Franz ferdinand band full#

'Perform' (via clever lookalikes) in a Dior ad starring Marion Cotillard? Bien sûr… Franz Ferdinand jumped at the bewildering array of opportunities that came their way. Tour America for the fourth time in a year? Of course! Record a song for David Mackenzie's 2007 film Hallam Foe? No problem. It was, they admit, partly their own fault. 'I just thought, 'Eurrgh, can't play music any more.' Couldn't stand it. ' I just came down heavily with depression, I think,' says McCarthy. According to Thomson, a period 'decompressing' was required in the wake of the two years spent touring their third album. It's a long way from 2009's Tonight, which sounded clenched and felt tired. It has no single producer, but saw friends (including Hot Chip and Björn Yttling of Peter Björn & John) occasionally managing the studio controls. Both pronounce themselves pleased with how they made their new album. They tell me the album – a short, sharp, whipsmart disco-rock record – was recorded in fits and starts in studios across London, Scotland and Sweden in the past year. McCarthy, born in Blackpool and now aged 38, is first joined by Paul Thomson, 36, this so-called Scottish band's sole actual Scotsman. Three weeks earlier than my visit to Kapranos's house, I met the rest of the band at McCarthy's studio in Hackney, the Sausage Factory, a cupboard-sized space in which the guitarist has crammed a junk-shop's worth of arcane musical kit. Having watched them graduate from sticky Glasgow squats to festival headline slots, I found myself travelling to interview the band a handful of times, everywhere from Germany to Poland to America to Australia. Their second album, You Could Have It So Much Better, went platinum in the UK, gold in the US. That September it won the Mercury Music Prize and in February 2005 Franz Ferdinand took home two Brit Awards, for Best British Group and Best British Rock Act. By spring 2004 their debut album had sold a hefty 300,000 copies in two months it would go on to sell 1.1m copies in America alone. When I asked what this brand new band sounded like, the singer shot back: 'Music for girls to dance to.'įive months later, ' Take Me Out', their second single, entered the UK charts at No 2.

Franz ferdinand band full#

'Fantastic crowd today, so full of energy, we were getting so much back off them,' the well-spoken Kapranos beamed in an accent that betrayed both a childhood in Sunderland and an adulthood in Glasgow. They were sensational: a pop band with spikes a rock band with jump-around adrenaline an indie band with club-friendly synthesiser lines. They were yet to release a single and had an afternoon slot, immediately after another bunch of hopefuls called Razorlight. I first met the band 10 years ago, when Kapranos, Nick McCarthy (guitar, keyboards), Bob Hardy (bass) and Paul Thomson (drums) were playing Reading Festival's New Bands tent. But I think the way it accelerated so quickly was probably quite damaging for us.' In many ways it was the beginning of the end for Franz Ferdinand. I shouldn't complain too much – we sold lots and lots of records.

'They pushed us in a way that didn't feel natural. 'It was exactly the opposite of what I wanted to be as a band.' He gives a grim nod. 'And I was like, 'Fucking hell, here we are in court on some payola charge,' Kapranos says. Franz Ferdinand's name was read out as part of the prosecution case. Things worsened for the band when their label was taken to court, accused of offering bribes to DJs to play the hot new releases by their hot new acts. Photograph: Danny Clifford//WENNĬorporate music biz America proved to be a world of largesse and excess. That was then: the band backstage at the ICA London in 2003. It is a bright energetic record, but one which has been clawed from a slough of despair. We are in deepest, greenest Dumfriesshire, in the conservatory of a large, slightly ramshackle Victorian house the musician bought in 2004 as a bolthole, discussing Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action – Franz Ferdinand's fourth album, and their first since 2009.

'Yeah, yeah, yeah,' he says quickly, frowning, looking pained. At first he says nothing, so I explain the subtext how the group he formed in Glasgow in 2002 embodied a du jour cool. I read this passage out loud to Alex Kapranos, singer with Franz Ferdinand.

'The party is being thrown by one of Carmen's good friends who writes about movies…' begins the American author Gillian Flynn, throwing the protagonists into 'a whoosh of body heat and writerness… black-framed glasses and mops of hair… black wool pea-coats flopped all across the couch.' A German poster for The Getaway covers 'one paint-cracked wall'. L ast summer's hit novel Gone Girl opens with a scene set in the trendy early noughties magazine circles of Brooklyn.