ALEX KAPRANOS
Franz Ferdinand’s gourmet on dancing, renewal and the Lamppost of Destiny.
Franz Ferdinand’s chief face gets Confidential about ambition, despair and why the only way is up.
ÒCan you wait a minute while I put my phone through the X-ray?” MOJO has caught Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos between radio interviews in Paris and Amsterdam, via a taxi to the Eurostar at Gare du Nord station, during a promotional sprint in support of new album, Always Ascending. It’s the Glaswegians’ first since the departure of founding guitarist Nick McCarthy and the arrival of Julian Corrie (keys, electronics) and Dino Bardot (guitar). The transition has accentuated the dance gene in Franz’s pop-smart post-punk-funk, which initially co-spearheaded, alongside The Libertines, the UK response to post-millennial Strokes fever. They’ve released four hit LPs since 2004, but the momentum hasn’t always been ascendant; in 2010, Kapranos considered splitting the band. But the Franz continental express continues, quite literally as Kapranos turfs a businessman out of his reserved Eurostar seat to keep talking.
It’s been five years since your previous album.
We toured for a long time, and we recorded the FFS [Franz Ferdinand + Sparks] album in 2015, and toured FFS into 2016. Then Nick left – which we knew before the FFS tour started – and Bob [Hardy, bass], Paul [Thompson, drums] and I started discussing what the new identity of the band could be. It’s great to allow that freedom of thought, to not necessarily be chasing a definite destination. I work hard, but I do enjoy intense periods of laziness. I blame the Reformation for our terrible sense of guilt! Emancipate your daydreaming, I say! Then we met Julian, recorded the album through 2017, and then met Dino.
After 15 years, what motivates Franz Ferdinand to keep going?
If you’re fortunate enough to discover what your thing is, you do it for the rest of your life. Since I started writing songs at 14, I knew everything else would be secondary. There are other things I enjoy, but they’re not the primary purpose. One thing I found inspiring about Ron and Russ [Mael of Sparks] was seeing two quite elderly guys with more energy and motivation than some people I knew when I was 17. After Nick left, Bob and Paul were as completely engaged and excited as they’ve ever been, as I was.
That’s where the title Always Ascending comes in?
Yes, it’s a statement of intent. We didn’t write it that way but when we were choosing the album title, it summed up our mentality. After a decade of the band, we had a choice, to continue living in that decade and repeat ourselves, or to leave it behind. Nick leaving was a great gift, actually, and combined with FFS, where our roles were jumbled up – I was co-writing with Ron Mael! – it meant things had to change. I think of Always Ascending as our second first album.
There was a time when you wanted Franz Ferdinand to end.
Funny, until you mentioned that, I’d totally forgotten about it, and I’d rather leave it that way. It’s like an old relationship: it’s over, I’m no longer in that place. It went wrong but it wasn’t
that bad. Typical bloody blokes, we hadn’t verbalised what was bothering us, and once we did, we realised how trivial it all was.
Always Ascending could be your most dance-driven album yet.
We wanted to make dance music right at the start, and I’d say the ingredients are the same, just mixed differently. On the first album, I was playing guitar to emulate an arpeggiator or sequencer, and maybe we’ve taken that to a further extreme on this record. Bands usually bolt themselves to a sequencer arrangement, but we’ve done the opposite. We play everything as if it’s been programmed. It’s dance music played by humans.
2016’s stand-alone single Demagogue was the first ‘new Franz’ recording, inspired by Trump.
We recorded it and released it within three days, because the song was only pertinent to that moment. His popularity was becoming increasingly apparent, but no one was singing about one of the biggest things in our lives at that point. It influenced the writing of this album, but also, on a more general level. You either ignore something, or say, Fuck this, I will do this instead, and ascend to something better, to celebrate what’s around you. It’s a way to show defiance.
Talking of defiance, you support Scottish independence. Will Brexit will accelerate it?
I really don’t know. In an ideal world, I’d be living in an independent Scotland but as part of the EU. All the journalists I’ve spoken to in Europe all want to ask about Brexit. It’s like you have this old, racist uncle, and everyone wants to know why you’re spending time with him, and you’re trying to explain that your views aren’t the same. I’m now anxious about what’s developing in Germany. But we’re in an age when making predictions is extremely dangerous, so you won’t get any from me.
Tell us something you’ve never told an interviewer before.
I crashed my Lada when I was 17. It was originally my grandad’s, a ridiculous car, really, the pinnacle of Soviet engineering, as drawn by a five-yearold! But I loved it. I was with my friend Andrew, who was eating a Walnut Whip, and he’d bitten the walnut off, as you do, and I was trying to get the rest to stick on his nose, by slamming the brakes and speeding up, and I lost control and totalled a lamppost. No injuries, though. The metaphor being, the Walnut Whip is the kernel of creativity, and you can never force it to be something that it wasn’t meant to be, because you end up colliding with the lamppost of destiny. Martin Aston
Always Ascending is released on February 9 on Domino.