Franz Ferdinand are back and have found a new voice. Gone are the shouty, stadium-filling mega-numbers; in is a more cerebral sound. Lead singer and former chef Alex Kapranos tells JIM CARROLLabout his love of Glasgow, his love of touring and his love of food – and why no book-writing or TV presenting job will ever separate him from his beloved FF
ONCE UPON A TIME, it was all rivets around these parts. Back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Govan was known for its shipbuilding and heavy engineering industries. On the banks of the Clyde, giant plants belched smoke into the air and attracted thousands of workers from all over Glasgow and further afield.
Those were Govan’s glory days. But when those industries fell into decline, the good times went with them and the area went to seed.
When Franz Ferdinand were looking for somewhere to record their third album, they walked down Govan’s mean streets and found themselves standing beneath the dome of the old town hall. Up to 1970, councillors would gather within its red-brick walls to discuss issues of great import, compare gold chains and drink mugs of tea.
Last in use as a drug rehab clinic, the Victorian hall came with flock wallpaper, filthy carpets and a cheap rent. Spacious and full of character, for the past 18 months it has been the band’s HQ, the place they went to reshape their sound.
As Alex Kapranos notes, they were not the only new arrivals attracted to Govan. “The area is changing a lot,” he says. “Even in the year and a half we’ve been here, you’ve had the new BBC building and other media companies going up. It’s strange to see that transformation. You have this fairly desolate part of Glasgow on one side and the new image of the city on the other.”
Today, sitting beneath a set of human bones which the band used for percussion on one track on the new album, Kapranos is a bundle of nervous energy. Franz Ferdinand returned 48 hours previously from a tour of Australia and New Zealand, but there’s no time for jet-lag when you have a new album to talk about. There’s a Japanese TV crew round for breakfast, Irish journalists in for elevenses and Radio Clyde booked for a late lunch.
This is what the band’s days will be like until their European tour kicks off in Limerick at the end of next month.
The new album, Tonight, contains many dashing feats of derring-do. It’s where FF return to the dancefloor to analyse life under the glitterball with hooks and humour. After the super-scaled grandstanding of You Could Have It So Much Better, it’s a welcome relief to see them throwing themselves around with wild abandon rather than standing aloof on the sidelines.
“Even though this record and the first record are quite different in their sound, they both have this desire to take you somewhere good,” says Kapranos. “They’re both soundtracks to a night out, but both have their introspective moments too. Some of the most introspective moments come when you feel a sense of loneliness and abandonment on the dancefloor surrounded by other people.
“You often hear that a big city can be the loneliest place on earth, but a club can be just as lonely because you’re surrounded by all these people communicating with each other, yet you’re unable to do so yourself. That sense of desolation when you’re surrounded by all that hedonism is on Can’t Stop Feeling and the sense of vulnerability you have, which can be gone by 3pm and back again by 3am, is on Katherine Kiss Me
“Listening back to the second album now, the sound I hear is the sound of an arena – which is not necessarily our natural environment. There are some lovely moments on it, but it was made at a frantic time for us as individuals and I know we wouldn’t make a record with such a big bombastic rock sound now. That may have been a little outside our personalities, but it came from touring those big arenas. That’s where we were at that time.
“But just because we play big arenas and festivals like the Electric Picnic or Oxegen doesn’t mean we shouldn’t play to 100 people in the basement of a pub. That’s why we did loads of small gigs in places like the Captain’s Rest here in Glasgow while we were making this record. Those raw, visceral gigs are the ones which hone a song. You play a new song there for the first time and you really know if it’s working because you can see it in people’s faces. It tightens you as a band, makes you quite edgy.”
The 18 months they spent working on the album allowed the band to do a lot of tinkering. “You go through an evolution, but you don’t know what it will be when you start off. It’s a bit like what you do when you were starting off as a band. You can have vague ideas, but you only find out your mettle by doing gigs and coming back to the rehearsal room and doing more gigs. You experiment, you fuck up and you learn from those fuck-ups. That’s what we did this time. We gave ourselves the space to fuck up.
“A major part of getting your ideas and identity together is contrariness. Of course, it’s about what you love as well, but it is also about a reaction to what’s around you. The irony is that what we created through that contrariness the first time became what was then all about us. The sound we created became part of the infrastructure. There are now so many guitar bands around who have come out since that first record came out. And this album too is based on contrariness. It’s a revolt against what everyone else is doing now.”
The town hall provided them with the physical space to do all this away from prying eyes. “We wanted to get out of the spotlight,” says Kapranos. “We didn’t want to talk to the media or let people know what we were doing, which is why we came to this backwater in Glasgow. We felt detached from the music industry, which was essential.
“I don’t like the idea of trying to create something with everyone going: ‘So what are you doing now?’ Not musicians as such – I find them quite supportive – it’s more the industry and journalists like yourself. It’s OK to say ‘well, over the last year and a half, we did blah, blah and blah’ in retrospect.
“If you talk about what you’re trying to do when you’re doing it, it can fuck things up. We did an Africa Express gig and after it, this guy from the Independent wrote that we were making an African record like Vampire Weekend. We never had an intention of making an African record. But if you play a gig with Africa Express with African musicians and a journalist asks you if you like African music (pause) well, of course I like fucking African music. It’s why I’m doing this gig! We never said we were making an African record, but before you knew it, that’s what we were supposed to be doing. One song on the album, Send Them Away, is the only song that has something vaguely African on it, that 6/8 Ethiopian beat.”
That wasn’t the only story doing the rounds. There was also talk of the band working with Brian Higgins, the Xenomania producer who worked with Girls Aloud, Sugababes, Kylie and other pop names.
“Everyone is fascinated by us working with Brian Higgins,” laughs Kapranos. “Everyone presumes that bands who are loosely termed as indie like us would never have anything to do with the pop world. But back in 2004 when I first became aware of Xenomania, I felt there were parallels between what we were doing and what they were doing. We were both making music which had the directness and melodies of pop music, but with these unconventional structures and original approaches.
“I thought Xenomania were more original than most of our indie peers and that’s what drew us to them.It was a good laugh. We became aware very quickly that we had different methods and techniques for working and probably couldn’t make a record together.
“Same with working with James Ford and Erol Alkan and James Murphy. They were very inspiring people and I think, as a musician, you have to search out the people to be inspired by. A good producer is a combination of collaborator and catalyst. Working with other people widens your perspective and means you see things in another way.”
Kapranos has thoroughly enjoyed everything that has come with being in a successful rock band. “I used to have a part-time job as a tutor in a college here and while the students were working, I’d stare at this map on the wall and think how amazing it would be to go to Serbia or imagine going to South Korea.
“So when you end up in Serbia or South Korea, it’s a fantastic opportunity so you soak it up. Going to these places was what I day-dreamed about in the first place, so touring and travelling is not a chore. I mean, I didn’t get out of Glasgow for a long time, never mind Scotland. A trip to London for a gig in the back of a van down the M6 was an adventure.”
A former chef, Kapranos eventually ended up penning a column for the Guardian about the food he was eating on tour, which led to a brilliant book, Soundbites. “I’d written about a meal I’d had in Japan on our blog and the Guardian contacted me about doing the column. I was reluctant because I’m not a food writer or a food critic. Then I realised I could write a tour diary from the perspective of food even though I didn’t really write about food most of the time.
“I even ended up getting offers to present TV shows about food in the States and over here. Some of the concepts were horrendous, so I knew it was time to stop that. Franz Ferdinand are my primary activity and I never thought for a moment that there was anything else which could take precedence over the band.”
That means releasing this album and spending the rest of 2009 on the road, hoping to add to the collection of gold and platinum discs on the walls throughout the hall.
“Who knows what will happen?” muses Kapranos. “It’s a different environment for us now because people know who we are. Some people will be curious or excited to hear what we’ve done again. Others will be resentful that we’re not doing what we did before and others still will presume we’re doing the same thing we did before.
“I’m not too concerned because I think we made this record with a retrospective in mind. When you look back on our records 10 years from now, you’ll be able to say that was a wicked album. Yes, I do think about what you leave behind because I presume I will be making music until I lose my hands and my ears and my heart stops beating. Well, I might be able to do without my hands, but definitely not my ears.”
- Tonight! is released on January 23rd on Domino. Franz Ferdinand play Dolan’s, Limerick on February 28th and Olympia, Dublin on March 1st
