The hottest new band in Britain

By ALEXIA LOUNDRAS

Alex Kapranos, Franz Ferdinand's frontman, looks thoughtful. Huddled around a small table in a London pub, the remaining three members of the year's most promising new band - Bob Hardy, Nick McCarthy and Paul Thomson - look at him expectantly.

"My mum and dad have gone weird on me," he confesses. "They keep trying to chat about trendy New York bands and say things like: 'So Alex, I hear you have a bit of post-punk going on'. They don't know what the hell post-punk is!"

Kapranos' experience strikes a chord with the others. Guitarist McCarthy - the band's Adonis and failed judo champion, emotionally scarred having lost to a girl at age 11 - nods passionately in agreement.

Drummer Thomson, whippet-like and sporting a rather suspect moustache, reveals that his folks too have been acting rather odd. "Yeah, my mum and dad are a lot nicer to me now," he says, surprised, his Scots accent almost smothering his words. "Over Christmas there was no talk about when I was going to get myself a job."

This change in parental behaviour shouldn't shock the Franz Ferdinand boys. Their parents aren't the only ones who have taken an almost unhealthy interest in the Glasgow-based band.

The underground gigs they did in a derelict Glasgow warehouse were notorious. They attracted a slew of record industry types who, smitten with the band's electric disco-laced garage, tried to woo them into their fold with offers of meals in expensive restaurants and limo rides, not to mention hefty record deals - offers that Franz Ferdinand flatly refused.

Despite the major-label frenzy, the band signed to Lawrence Bell's small but respected independent label, Domino. As Kapranos puts it, this was mainly thanks to Bell's "real enthusiasm and genuine love for music. Lawrence had a totally different attitude from all the other labels. He never said he'd buy us some big fancy meal - he cooked us dinner instead. We liked him and we liked his ideals."

By the time Franz Ferdinand released their debut single, Darts of Pleasure, the British music press had hailed them as the saviours of British rock. Franz Ferdinand kick-started this year on the cover of New Musical Express and the record-buying public have embraced the band. The quartet's second single - Take Me Out, released in January - smashed into the British charts at No 3, further fuelling the anticipation for their eponymous debut album.

Quite some achievement, particularly for a band who just 18 months earlier started writing music on a whim.

Franz Ferdinand were a happy accident of sorts, conceived in Glasgow's vibrant art scene. Cherubic bass-player, Hardy, who, at 23, is four years younger than his bandmates, came from West Yorkshire to study painting at Glasgow School of Art, which was also where Thomson, the band's only true Scot, worked.

Kapranos - aristocratic cheekbones, angular haircut - moved to the city from Sunderland in the 90s to study English. The art school was the hub of Glasgow's social scene, which is how the three met.

At that stage, the founding members of Franz Ferdinand didn't have a burning ambition to play in a band.

The impetus for the group came when Kapranos inherited an unwanted bass from his mate, Mick Cooke of Scots troubadours Belle And Sebastian, on the understanding that he do something useful with it. Suitably inspired, Kapranos set out to convince Hardy and Thomson to join his new band. But it was not until Kapranos met Blackpool-born, Munich-bred McCarthy over a scuffle for some vodka at a party one night, that the line-up was complete. Fresh out of the Munich Conservatoire, and desperate to put his musical skills to some use, McCarthy happily admitted to trying to steal Kapranos' bottle. A fight was averted and a band was born.

"It was almost as though fate was bringing us together," says Kapranos. That may be, but it was the lads' shared commitment to "making music to make girls dance" that cemented the band.

"I like what a glib statement that is," says Kapranos about what amounts to Franz Ferdinand's sonic manifesto. "It almost means nothing but it sums up how we were feeling at the time, what we were kicking against as a band."

The group had noticed two things: the first was that bands didn't seem to be making music - real rhythmic music, not just collections of chords - that got people dancing. The second was that there never seemed to be any girls at gigs.

"It seemed ridiculous that you would go to a club to dance and a gig to either stand around with your arms folded or mosh about, throwing yourself violently into others," Kapranos says.

"Bands were just playing to other blokes in bands, knowingly cross-referencing each other's music, but never playing any tunes. We wanted to make people dance."

And that they've done. Even before Hardy and Kapranos came to hear of a racehorse called The Archduke - which started a long conversational tangent about another archduke, Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination sparked World War I - the band had made serious headway into their lofty more girls/more dancing ambitions. They played their first gig as the token boy band at an all-female art exhibition. Far from sounding like an unholy clash of influences, Franz Ferdinand have pooled their musical experiences, which cover everything from freeform jazz and Prince, to post-punk and "strange electronica", to create an exhilarating blend of electro-fused 60s pop and psychedelic disco-rock, spiced with melody and lashings of dance-floor energy.

"If you're going to create something new, you're going to have to take inspiration from everywhere. You can't just draw from one narrow niche," says Kapranos.

"The most exciting bands have this space that they live in, far removed from anything else. I think we've ended up in that situation. It's like we exist in this funny little world where we peek out on the rest of existence. And this is why we work so well."

Having got this far, the band intend to be here for the long haul.

"We'd like to usurp the name of Franz Ferdinand," Kapranos says, laying out the battle plan. "When people hear that name, they won't think of some archduke, they'll think of this daft bunch of guys that met in Glasgow and formed a band. It's a big one, but you've gotta have dreams!"

- INDEPENDENT

* Franz Ferdinand is released on May 15.