of his fabulously pointed Chelsea boots. ‘It would have wiped out every ponce in Glasgow in one night,’ he grins.

The gig was ‘The Chateau Cells Out’, one of Franz Ferdinand’s early music and art performances, held here exactly a year ago. A map for the evening is still pinned to a wall, detailing which artists occupied which cells on the night. ‘Ponce’ is Kapranos’s self-deprecating way of referring both to this proudly cultured band, and to their community of creative friends and fans here in the town in which they formed.

‘When we started we wanted to have some control over our environment,’ he says. ‘A lot of bands have the enthusiasm kicked out of them by playing really dreary pub venues that just churn bands through.’

‘I was cycling around one day and I saw what looked like a big house,’ McCarthy had told me at an earlier meeting. ‘It was open, so I went into the back yard and found it was a jail. Inside there was a cell block on two floors, wooden doors and functioning locks, all dating from around 1850. There was a massive courtroom as well. It was all there.’

The Bridgeton Jail complex offered the perfect environment – big, unusual, different, private, cheap – in which Franz Ferdinand could establish the new Chateau and hone their vision of the band. Today they share the working space with a kilt maker, artists, some other bands and someone who makes giant Christmas decorations. But, since Reading, they have hardly had time to set foot in Glasgow, let alone the Chateau.

Here in the courtroom, Kapranos and bass player Bob Hardy are surprised to find, strewn on a sofa salvaged from a skip, relics of their formative months still lying around: sheets of paper with a list of early songs, and notes on chords and keys. For a while they wrote in this vaulting, draughty, slightly soggy, light-drenched room. ‘Then we moved into the cells,’ Kapranos, says, ‘and the songs got a lot tighter.’ He is not being facetious.

Franz Ferdinand practised in cell A6, where the graffiti scored by one Willie Whitelaw is dated 1888. They still store their gear in cell A9. Drummer Paul Thomson – the band’s sole Glaswegian by birth – slept for a while in B4, until the damp started lapping round his duvet.

He is still homeless. His worldly possessions are also in A9. Today he is in London, staying with his girlfriend, apparently readying to move back to Glasgow. McCarthy, a Blackpool-born graduate of the Munich Conservatoire and with a mainly jazz musical background, is absent today as well, entertaining his family who are visiting from Germany, where he grew up. He and Kapranos write all the songs together, but he is responsible for the climactic German chorus of Darts of Pleasure. ‘It translates as “I am superfantastic, I drink champagne with smoked salmon,” ‘ McCarthy had explained. ‘Well, that’s not strictly true – what we’re actually saying is “salmon-fish” because it scans better that way.’

We move on, visiting Glasgow’s School of Art – Hardy studied painting there, and Thomson was a life model who was sketched by the girlfriends of both McCarthy and Kapranos. Hardy remembers seeing flyers put up around the college by McCarthy when he was new in town and desperate for work: ‘Learn double bass! Learn guitar! Learn piano! Learn German! Phone Nick.’ We also visit the flat on Sauchiehall Street where Franz Ferdinand played their first gig, on January 10, 2002. They were the musical accompaniment to an exhibition called ‘Girl Art’ staged by student friends.

Later, over pizza, Kapranos and Hardy discuss the minutiae of how Franz Ferdinand formed. Thomson, 27, and Kapranos had been in another band together. They met McCarthy, 28, at a party. He had moved to Glasgow on the advice of a friend who said it was a fun town. Hardy and Kapranos already knew each other from working in a restaurant kitchen together – they had become friends not long after Hardy, 23, moved to Glasgow. Kapranos had had a brief stint studying divinity in Aberdeen (he didn’t want to be a man of the cloth, he just found theology and the history of the Church ‘fascinating’) but had returned to Glasgow to take up an English course.

When Hardy first encountered Kapranos the singer had been a fixture on the Glasgow music scene for a while, in various bands and as a band booker at a local venue. Then he was known as Alex Huntley, the name of the aunt who adopted his Greek father after he came to Britain as a child. His full name is Alexander Paul Kapranos Huntley, but a couple of years ago, he decided to lose the English appellation – ‘It always got on my nerves, I never felt any association with it.’ He has always been cagey about his age, and today says he’s 28, but is in fact 32 (the music industry is phobic about age – to be a ‘hot new talent’ and be the wrong side of 30 is an affront to the pop biz’s tyranny of youth).

His experience on both sides of the fence explains his formidably well-thought-out approach to music. Early last year a colleague from one of Kapranos’s old bands passed Franz Ferdinand’s first demo on to Lawrence Bell at the tiny Domino label. Despite serious offers from a variety of major labels, they signed with Bell because his independent-minded passion for music chimed with their purist vision.

It’s not big or clever to be a big and clever rock band any more. The days of Morrissey referencing Keats, or The Fall naming themselves after a Camus novel, are long gone. Kevin Rowland’s strict rules about how Dexy’s Midnight Runners would look, perform and conduct themselves are deemed quaint and bonkers. Most modern bands would think Joy Division’s austere Mancunian aesthetic, or Roxy Music’s flamboyant art-school one, was silly. Look at Radiohead, derided as bookish dweebs because they dare to talk politics. Look at Coldplay, dismissed as boring goody-two-shoes because they know about FairTrade. Namecheck a good book instead of a Velvet Underground record and you’re a student or a boffin. You’re certainly not rock’n'roll.

But if you’re as smart as Franz Ferdinand are, doesn’t being catapulted into the mainstream with only your second single, well, spoil things?

‘No,’ Kapranos says definitively. ‘We decided early on that we were, of sorts, a pop band. Obviously we’re not your standard pop band, but we feel that what we play is pop music – direct melodies that you hum and that people want to dance to, etc, etc. Of course, there’s a certain type of person who feels that anything which becomes mainstream has to be rejected immediately. And that’s part of the indie-alternative snobbery and hierarchy and elitism. That’s something that we were kicking against right from the start. I like the idea that people understand [our music] on completely different levels and in completely different ways. A friend was telling us how she was on the tube in Glasgow and there was a bunch of guys singing the riff from Take Me Out. Fair enough, that’s the way they’re into it, going for a night out and singing Take Me Out.’

Ever keen to widen their pool of references, the video for their new single, Matinee, is inspired by Powell and Pressburger’s film A Matter of Life and Death. With their talk of Stravinsky and Bulgakov and Fibonacci and Hitchcock and the Smiths, they’ll move your feet and, if you want, your brain.

‘Just because these things influence you, doesn’t mean that your work – the music – has to be pretentious or inaccessible in any sort of way,’ Kapranos declares with characteristic vigour. ‘In fact, quite the opposite. Cinema, which is influenced by every single part of life, is direct and reaches you immediately. And writing – the best writing is complex ideas communicated concisely.’

Excited, enthused, engaged, Alex Kapranos is almost shouting now. ‘And music – if it’s a good tune, make sure people can bloody hear it!’

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/3614926/Arch-dukes-Ferdinand.html

In the freezing, graffiti-scarred basement of an old north London factory, Franz Ferdinand are discussing their next pop video. “We wanted it to be like a Dada-ist photomontage, where perspective’s jumbled up and there’s a strange jerkiness,” says Alex Kapranos of the clip for their second single, Take Me Out. “Busby Berkeley comes in there via repetition – he used actresses and models as geometric shapes rather than human beings, but we want to take that to a further extreme and disembody the limbs.”

Kapranos’s three bandmates huddle into their overcoats and give the occasional nod at these references to surrealism and the golden age of Hollywood choreography.

“There’s also a bit of that Russian constructivist element,” the singer continues, “geometric and blocky shapes, and blocky colours, from a limited palette.”

On the rickety table between us is a copy of the Glasgow-based band’s debut single, Darts of Pleasure. A zippy guitar-pop song, it features Blackpool-born, Munich-raised guitarist/keyboard player Nick McCarthy hollering stirringly in pidgin German. The orange, black and grey-blue colour scheme on the cover was produced by Kapranos’s girlfriend, a textile designer, initially for a tie.

“And the flag design came together following Fibonacci’s golden ratio formula,” chips in bass player Bob Hardy. Come again? “You see it in nature – it’s a mathematical ratio that repeats itself,” says Kapranos.

“It’s very useful in composition. I used it my painting,” says Hardy, a graduate of Glasgow School of Art.

Franz Ferdinand are not like other young British guitar bands. For a start, having met and formed in early 2002 via the aforesaid college, they are defiantly arty – although they bristle at the word.

“Arty,” muses Kapranos with disgust. “To me the word’s got as much venom associated with it as ‘wacky’.”

Drummer Paul Murphy, mostly silent, is roused to speech: “The other word that gets used about us is ‘boho’. Isn’t that somebody who bums about?”

Kapranos snorts. “Boho to me is a first-year student who’s just discovered the tie-dye shop.”

Also setting them apart is their music. Franz Ferdinand are very early 1980s, conjuring as they do the sexy thrill of Roxy Music, the angular funk of Postcard bands Josef K and Orange Juice, the new wave disco of Talking Heads. In line with that period’s sharp, almost brittle aesthetic, they favour side-partings, possess “retro” cheekbones and forswear jeans and trainers. They’re also as camp as Christmas: the sizeable crowd who caught their early afternoon slot at this year’s Reading Festival were treated to the sight of the band members playing with one arm aloft, in synchronised giddy abandon. They looked like gay rodeo riders. They didn’t plan it, they say, it just happened.

Little else is left to chance. They have rules about songs: no solos, no clutter. “When we’re recording, we remove anything that’s irrelevant or unnecessary,” says Kapranos. “Why play a chord when you can play one note?”

There are rules about stagecraft: the audience’s gaze must be held at all times. “So many bands look away, as if they’re thinking, ‘Oh God what am I doing here?’ No!” shouts Kapranos. “Be on stage and love it! Make a connection with the people you’re meant to be entertaining.”

And there are rules about performances. Not for Franz Ferdinand the weary treadmill of crappy pub venues. When they play, it should be an event. Back home in Glasgow they are founders of the Chateau . This collective of musicians and artists was initially headquartered in an abandoned Art Deco warehouse, where Franz Ferdinand and friends would host elaborate gigs-cum-exhibitions-cum-parties. When the police began shutting down these art-raves, they relocated to their current base, an abandoned courthouse and jail complex in the city.

Today, the Chateau have come to London, to the cavernous, dripping and dilapidated Electrowerkz . It’s a squat venue that’s very Franz Ferdinand, right down to its Germanic name. Later that night, 1,000 intrigued indie fans, art students and fashionistas are bombarded with wall paintings of superheroes, a boxing ring, Escher-style patterns pasted up round the bar, cages containing cameras, video projections and, either side of midnight, two sets from Franz Ferdinand.

I can report that they duly heeded the staring-at-the-crowd diktat and fulfilled another of their guiding principles – to make exciting guitar-based music that is as appealing to girls as boys and makes everyone want to dance.

Earlier that day, discussion of their graphic design had got Franz Ferdinand all excited. Bob Hardy had explained that the Golden Ratio could also be used to calculate an individual’s beauty, by comparing the distance between their chin and navel to the span of their eyes (or something like that).

“In fact,” Hardy mused, “there’s a special machine called the partial divider – you can set it up to measure how attractive someone is.” Really? And so I leave Franz Ferdinand, this most excitingly different young British band, animatedly discussing plans for partial divider merchandise.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/3608408/Dada-cool.html

In a cavernous TV studio in Acton, West London, Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos is sprouting feathers from his head. As he sits stock still in a chair, technicians and assistants fuss around. Plant-like stalks complete his headdress but they’re too long, so a crew member hacks into them with secateurs.

To the singer’s left stands drummer Paul Thomson. “I look like I’ve been to Haiti on holiday,” he says of his tropical face markings. Behind, surrounded by make-up artists, sits Nick McCarthy. The sturdy guitarist could be a soldier in full jungle camouflage. The director calls for “a little military green” to be mixed in with the smears on his face. Ever-dapper bassist Bob Hardy, meanwhile, is as yet untransformed – he sits reading the newspaper in his civvies (sensible trousers, shoes and shirt). “This is what we do before battle,” he says wryly. “Put on face packs.”

It’s Friday, September 26 and Franz Ferdinand are filming the video for Ulysses, the first single from their forthcoming album Tonight: Franz Ferdinand. It’s a typically detailed affair from this habitually detail-stuffed band. Kapranos talks about the “narcotic” elements of the song, a throbbing funk number with razor-sharp guitar riffs; about how the Glasgow-based foursome want to look as if they’ve gone “feral” under the influence of paganism.

In the past these erudite rock’n’rollers have written songs inspired by The Master and Margarita (the 1941 Russian magical-realist novel by Mikhail Bulgakov), David Mackenzie’s 2007 film Hallam Foe,and by the Austrian Archduke, whose death helped to spark the First World War, and from whom they take their name. They have inventively covered songs by Serge Gainsbourg, Pulp, David Bowie, Nirvana and themselves – Thomson sang album track Tell Her Tonight in German on an early B-side. They have been photographed by the former Dior designer Hedi Slimane and modelled for an advertising campaign by John Varvatos.

The imagery for the new album and its accompanying singles will evoke the work of the legendary New York shutterbug Weegee. In 2006 Kapranos and McCarthy (both of whom play multiple instruments) hosted a writing masterclass at the Edinburgh Book Festival, and last year the singer published an anthology of his weekly newspaper columns about the food he ate during their last, year-long world tour. For Franz Ferdinand, being in a band is not an end in itself. As well as making people sing and dance (and if you’ve ever been to one of their riotous shows, you’ll know about this), it’s about providing further creative opportunities. Big tunes beget big ideas.

For the Ulysses video their cultural palette is both eclectic and precise. “It should be evocative of the Rolling Stones’s late-Sixties satanic imagery rather than heavy metal satanic,” says Kapranos, before name-checking the psychedelic films of Kenneth Anger. A goat, which is to emerge from Thomson’s chest, arrives on set. But it is “the wrong colour”, so Franz Ferdinand have it painted black.

“It’s about loss of control and loving losing control,” notes Kapranos of the song. “That’s the whole Ulysses theme – he was lost at sea for ten years and rather than crying about it he went, ‘Yes! I’m lost at sea! Let’s have an adventure!’ ” This is where Franz Ferdinand find themselves at the dawn of 2009. They’re on a sonic adventure, one that they’ve cooked up over the past 18 months with the help of Girls Aloud’s songwriter, Arctic Monkeys’ producer, a vintage mixing desk and the innovative HQ/studio they’ve established in a glorious but dilapidated Victorian town hall in Glasgow.

Certainly Franz Ferdinand can write pop-friendly anthems. Think of their second single Take Me Out, which crashed into the charts at No 3 in January 2004, or Do You Want To?, from their second album You Could Have It So Much Better (2005). But these days the big-sounding rock of their peers is not for them. Keane, Kaiser Chiefs and Razorlight all used their third albums to stake a claim as Britain’s next stadium-friendly band. After selling 5.5 million copies of their first two albums – hits all over the world – Franz Ferdinand are using their third to sound, well, smaller.

“I’m really bored by all the guitar music,” says McCarthy, guitarist with the band who, when they released their debut, singlehandedly revitalised British guitar music almost ten years after the glory days of Britpop.

“It’s gone. It’s finished. It’s all over. There has to be something new again now. All these high-sounding guitars – that can’t be it. On Tonight we’re embracing synthesizers, electronics.”

Glasgow, Friday, November 7
“Nihil Sin Labore” says the motto engraved on weathered stone above the front door of the old Govan Town Hall. Nothing without work. Franz Ferdinand know all about that. They have been bunkered in this building – also home to TV production, theatre and fashion companies – for nearly two years. It’s their latest artistic squat. Having met each other through the ever-busy Glasgow music scene, Franz Ferdinand started out in 2002 by occupying an abandoned Glasgow department store. Dubbing it the Chateau and channelling the spirit of Warhol’s Factory, they and artist friends would hold gigs-cum-exhibitions-cum-happenings. After signing a record deal they relocated to an old prison complex in the city.

In the beginning “the songs had this space to them”, says Kapranos, 36. He spent his early years in Sunderland but moved to Scotland aged 10 with his academic dad’s job. “That changed when the roof at the jail sprang a leak and we had to move into one of the cells. So we were all in this little space that was about 11 ft by 6ft. That’s probably where a lot of our sound on the first record came from: we were crammed into this tiny room together making this spiky, jerky sound. Your environment has an impact on you – even if you’re not consciously aware of it.”

Kapranos was in several Glasgow bands and in his thirties before hitting the big time. He’s fiercely ambitious with a hint of the control freak – but not for egomaniacal reasons. He wants the band to be successful but, more importantly, for it to be interesting – a view shared by the equally strong-willed McCarthy and by the punk-minded Thomson. They admit there are a couple of songs on the new album on which they purposefully dialled down the choruses to make them sound less like the band’s commercial smashes of yore.

Here in the town hall they’ve installed a jerrybuilt recording studio. As befits Franz Ferdinand’s status as Britain’s most innovative art-rock band, the group has spent the past 18 months “playing” this environment as if it were an instrument. “We got more sounds here than we would have in studio you’d pay £1,000 a day for,” says Hardy. This set-up even gave the new album its title and de facto theme: after neighbours complained about the noise the band boarded up the windows, shutting out daylight from the recording process. Hence Tonight: Franz Ferdinand, a DIY record bristling with club-friendly and quirky electronic tunes. Saturday night fever, given a postmillennium credit-crunch reboot.

Hardy, 28, who initially came to Scotland from Bradford to study at Glasgow School of Art, gives me a tour. A store cupboard has become a keyboard room stuffed with vintage musical kit with lyrical names (Quartet Arp, Micromoog Synthesizer, Roland Rhythm Composer, King Vocoder). A former bathroom is now the band’s amplifier room, equipment stacked around the toilet bowl. In the Town Hall’s cavernous former debating chamber they set up their instruments in the middle of the floor and jammed. One day McCarthy (34, Blackpool-born, raised in Germany, relocated to Glasgow after graduating from the Munich Conservatory) spent hours crawling in the roof space to dangle and swing a microphone over their heads to create a Doppler effect. It amounts to four seconds of music on Tonight.

Half of the room housing their office is filled with a vintage Flickinger mixing desk, as beloved of Sly Stone, Ike Turner and Funkadelic – found for the band in Chicago. To record the new song What She Came For, Franz Ferdinand also decamped to the town hall’s cluttered basement, jammed in among boxes and flight cases. Hardy, a keen photographer, has images of this set-up on his lap-top. Thomson, 32, the sole Scotsman in the band and only dad (he has two young children), is pictured with his bandmates crowded round his drum kit. “We were playing right in each other’s faces,” recalls Kapranos. Why? “We wanted the end of What She Came For to sound like a nuclear explosion,” the singer beams.

Warsaw, Wednesday, November 19
Stodola is a 2,000-capacity student union attached to the Technical University in the Polish capital. Franz Ferdinand are playing it as part of a short run of European dates to road-test new songs (early last summer they did the same in the Scottish Highlands and Islands).

They are taking their time over this album. They released You Could Have It So Much Better a scant 18 months after their debut. I met the band in Germany in summer 2005 just before its release; it was the day after McCarthy’s stag night and they were rushing to finish recording and approve artwork in the midst of brutal hangovers. A few weeks later Kapranos would even forgo the wedding in favour of mastering the album in New York; their long-serving tour manager quit shortly afterwards, suffering from adrenal exhaustion. The album, which went through not one but two last-minute title changes, suffered as a result. It was too samey, too much a continuation of their first album.

Why were they in such a hurry? Kapranos: “We had to do it that way because of the energy that was in us – all the time we were touring the first album we were frustrated, thinking, God, all we want is space to write some more songs. And we had an American tour booked – we had commitments to meet.”

Thomson: “We broke up the recording by playing the Grammys in Los Angeles – after that our American label said to us [affects bigshot American accent], ‘OK, we’re ready to really go with this record!’ ” McCarthy: “Eventually the album came out halfway through that American tour – and the venues were too big. These enormodomes where they’d have to curtain off some of the balcony so the crowd would look bigger. That really f***ed us up. It was really stupid.”

The Stodola club is packed. Band – and the singalong audience – are on blistering form. “One of the best gigs of the year,” declares one national newspaper the next day.

Afterwards, Franz Ferdinand go to a bar attached to Warsaw’s grand, communist-era cultural palace. En route they decide to take more pictures for the forthcoming CD sleeve. There is, naturally, a concept: black and white shots of individual members of the band, prone on the ground, as if they’ve been murdered. Despite the lateness of the hour and the icy rain, Kapranos and McCarthy lie on the palace’s stone steps. McCarthy offers to lie with his head propped up on a kerb, echoing a brutal murder scene from the neo-Nazi film American History X. Bob Hardy vociferously opposes this – the film’s violence sickens him. “Oh don’t be so moral Bob!” snaps Kapranos. The art show must go on.

London: Monday, December 1
Franz Ferdinand are the secret guests at Durrr, an achingly cool weekly night in Central London club The End. The DJ is Erol Alkan, who has carved out a busy second career as a hipper-than-hip record producer. Last year Franz Ferdinand spent a few days working with Alkan in Glasgow, with a view to him producing Tonight. They also worked at the Kent base of Xenomania, the writing and production team – headed by Brian Higgins – who create Girls Aloud’s consistently innovative pop.

There was a further studio stint in London, with James Ford, producer of Arctic Monkeys and 2007 Mercury prizewinners Klaxons. And there was an exploratory trip to the famed Hansa studios in Berlin, home of storied albums by David Bowie and Nick Cave.

But none of those collaborations was extended into full album sessions – Franz Ferdinand ended up co-producing Tonight with Dan Carey, another DJ-turned-producer, and their ratty town hall in Glasgow trumped any legendary studio. But the experiences, insists Kapranos, were instructive. “With all of these people we were looking for an appreciation of rhythm as well as the melody, and maybe going away from the rock end of things.”

This is thrillingly obvious in the dark, subterranean environs of Durrr after Franz Ferdinand take to the small stage for their midnight show. The young crowd of twentysomething clubbers haven’t heard the new songs before, but they dance heartily throughout the short set.

“Things were going a bit wrong for us onstage,” says Kapranos later of the technical problems. “But the rawness of that was pretty good. It was a real test for the music – to see if it did make people dance.”

Los Angeles, Tuesday, December 16
That ambitious video Franz Ferdinand were making in September? They’ve just scrapped it.

“It just wasn’t right,” says Kapranos heavily. “There wasn’t enough of us in it.” He means their input. “We all feel so strongly about the visual identity of the band. There wasn’t enough collaboration between us and the director. He didn’t really listen to what we wanted. That happened before, with the video for The Fallen. It hadn’t come from the band; we regretted putting it out. So we thought, this time, let’s kill it dead now.”

This decision will have cost the band dear (Kapranos declines to give a figure). But for this laser-focused band, there was no alternative. And, as with the brief recording sessions with Alkan, Higgins and Ford, Franz Ferdinand view it not as a mistake but as part of the creative process.

So this week in Los Angeles, after a set of North American gigs and radio station-sponsored showcases (the last, in LA, was with Kanye West and the Killers), Franz Ferdinand have shoehorned in another video shoot. They filmed it in downtown LA, “a pretty edgy part of the city, a bit like New York in the Seventies”, with the film-making duo who shot a “making of the album” documentary that is being released alongside the CD.

“We talked about the film ideas we liked – the [John] Cassavetes way of filming and improvising shots. We wanted to do something similar to what we’ve done with the cover photographs – create a scene.”

This is the Franz Ferdinand way: creating a scene. Not in the Oasis manner, where that means causing a fuss and being stroppy. It means establishing an image, an idea, a concept, and rigorously working it through. It would all be wearyingly pretentious if the tunes weren’t so brilliant and forward-thinking, too.

“The new songs are a lot slower and therefore heavier than anything on the previous two records,” says Kapranos. “ Tonight is a club album, for going out and not caring about the next day,” McCarthy says. These are not the kind of things you hear so much from musicians in these straitened times, when big bands are going for the commercial jugular because they feel they have to. But you hear it from Franz Ferdinand because they’d rather be small, nimble and (in a good way) indulgent. They, refreshingly, don’t want to be superstars.

“Our music,” says Thomson, “is about complete abandonment and enjoyment.”

Source: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article5516329.ece

Funny thing, fame. One minute you’re playing your first gig to 80 close friends in a mate’s bedroom, the next you’re getting emails from David Bowie. It’s like, well… “It’s like being on Jim’ll Fix It,” suggests Alex Kapranos, lead singer with the band Franz Ferdinand, who are currently enjoying their own heady ride on pop’s parabola. “All of a sudden you get to meet all your heroes: Bowie, Morrissey, Jarvis Cocker…” To be fair, they’ve only met Jarvis Cocker so far. Bowie’s email was an invite to meet up in June, when they’re next in New York. (“I don’t even know what I call him,” says Kapranos. “David? Mr Bowie?”) in the meantime, Morrissey has asked them along to a little party he’s having at the end of this month. It’s not exactly private: there should be 15,000 people watching when they open for him at Manchester’s MEN Arena, his first hometown concert in 12 years.

Funny thing, fame. One minute you’re playing your first gig to 80 close friends in a mate’s bedroom, the next you’re getting emails from David Bowie. It’s like, well… “It’s like being on Jim’ll Fix It,” suggests Alex Kapranos, lead singer with the band Franz Ferdinand, who are currently enjoying their own heady ride on pop’s parabola. “All of a sudden you get to meet all your heroes: Bowie, Morrissey, Jarvis Cocker…” To be fair, they’ve only met Jarvis Cocker so far. Bowie’s email was an invite to meet up in June, when they’re next in New York. (“I don’t even know what I call him,” says Kapranos. “David? Mr Bowie?”) in the meantime, Morrissey has asked them along to a little party he’s having at the end of this month. It’s not exactly private: there should be 15,000 people watching when they open for him at Manchester’s MEN Arena, his first hometown concert in 12 years.

“It hasn’t really sunk in,” admits Kapranos. “I’ve mentioned it to a couple of my pals and they’ve said, ‘My God, won’t you be a quivering heap?’ But I don’t know. I reckon he’s just like an ordinary guy anyway.” There hasn’t been much sinking-in time for the members of Franz Ferdinand so far. The band’s own website charts their rise in typically deadpan style. Their first show is recorded for posterity thus: “22 May, 2002: Celia Hempton’s bedroom, Sauchiehall St, Glasgow”. This, the so-called Girl Art show, was the first time the line-up of Kapranos (vocals), Nick McCarthy (guitar), Bob Hardy (bass) and Paul Thompson (drums), got to put their in-front-of-the-bedroom-mirror dreams into action. Albeit still in a bedroom. Unbeknownst to them at the time, their four song set already included a future number two single. But more of that later.

As a unit, Franz Ferdinand are commonly referred to as “art school”. Which, literally speaking, is at least half right. “It was just Bob and Paul that studied art,” explains Kapranos. “Bob did painting and Paul did environmental art. I did English and Nick studied music. But Nick studied double bass and ended up playing guitar. He hadn’t played the guitar before he joined the band. There was a lot of perverse swapping round of instruments, almost wilfully not doing the thing you’re meant to do, just to give it an edge. And Bob had never played bass before too…” Hardy: “Or any instrument.” Kapranos: “And Paul would only play drums if he could be seen on stage, so he didn’t have any toms.” Thompson: “…which is fair enough.” That first bedroom event (swiftly followed a month later by a performance in “Nick McCarthy’s front room, Hamilton Avenue, Glasgow”) pretty much set the template for every gig to follow. There were girls dancing. All of whom had an unencumbered view of the drummer. There was a sense of inclusiveness – not to mention the ridiculous. There was an understanding that any ideas of “cool” would be checked in at the door. There were people feeling like they were 16 again, even though they plainly weren’t. Everywhere they’ve played in the two years since, be they liberated Glaswegian warehouses, derelict Victorian gaols, HMV flagship stores or NME sponsored showcases, there’s been the same reaction. This band are a bit special.

We are, of course, talking about the world of pop, where hyperbole comes in huge overwritten dollops. But Franz Ferdinand attract a different class of hyperbole. Instead of the music press they have Morrissey and Bowie to sing their praises. Time and Le Monde want to interview them. While their peers are busy telling Smash Hits what’s in their pockets, they get to edit supplements of national broadsheets. Chanel used their music to soundtrack their last collection, while Dior want the band to wear their clothes on tour.

Where did it all go so right? There’s an easy answer to that. It’s “Take Me Out”, the number two single first aired in their friend Celia Hempton’s bedroom. An infectious, stop-start epic, it was released at the beginning of the year during the traditional post-Christmas lull, and already sits happily atop the “Best of 2004″ polls, cockily swinging its legs, waiting for someone to try and knock it off. “Take Me Out” is the perfect example of what Kapranos means when he talks of “wilfully not doing the thing you’re meant to do, just to give it an edge”. It’s in the way they tease you with a faintly familiar intro – a summation of all the cool, spotty, New York punk reference points that have dominated the indie scene over the past few years – and then abandon it for something completely different, something very angular, very British. And very much better.

It says, in the space of one key change, “forget all that crap you’ve been listening to. You deserve this”. Every time they play the song live, Kapranos and McCarthy adopt looks of melodramatic surprise at this point in the song, as if they can’t quite believe what strange force has taken over their instruments. It’s very funny to watch, which is another important part of the Franz Ferdinand jigsaw.

Alongside the countless, achingly cool comparisons thrown up by critics in describing the band – Orange Juice, Josef K, Talking Heads… there’s one crucial group missing: Queen. They may not seem to have much in common, but Kapranos is adamant. “Freddie Mercury is a huge inspiration, just for his attitude. My favourite performers on stage are the ones that get up and don’t give a damn about making a fool of themselves. There’s nothing worse than a self-conscious idiot onstage, worrying if his pals will think he’s cool. You shouldn’t be onstage at all. You’ve got to be totally prepared for people to turn on you, and if you fall on your arse and everyone laughs at you, not care. Enjoy it. Laugh as well. Because it’s funny, you’re on the stage.” Which isn’t to say this art of uncool, this air of effortless nonchalance, is something they don’t work on or worry about. You need only contrast the shuffling, ill-coiffured guitar bands barely enjoying their 15 minutes on CD:UK with Franz Ferdinand’s tight, sharp unit to see that. “Oh definitely,” agrees Kapranos. “I see so much laziness in bands. They couldn’t care less about so many important things. Maybe it’s because we’re so passionate about the bands we like – and we like every element about them, whether it’s their record sleeves, or their videos, or the way that they’re dressed, or seeing them perform.” It’s refreshing to find a band who would rather discuss the influence Russian Constructivist art has on their record covers than what’s on their stereo. Furthermore, they understand that giving interviews is a vital part of the wider picture, as is the artwork and the videos and the haircuts and the shoes and the on-stage theatrics. It’s all a part of conveying the message.

“Quite often the press build up bands who have the potential to be good,” says Kapranos, “but they often don’t meet that potential. And that’s not always the fault of the press, sometimes it’s the fault of the bands as well.” “But also a lot of expectation comes from the record companies too,” adds Thompson. “And at the end of the tax year they have a cull.” Kapranos again: “I think the way that we – I was going to say deal with it, we don’t deal with it – but the way that we progress, we see the press writing about us, the label that we’re on, the publishing deal we have – these are almost on the sidelines in a way. You get a band together to write and play music. Of course the rest of it is important and you need to be aware of it and understand it, but it’s not your primary occupation.”

Whether they’re stealing the show at the bottom of support bills or returning in triumph to headline the same venues,Franz Ferdinand have won people over simply by the force of their conviction, their good humour, and their willingness to treat everyone as if they’re Celia Hempton’s mates. It’s probably this attitude that’s preventing the fame thing from sinking in.

“A lot of stuff happened so quickly that there wasn’t really time for the full impact of it to hit you,” says Kapranos. “Playing Top of the Pops for example: ‘Oh, all right, here we are…’ We were talking about how we were going to do it, standing on the drum riser and walking forward into the camera, so all these sorts of things are going through your head instead of, ‘Oh my God, I’m on Top of the Pops Mum!’” Thompson chuckles. “It felt like one of our first gigs because all our mates were in the front row,” he says. “In fact that’s why we did that move, because we’d done it in front of 40 of our mates at a gig almost exactly a year ago, and all of a sudden we’re doing it in front of the bloody nation!” In fact, it wasn’t until their homecoming show this fortnight that the band started to notice those telltale hints of pop stardom. “It was crazy,” says Kapranos. “We had underwear thrown at us and everything. And not by our friends!” Was that his ‘pinch me’ moment? “Well that was one. And also, when I sing the first line of [current single] ‘Matinée’, ‘Take your white finger…’ I’ve suddenly noticed all these fingers appear in the air.” Not quite “Radio Ga Ga”, but a start. “And people have started knowing all the words. France is the best: everyone singing the lines back to you, but with a really French accent. Jacqueline’s a really good one: ‘Jac-quelle-een’.”

Much is made of the fact that Franz Ferdinand are an “educated” band. There is a perceived cleverness, an artiness, to their music. You can hear it in their lyrics – “Take Me Out”, for instance, takes the standard eyes-across-the-dancefloor moment and turns it into a Sartrian conflict, using the metaphor of snipers zeroing their crosshairs for the kill. Again, it’s that wilful contrariness, not least in the joyous, singalong chorus of “I know I won’t be leaving here with you”.

There’s no denying the intelligence that the band bring to the indie wastelands. Not so long ago, Noel Gallagher was proudly announcing that he’d only ever read one book in his life. Not only have Franz Ferdinand clearly read a fair few between them, they even started their own book club while they were on tour. But they’re understandably wary of being seen as too clever-clever.

“To me, there’s nothing worse than singing about ‘that book by Nabokov’ in your song,” says Kapranos. “You mention Oasis, but there’s no way I’d ever slag off Oasis. I don’t give a damn what their intellectual or anti-intellectual stance is, whether they’ve read a book or not read a book, because I think they’ve written some really great tunes as well. And at the end of the day that’s what we should be judging them on.”

Franz Ferdinand then: your anti-intellectual intellectuals. The most un-rock’n'roll rock’n'roll group you’re likely to meet. An art band dedicated to making girls dance and to making everyone feel 16 again. Inspired by Freddie Mercury. And, in a climate dominated by Simon Cowell’s production line pop, a force for the good: an alternative band with the potential and ambition to go mainstream.

“To be honest, mainstream pop music just passes over my head,” says Kapranos. “Most of the stuff on Top of the Pops and Radio 1. The problem is, it’s bland, bland, bland. It’s retrogressive. There’s nothing progressive in it at all. It makes kids think that to get anywhere they have to have a team of stylists and a Simon Cowell to tell them whether they’re any good. It discourages people from creating for themselves. They think they need this big machine behind them. That’s bullshit – that’s where the worst pop music comes from. The thing is, being in a band is simple. People seem to forget that. And fun.” You might even get to meet David Bowie.

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/franz-ferdinand-uncool-thats-us-562098.html

Even by British pop music  standards of eye-blink-quick, nobody-to-celebrity transformations, Franz Ferdinand’s rise to popular acclaim has happened shockingly fast. At least that’s the way it appears observing the Scots dance-rock delinquents’ progress from this side of the Atlantic, where their striking debut single, Darts Of Pleasure, appeared here on import just two weeks before they appeared on the cover of the NME with the headline hype boldly declaring, “This band will change your life!”

Well, no more or less than last issue’s next-big-thing, but when you’ve been trying to sell no-talent fuds like Kings of Leon, it’s entirely understandable that a mag would go overboard when a band with genuine songwriting chops and a dash of charisma comes along – and Franz Ferdinand have it in spades.

The group, that is, not the ill-fated Austrian archduke whose 1914 assassination touched off the first world war. Evidently, there’s been some confusion surrounding the origins of the name, which actually came from a horse.

“We were watching a horse race and one of the horses was called Franz Ferdinand,” explains bassist Bob Hardy from a London phone booth. “We’d been trying to come up with the right group name for months, so we had a brief discussion about the archduke, and the name seemed to fit our criteria.”

That was almost two years ago, and ever since, club bookers and bar owners have been mistaking the Glaswegian groove squad for unusually snappy-dressing German hooligans. But that could have as much to do with the tendency of their Munich-raised keyboardist/guitarist Nick McCarthy to spew off Deutsche disses as their unusual handle.

“A lot of people still think we’re German,” chuckles Hardy. “And there’s always someone asking to speak to Franz. They usually think it’s Alex (singer Alex Kapranos) because he’s the vocalist. You’d imagine that most people would know about the archduke, but occasionally an odd situation arises.

“We did this television show in France where they had two dressing rooms ready for us – one for Franz Ferdinand and another for his backing musicians. That took some explaining to sort out.”

Ah, the French. Franz Ferdinand’s recognition factor has changed dramatically since the NME cover story hit the streets in January, followed by the release of their swaggeringly self-assured self-titled debut disc for Domino. While the album’s Canadian release through Outside is set for March 3, it’s already at number three with a bullet on the UK charts thanks in part to the exquisite live-in-the-studio production job of the Cardigans’ Swedish sound sculptor, Tor Johannson.

Judging by the recent standing-room-only tour of England that Franz Ferdinand just completed with the Rapture, Von Bondies and Funeral for a Friend, they seem well on their way to fulfilling their ultimate goal of “making music for girls to dance to.” So far, Hardy and Kapranos have no regrets about giving up their potentially lucrative cake decorating careers as Glasgow pastry chefs.

“The tour we just did was brilliant,” shouts Hardy. “The kids in the audience were going crazy as soon as we went on. They were dancing to every song, and there was even a mosh pit every night, which we’ve never had happen at our shows before. It was bizarre but very exhilarating.”

Source: http://www.nowtoronto.com/music/story.cfm?content=140392

Either Alex Kapranos is hungry or the traditional English dish of beans on toast has played a pretty memorable role in his life. The Franz Ferdinand singer-guitarist will refer to it twice within an hour: once as an example of a meal he couldn’t afford while playing in ’90s-era Glaswegian acts such as the Amphetameanies and Yummy Fur (“Being in a band didn’t buy me my beans on toast!”), and again as a symbol of the normalcy he would like to preserve now that his band has sold more than five million records worldwide (“There’s a character that I play onstage, and I can’t let him loose in the supermarket when I’m buying my beans on toast”).

It is breakfast time in New Zealand, where the 37-year-old frontman and former chef/lecturer/amateur food critic is on Christmas holiday with his longtime girlfriend, Fiery Furnaces singer Eleanor Friedberger. Tomorrow, he will embark on a tour to support Tonight: Franz Ferdinand, a dance-floor-friendly third album, which the foursome intended to be a departure from the post-punk bonhomie of their breakout single “Take Me Out” and everything after it. “We started out rejecting what we were hearing on British radio, and we’ve returned to that contrariness,” says Kapranos. “Except this time we are rejecting our own sound.”

When did you first decide you wanted to make music for a living?

I started writing songs with my close friend Andrew when I was about 14, but we never thought of playing them for anyone else. Neither of us had ever been to a concert until Andrew got us tickets to see Huey Lewis at the Scottish Exhibition Centre in Glasgow, because he knew that Back to the Future was my favorite film. Our seats were in the back row of this massive ballroom, and the band was at the end of a two-year tour, so they didn’t have much energy left, and we both came to the conclusion that gigs were crap and records were amazing. It wasn’t until I started going to smaller punk shows around Glasgow that my opinion changed. So I toiled around in bands for the next ten years and he became an astrophysicist.

You were a promoter at the Glasgow club 13th Note when Mogwai and Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch played their first shows there. Did you help create that scene? Or do you object to that word?

I don’t think it’s a word you need to shy away from because it’s true. Basically, this guy Jim had the idea to start a club night on Tuesdays. Nobody turned up for the first gig apart from my band, the Blisters. It was a thrashy band and we had too much energy, but we thought it was fantastic that we got to play without anybody telling us to stop. Jim decided he’d had enough, so I thought: I can be a promoter! And I made a rule to stop listening to bands’ demo tapes and instead just talk to the people in the group. That was really why the club worked — it was all based on whether we got on together. It was very raw and unpredictable, and I loved it. Of course, most bands, when they start off, are pretty awful. I didn’t grasp the basic principle of being a promoter, which was: Put on music but also generate an income. I was on the dole most of the time.

Guitarist Nick McCarthy once described Glasgow as “hardcore.”

Well, there were some real wankers who weren’t famous but would act like aloof rock stars. Mostly, though, it was insular in the sense that it was apart from the rest of the world. The late ’90s in the U.K. was the era of Britpop. It had absolutely nothing to do with our lives in Glasgow, and there was a major rejection of it. That was a London scene created by the press to glorify people who sang about being out in London.

You attended divinity school for a year. Were you religious at the time?

I was certainly curious. But it was the wrong school to go to. I was a 17-year-old sitting in a classroom with middle-aged men who wanted to be ministers. These people had already experienced a bit of life, and they had decided they had a calling for the Church of Scotland. One day a fellow student told me, “Alex, we’ve been holding prayer meetings about you because we heard you were smoking grass.” I thought to myself, “I’ve got to get out of here.”

Had you been smoking pot?

[Laughs] It was a terrible rumor. I don’t know who started it.

You worked in various restaurants for many years before forming Franz Ferdinand. Is it true that kitchens are crazy places where loads of drugs are done?

Oh, yes. Those guys party a lot harder than guys in bands. Traditionally, lots of vagrants and unemployable characters wind up working in kitchens. The fact that it was this hard, bright, frantic place full of misfits and extreme characters appealed to me straight away. It’s a job I would return to whenever I was skint.

Your 2006 book, Sound Bites: Eating on Tour With Franz Ferdinand, is a very obsessive food diary. Do you plan to continue writing about food?

No. When [U.K. newspaper] The Guardian first asked if I’d write those food columns, I was quite chuffed, but I was worried because I wasn’t a food critic. Then I remembered working in my first restaurant job in Fort William [in the Scotland Highlands] when a chef asked, “Hey, you want a slice of shark?” And my response was, “Shark? What the fuck?” So I figured it would actually be interesting to write from a naive perspective. But then the book was published and all of a sudden I was becoming a food writer. I had a couple of calls from TV stations asking if I wanted to present food programs, and I thought, “God, this has got to stop. This is not who I am.”

You spent many years playing with experienced musicians in bands like Yummy Fur. Why did you form Franz Ferdinand with bassist Bob Hardy when he couldn’t play an instrument?

It started as an argument about how anybody could be a musician. In 1999, Bob was going out with my [then] girlfriend’s best friend. He told awful jokes about dead babies — I thought he was an idiot. But we had a few drinks and I realized he was all right, so I got him a job as a dishwasher. During our downtime, we’d drink cooking brandy and talk about our imaginary band — about how we’d meet the eyes of the audience, be incredibly emotional, and capture the experimentation of the avant-garde while keeping melody. But he had no interest in being a musician. Then my friend Mick, who was in the Amphetameanies with me at the time, offered me a bass guitar on the condition that I do something useful with it. So Bob and I drank some whiskey, and I showed him how to play an early version of “This Fire.” I think in Bob’s head, he was going, “I’m in art school. Getting a band together is the sort of thing you do when you’re in art school.”

As a band, you guys seem very chummy. When was the last big fight you had, and what was it about?

Bob and [drummer] Paul [Thomson] are very peaceful. It’s Nick and I who are more extreme characters. At the end of 2004, we were playing a festival in the Zenith, which is this big arena just outside of Paris. I can’t remember what started it — something about a light switch. This huge fight erupted and we ended up laying into each other in the dressing room. Then we were told, “You have to be onstage in five minutes.” So we played the gig. It was a great gig! Then we went backstage and picked up the fight. Chairs were upturned and food was everywhere. Then someone comes to the door and tells us that the guys from our label want to give us our gold discs. So we stopped the fight again and got the gold discs. And then our manager says, “Oh, we’ve just got this message from the queen. She wants you to come play a garden party at Buckingham Palace.” And we’re like, “What the fuck is going on here?” But we go back inside and start the fight again and now there are gold discs flying all over the place. I remember being dragged out of the dressing room by five guys and Jarvis Cocker staring at us. It was totally embarrassing. I realized I’d been a complete idiot.

Looking at bands who had big moments around the time you guys came out but are no longer on people’s radars, do you worry about Franz Ferdinand’s ability to remain popular?

I don’t know. I like the fact that a band can disappear and come back after a while. At the end of 2006, we had to force ourselves to do that. I’ve always been awful at planning for the future. My family and my girlfriend and everyone I know have been completely disappointed by the fact that I can’t plan five hours ahead, much less five days or five years.

Did you take a break after 2005′s You Could Have It So Much Better because you were disappointed with it?

Well, after the first record, I was thinking I wanted to do album after album like they did in the ’60s, not considering that those bands didn’t tour around the world the way we did. I can’t regret [the second album] now. We were desperate to get back into the studio. But if we had done that again, it would have been a third record with the same sound as the first two, and we wanted something different. Lyrically and musically, Tonight is very much a nighttime record, but there were no preconceived notions when we started.

It was reported that one potential producer didn’t want to work with you on Tonight due to a disagreement about drinking in the studio.

I think [Cher collaborator] Brian Higgins was surprised by how much whiskey Nick and I got through and how undignified our approach to making our record was. The bands he usually works with don’t really behave in the same sort of way. We wanted to lose our self-awareness. Dan Carey [Hot Chip, Lily Allen] was the ideal collaborator because he had this mad-scientist approach to being in the studio. When we had a ridiculous idea, he’d say, “I love it.”

Speaking of, why did you use human bones for percussion on “No You Girls”?

We tried maracas, we tried a tambourine; they seemed a bit obvious. I had bought a box of bones at an auction for £12 — the idea that you can get somebody’s mortal remains for that price is a little sad — and they were lying around the studio. One day, I picked up the pelvis bone and started rattling the collarbone inside of it. Paul had two shoulder blades, and Nick had the skeleton’s hands for clapping. We didn’t have the skull, but we had all the teeth, so we rattled them around in a glass jar. There was no voodoo to it. They just happened to make a good sound.

A lot of Franz Ferdinand songs seem to be about rituals of flirtation and romance, especially on Tonight. Is that your comfort zone?

Far from it — that’s the least comfortable zone to be in. It’s the moment where you’re actually making yourself quite vulnerable in terms of being open to rejection. I am not interested in writing songs that say, “I am definitely in love.” We might be aware of the effect we have on the opposite sex, but we can never truly understand them. I will never know what it’s like to be a woman.

You and Eleanor share a house in Brooklyn, but it must be hard to spend time together with your various projects and touring schedule. On the new song “Live Alone,” you sing, “I want to live alone because the greatest love is always ruined by the bickering.” Is that autobiographical?

I feel like I have to be a bit cold to you now because I’ve decided I can’t talk about certain parts of my personal life. Watching celebrities bare it all in tabloids and on TV shows, I realize that there’s nothing that’s purely theirs anymore. It’s very difficult for me because I have this desire to be honest and open. When I write, I have to draw on the essence of what makes me who I am. But to avoid being a celebrity, I feel like I have to say, “Eleanor? Eleanor who?” I suppose there’s an irony to the fact that there are things that will come out in lyrics that I would never, ever discuss in everyday life.

But in Sound Bites, you share stories about losing your virginity and about how the taste of bull’s testicles reminded you of why an ex-girlfriend objected to oral sex. Did you find it easier to be more confessional in that venue?

Those are just funny anecdotes. I would tell them to my friends for a laugh if I was out at the pub. They’re not corners of my soul. I think the reason I’m a bit wary of disclosing too much information about my life is because I had a really horrible experience a couple of years ago. Some crazy stalker fan got access to some really personal details of my life. The idea that there are people who aren’t just satisfied with listening to the music — that they want to suck out the very essence of my soul like some vampire — made me want to withdraw further.

You didn’t become famous until you were 32. Are you happy it played out this way, or do you ever wish it happened sooner?

There are benefits to both. I had as hedonistic a time in my 20s as I probably would have had if I was a rock star or whatever. And I’m very pleased that I had the opportunity to live in the parallel universe we created in Glasgow. Because if you do think about being famous, it becomes a burden, and you’re less likely to try perverse ideas. It’s the perverse ideas, the unpredictable ideas, that make being in a band palpably exciting.

Source: http://digital.spin.com/spin/200903/?pg=70&pm=2&u1=friend

Five minutes in, and things are going to the dogs. “So,” I ask Franz Ferdinand, “what are your influences?” There is laughter. The snorting type. “What do you want us to do?” scoffs Alex Kapranos, the band’s lead singer. “List every record we’ve ever bought?” My earlier question, about the rumour that Kapranos is not 29, but in his mid-thirties — which he clearly isn’t, unless he is Dorian Gray with a floppy side parting — elicited a similarly withering response. “I am 29, and the only people who ask me about that are journalists looking for a scoop on the band. There isn’t one.” I say I’d heard the age rumour from a friend of theirs. “Well, I don’t know her very well.”

Kapranos clearly finds the whole interview process intellectually disappointing. This could, of course, be a symptom of fast and vast success and the relentless work schedules of new pop stars. From virtual obscurity in spring 2003, Franz Ferdinand’s catchy, clever brand of pop has made them the most successful act of 2004. You could compare them to Blondie; they also fit, a little, alongside the new punk sound of the Hives, the Strokes and the Libertines. But best not to compare them at all — Kapranos is “annoyed by comparisons”.

The band’s first album, which has just gone gold in the United States, has gained them some high-profile A-list fans. Chris Martin, Brad Pitt, Kate Moss, Jennifer Aniston and Elijah Wood all turned out for recent gigs, while Hedi Slimane, the Dior menswear designer, has turned them into unofficial poster boys for the label, showering them with free £1,000 suits.

But what makes Franz Ferdinand different from most accessible pop acts today is that they weren’t dreamt up by a record-industry bozo with a coke problem. Their image — and their music — was already hot to trot before they signed. They are good-looking boys in flamboyant thrift-store chic, with pointy shoes and tidy partings, who jump around on stage with a pretty vigour. And they’re brainy, with the experience and self-confidence to give up being pop stars if it ever starts to feel like a job. As Kapranos says: “What’s the point of doing a job if it’s crap?”

I meet up with him backstage at the Swedish festival that the band is about to headline. He’s looking like a kind of polyester mod: second-hand cycling top from Paris, flat, hard-soled plimsolls from Oxfam in Manchester and orange socks from “a really flash pimp shop on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side”. A newspaper finishes off the thinking-hipster look.

We pick up the other band members and wander out to a park bench in Gothenburg’s botanical gardens. There is the quiet baby-face of the group, the bassist Bob Hardy, and the chip-toothed drummer Paul Thomson in a hound’s-tooth Dior suit (the only actual artists in the band, despite the “art school” label applied by overenthusiastic music journalists). Thomson used to be the guitarist and only swapped on the condition that the drum kit was arranged so that the audience could see his face. He had only been abroad once before the band took off, to Spain on holiday when he was 13, and until last year, was sofa-surfing because he was so broke. Nick McCarthy, the fourth member, is wearing a pair of pointedly ugly white, plastic shades and more thrift-store polyester. They all immediately focus on the inscrutable beauty of a small blue bird.

It’s a typically Franz Ferdinand moment. The band started out as part of a Glasgow, Factory-type art-and- music scene centred at reclaimed derelict buildings that they called the Chateau — first a warehouse, then a prison. The Chateau threw free parties with illegal bars, art shows, gigs, all with electricity “borrowed” from Scottish Power. Glasgow, they say, gave them a freedom they wouldn’t have had in Edinburgh or London, where “we wouldn ’t have time to be in a band, because we would be doing shit jobs to pay the rent”. You didn’t need to be there to know it’s a prospective art student’s wet dream of a life. The boys still claim the band is “as good a thing to do as go to the pub on a Friday night. It’s primarily a social pastime”.

I’d say it’s a bit more than that. They are slowly building a Franz Ferdinand manifesto. They chose their Swedish producer for his “wideness of thought and unblinkered approach”. They have a stated “no groupies” rule backstage (“We’re all quite romantic guys and prefer real love rather than being in some squalid dressing room with someone you’ve never spoken to,” Kapranos has said). They are also closely involved in all aspects of their graphic design and merchandising, which includes proper Hoxton Twat-style sweatbands and matching Y-fronts and vest in shades of brown and orange.

There’s something too clever by half about it all. Even the name, which came about after a racehorse called The Archduke inspired a conversation about the first world war — not something you could imagine happening in many pop or rock households. At the time, Hardy famously said that he “wanted the band to convey the raw emotion of Field Marshal Haig’s tears as he read the casualty reports from the front”. Of course he did.

After playing to the capacity crowd of beaming Swedes, Kapranos and Thomson give me an opportunity to try to ask questions that meet with their intellectual approval. Even Kapranos seems to realise that attitude only gets you so far — “You can’t be arsey about (the media),” he says, “or you’ll look a c***.” And when I ask about the great thrift and vintage stores of Europe and New York, the conversation finally starts to flow. Esther, Thomson’s wife, is here with him, sporting some staggering vintage orange platforms he bought her in Berlin. (She gets the plain-speaking quote of the night: “It’s nice not to be supporting Paul any more.”) But platforms or no platforms, it’s Kapranos I look at, Kapranos I talk to, Kapranos who is fascinating and well informed on any subject, even town planning (someone told me that). I expect his fellow band members are similarly intellectually able, but they aren’t as loquacious.

And so we’re off, and the conversation passes Dutch deconstructivism by way of Detroit techno. The band’s videos reference Dadaism. The word postmodern appears twice in my notes. It is clear that Kapranos and the other members of Franz Ferdinand are creative, clever boys first, pop stars second. Lines like, “Everything you do should have an air of subversiveness to it” may make them seem affected. But perhaps it’s not such a bad aim in life. And it makes a change from plain old-fashioned rock-stud ignorance.

Source: http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/style/article466649.ece