Alex Kapranos talks to SCOTT KARA about Franz Ferdinand's excitement over their new album and heading Downunder
KEY POINTS:
Alex Kapranos is having tea when TimeOut calls. "But I'll come back and finish it later," says the Franz Ferdinand frontman politely.
"Have you just finished your breakfast, have ya?" he asks quickly.
As a matter of fact Alex, I have, and the toast and coffee was very nice, thank you, but yours sounds better.
He's just been tucking into some "very spicy Thai" in the town of Taunton, about an hour out of London, where he's overseeing the mastering of Franz Ferdinand's third album, Tonight: Franz Ferdinand.
"The lasers are cutting through the acetate as I speak," he says excitedly.
And the title of the album gives a pretty good indication of what mood the Glasgow band's third album is likely to have. It's not out until January 26 but New Zealand audiences will be among the first to hear the new songs when they headline the first day of the Rhythm and Vines festival in Gisborne on December 29.
"We just sat down as a band and had a chat about it and we thought, 'We gotta get back down'," says Kapranos of the band's third visit to New Zealand.
The first new Franz Ferdinand music since 2005's second album You Could Have It So Much Better surfaced back in August when the band made Lucid Dreams available on the internet. The song was less uppity and angular, with a a more slinky and laid-back sound, although Kapranos says a much more psychedelic version made the final cut of the album.
"I can't wait till you all hear the rest of the record. It's a little more laid-back but there are other parts that are really intense. I'd say the BPMs are slower, but it's still a real dance record. There's still some dancefloor numbers on there.
"The whole record has a night-time vibe about it - like when you're psyching yourself up to go out; to the confrontation on the dancefloor; to the chase scene afterwards; to the moment where you're having a full-on lucid dream freak-out; and then I guess alone in your room rocking yourself to sleep wishing whatever's in your system was no longer in your system," he says gleefully.
There has been a long gap between albums this time round, especially considering the band said they were keen to trot out records regularly following the release of their self-titled debut in 2004 and follow up You Could Have It So Much Better the year after.
Yet Kapranos' flippant reasoning for the three-year gap is that "it was recorded when it was ready".
"I guess we just finished touring at the end of 2006, I went off to Vancouver with the Cribbs to produce their record out there, and we met back up in Glasgow in 2007. It's taken a little over a year for the songs to evolve, to write and also to record them. For me, that's been a wonderful experience, it's allowed us to see those songs evolve in a natural way and to enjoy the writing and performing.
"When a band's enjoying themselves and enjoying the music that comes through the speakers at the other end. There were ideas that, sometimes, took a few months to start to really make sense and it also allowed us to play the songs live."
They took an old-school approach, playing small gigs in Glasgow, not telling anyone about it until the last minute and popping out flyers to spread the word. It's an approach very similar to how their first album evolved and songs like Take Me Out, The Dark of the Matinee and Michael shot them to stardom.
"In the basement of a pub, or something like that, when you play these songs in an environment like that, they really make sense and playing a song live you can really perform it properly. It gave us an indication of the songs that maybe weren't as good as they should be so there were some songs we wrote at the beginning that weren't turning the audience on," he laughs.
Franz are a band who also like to have a base to work from when it comes time to record. For the last album they were holed up at Kapranos' house, playing each other everything from Devo and Pink Floyd to Afro-beat and Can, for inspiration. This time they took over an old town hall in Glasgow, built a studio, and listened to African music.
"We found this fantastic 19th century building with great grandeur and wonderful acoustics and we got to play in different rooms, and there was one room where we set up that was dead and dry, so that was where we put down some rhythm tracks. The large hall that we used was the extreme space and reverb. And down in the basement, right at the bottom of the building, there was a cellar with concrete and metal walls, and that's where we recorded songs like What She Came For - the four of us performed into one microphone so we got this really intense visceral punk rock-style.
"We were rejecting the whole idea of high-fidelity recording and concentrating on the purest and rawest of energy," he says, more excitedly than ever.
The show in Gisborne should be a cracker then, and don't forget to get your glad rags on for when the album comes out.
LOWDOWN
Who: Franz Ferdinand
Line-up: Alex Kapranos (vocals/guitar), Bob Hardy (bass), Nick McCarthy (guitar/keyboards/vocals), and Paul Thomson (drums/percussion/vocals).
Where & when: Rhythm and Vines, Gisborne, December 29.
New album: Tonight: Franz Ferdinand, out January 26.
Past albums: Franz Ferdinand (2004); You Could Have It So Much Better (2005)
