Glasgow band Franz Ferdinand have reinvented British guitar music and got a whole lot of people dancing while they were at it. They tell Anna Carey about their non-macho approach
To many supposed music lovers, pop is still a dirty word. But not to Franz Ferdinand, the four skinny Glasgow boys who've reinvented British guitar music. "We're a band that plays pop music, and in a way we wanted to rebel against all that snobbery," says frontman Alex Kapranos. "Some of the most radical music ever made was pop music - what Bowie did in the 1970s was pop, but it pushed more boundaries than Emerson, Lake and Palmer." Their second album, You Could Have It So Much Better . . . With Franz Ferdinand, cements the band's position as one of the most exciting acts in the world, pop or otherwise.
But success hasn't gone to their heads. When I meet Kapranos and bassist Bob Hardy in the bar of a Dublin hotel, Kapranos is suffering from a bad sore throat, and both have spent the entire hot and stuffy day stuck on a motorway in their tour bus. They could be forgiven for being a little cranky. And yet, both are friendly, charming and good-humoured. Divas they definitely are not.
In fact, perhaps the most appealing thing about Franz Ferdinand is that they don't take their success, or its perks, for granted. They've spent the past year working tremendously hard, touring, recording and meeting the press ("I think we had Christmas day off - just a few phone interviews" jokes Kapranos), and before going into the studio to record the new album, they had a three-week break.
Three weeks of leisure after more than a year of constant touring doesn't seem an awful lot, but Kapranos wasn't complaining. "Most people I know only get two weeks off a year from their jobs," he says. "So three weeks was pretty good." And going back to work was no hardship. "We were all looking forward to getting back into it," says Kapranos. "It wasn't like 'oh, no, we're going to have to play music again'."
They recorded the album in an old country house near Glasgow rather than using a recording studio. "We wanted to go to a house to record, where we could all live together," says Kapranos. "A studio can be a little bit intimidating, I think. It can kill the creativity."
The move to the country saw the band going back to basics, and not just in the musical sense. "The house had nothing in it - we had to get some furniture and stuff for it," says Kapranos. "The first night that [guitarist] Nick [McCarthy] and I went down we just slept in our sleeping bags and lit a fire in the grate. It was nice, actually." This rustic hideaway was especially welcome to the band after spending so long on the road." It was good to be domesticated again," says Bob. "Just being able to cook your own food was great."
They also liked being back on their home turf. "It was good to get back, because we'd been away from Scotland for ages," says Kapranos. The Glasgow-based band feel a strong tie to their adopted city. "Paul's the only member of the band who was actually born in Glasgow," says Kapranos, who moved to the city when he was 10. "But I think we're very much a Glasgow band. The band itself was born in Glasgow, and the music scene there was essential in forming the character of what we do."
For a relatively small city, Glasgow has a long and illustrious musical history - from the Pastels to Primal Scream, from Teenage Fanclub to Belle and Sebastian. There must be something in the water. "I think there are so many reasons why Glasgow's music scene is the way it is, but one of them is simply the fact that it's so far away from London, it's developed in its own way," says Kapranos. "And then there are four universities and an art school, and yet it's a working-class, industrial city - it's an interesting mixture."
Three of the band still live in Glasgow, although drummer Paul Thomson lives in London ("He got married and his wife wasn't too keen on moving to Glasgow," explains Hardy). His bandmates say that this doesn't make too much difference. "We live on the [ tour] bus for most of the year anyway," laughs Kapranos. But when they do go home, they still see a lot of each other. "It's funny, you'd think we'd have enough of each other on the road, but somehow we always end up together when we get home," says Kapranos. "We share a social circle in Glasgow, so if there's a party on we all turn up," says Hardy. He laughs. "And then we end up sitting in a corner talking with each other all night."
The release of the new album inevitably means more time away from home, but the band don't mind going on the road. "I like going on tour," says Kapranos. "I like to approach it as an adventure. Because that's what it is - you get to go to so many amazing places. It can be exciting and invigorating." Hardy agrees. "There are bits that are a drag, but they're far outnumbered by the good things."
They believe that successful bands should count their blessings. "In a way, I sometimes get annoyed when bands complain about being on tour," says Kapranos. "Especially when I think about how mundane most people's lives are, and what jobs most people have to put up with. And then you hear someone go [adopts miserable voice] 'Oh, we had to do some press today, and we had to get on a plane from Los Angeles to Tokyo . . . ' Oh, shut up, man!"
Their success has, of course, brought them to the attention of the mainstream press, and although they're not quite Heat-magazine-fodder yet, they have experienced some tabloid intrusion. "There are some things that would seem pretty extreme if you didn't have a sense of humour," says Kapranos. "Last year I was away from home so much I didn't renew the road tax on my car, and [ Scottish tabloid] the Daily Record published a great big picture of my out-of-date road tax."
"It was a handy reminder for you, though," says Hardy. "Actually, that's right, it was," says Kapranos cheerfully. "I rang my mum, and she changed it for me - I wouldn't have known otherwise."
Although often described as an "art school" band, only two of the band members - Hardy and Paul Thomson - actually studied art at college. Hardy attended the Glasgow School of Art, a beautiful Charles Rennie Mackintosh building. "You used to get tourists coming into the studio when you were working," he says. "But it was fun, having tour guides wandering around."
Kapranos's college days were somewhat different. "I went to Strathclyde University," says Kapranos, who studied English in that concrete jungle. "And absolutely no one wanted to visit that place." But although they may not all be artists, the band have always had a strong visual identity, and the Bauhaus-style covers of their first batch of releases were all linked by style and colour.
"I love how last year whenever you saw that black, dark brown, orange and cream, you immediately knew it was a Franz Ferdinand thing," says Kapranos. "And it was a conscious decision to change the colours around for the next season of music. Here's something new, and here's a new set of colours to go with it." The new scheme is just as striking as the first. There's a hint of East German graphic design in the red and blue covers, all of which feature black-and-white photos of people's faces.
"Last time it was all extremely graphic, but this time every cover has a portrait in it," says Kapranos. "We're sending friends of ours written instructions of how we'd like them to take a picture of themselves. And so for the album cover, for example, we asked our friend Lucy to take a picture of herself shouting, as if she's shouting out a really positive message. For the Do You Want To single cover, because we wanted to reflect the nature of the music, we asked another friend, Roxanne, to wink suggestively at the camera. I don't know who we're going to use for the next single, though. I think it's going to be Walk Away, and I like the idea of getting a girl with heavily mascara-ed eyes and tears running down."
The new album sees the band moving on, musically as well asvisually. It's a more organic-sounding album, with acoustic guitars and piano frequently replacing the first album's jagged synths. "We knew we didn't want to do an exact replica of the first record," says Kapranos. "But we didn't have a preconceived idea of how we were going to do that - it just evolved as we were making the record. We picked up a second-hand piano and decided to record with that, and then we realised some songs sounded better without drums. And some of the songs themselves sounded a little bit more melancholy."
While the album is full of delightfully spiky pop songs, it's the quieter, darker tracks that really stand out, particularly the bittersweet Fade Together. I tell Kapranos that Fade Together reminded me of the Kinks song, Two Sisters. "I love that song," he says, singing a few bars. "I think there's something in it that I really strive for when writing songs myself - there's a sort of uplifting melancholy. It's really down, but it makes you feel euphoric at the same time."
Hardy agrees. "That's my favourite sort of song," he says. "The Smiths did it really well, too. Pop music about sad things." "It's music for listening to when you're sitting in your bedsit, looking out the window," adds Kapranos.
"But seriously, it's the hardest type of music to write and perform, because it's easy to make it ridiculous. If you do it in any way that's self-conscious at all, you just f*** it up. You have to just totally open yourself up and go for it." He admits he used to find this difficult. "I find it easier now. There's nothing on the first record that's as open as the songs on this one. There were songs that were kind of dark, like Auf Achse or Come on Home, but they were a little bit disguised. As we were arranging them, I put things on top to hide the melancholy elements."
In an early interview, the band flippantly said they wanted to make "music for girls to dance to", a line that has appeared in much of their press coverage since. But at heart, they stand by it. "It summed up how we felt about music," says Kapranos. "We wanted to make dance music - no other rock groups were doing it. But also we didn't want to be one of those macho bands. You know, you go and see them and the audience are completely male and unwelcoming to girls. It seemed like the most rebellious things you could do as a band would be to make music that girls could come and listen to, and to make music that people could dance to. And if you got the girls to dance, then . . . well."
Later that evening, Franz Ferdinand take to the stage in Lansdowne Road. They're a fantastic live band - funny, tight and charismatic. They hold the audience spellbound, working the crowd like born showmen. And they've achieved one important goal. As Take Me Out rings through the stadium, I glance at the people around me - teenagers in sparkly cowboy hats, jaded hipsters, little indie kids, a six-year-old girl and her dad, tracksuited teenage boys with gelled hair, scruffy skater boys and girls. All of them are dancing.
You Could Have It So Much Better . . . With Franz Ferdinand, will be released on September 30