Electrifying return from invigorated new line-up
Franz Ferdinand Brixton Academy
In most walks of life, if a gentleman in his mid-forties takes a rash step like peroxiding his hair, he’s usually believed to have suffered a midlife crisis. But when a bottle-blond Alex Kapranos led out a freshly reconfigured Franz Ferdinand this month after a wobbly couple of years, most agreed that his beloved ensemble have acquired a new lease of life. At this sold-out comeback show at Brixton Academy, a crowd of an exceptional age and gender mix saluted them with singalongs, disco-dancing and general euphoria.
Since they collaborated with Seventies glam weirdos Sparks as FFS circa 2015, they’ve lost guitarist/ keyboard player Nick Mccarthy – such a key member that it ultimately took two new ones (guitarist Dino Bardot and Julian Corrie on keyboards/ guitar) to replace him. In introducing this line-up’s first album (and Franz Ferdinand’s fifth overall), the positively entitled Always Ascending, Kapranos has talked of that departure as a “great gift”, cementing their determination to carry on and prompting them to search for a “future sound” with Philippe Zdar, an enigmatic producer associated with the Parisian house scene that spawned Daft Punk.
Their show confidently kicked off with Always Ascending’s title track, its ever-spiralling upward thrust ushering in a mood of unrelenting Saturday-night abandon. When Franz Ferdinand first broke through in 2004, they were Britain’s riposte to American bands like the Strokes and the White Stripes, who had reasserted a Luddite rock’n’roll aesthetic in the face of pop’s hi-tech obsessions. But here, selections like No You Girls served as a reminder that there’s actually always been a dance-around-your-handbag disco tinge to their act.
Kapranos was a performer reborn, laying down his guitar during new songs like Paper Cages to conduct mass arm-waving exercises. Repeatedly checking if everyone was having a good time, he responded to the deafening confirmation with warnings that this wasn’t a garden party, and somehow elicited a greater roar. If his indefatigable stagecraft bordered on the Jagger-esque, his moves were like Jarvis Cocker – an intelligent, selfaware entertainer who led the party with an armoury of twirls, star-jumps, and other dance-floor perennials.
Kapranos’s graft, together with an expertly balanced set list, enabled them to air the majority of Always Ascending, without it feeling like a drag. When, after an hour or so, they dropped Take Me Out, their breakthrough indie-rock banger which even cracked America, the place predictably erupted.
In a decade in which we’re losing heroes from pop’s foundation at an alarming rate, the question necessarily arises: who will take their place? When a saxophone-augmented Franz evoked David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs era in the encore, they genuinely shaped up as contenders. At the very least, their electrifying energy confirmed that they’re back with a vengeance.