You should see what he's like with his strawberry tarts…” Zdar has to have the best of everything, so when the band arrived at his studio in Paris, he insisted that they eat strawberry tarts. “That's Philippe's mentality,” he says, referencing Zdar's approach. This approach of re-producing electronic music with live instrumentation sounds like a similarly ostentatious process to Daft Punk's last album, Random Access Memories, though, hopefully, less expensive? Kapranos laughs. It's like finding yourself in a different city, trying to navigate to a supermarket.” “My hands stopped falling into the same shapes they'd been falling into for the last 14 years. “I wrote on piano,” says Kapranos, surprised. For a track called “The Academy Award,” for instance, they programmed the bass line digitally, like you would a cracking techno number, then learned to play it live. This go-around, Franz Ferdinand’s songwriting method was at odds with anything they'd tried before. With fresh blood in the mix, it was time for some reinvigorated experimenting. So why change now? “It's a nice life, but I don't feel like spending the rest of mine in suspended animation.” “I don't like slagging off other bands, but there are ones who still live in the decade where they had most success.” Franz Ferdinand never played ball with the emerging British indie scene- NME's so-called 'new rock revolution' featuring those bands mentioned above. “We had to evolve,” he says, unlike some of their peers. Signaling the end of a chapter, Kapranos was eager to begin a decade of band life anew. His departure and the more electronic leanings of Always Ascending aren't coincidental. After ten years on top, it was a pretty dream one at that. That would become lead guitarist McCarthy’s swan song. glam rockers Sparks, called FFS, and toured together. After releasing their fourth record in 2013, they undertook a surprising but no less welcome supergroup collaboration with ’70s L.A. You Could Have It So Much Better, their second album, led with the infectious singalong of 'Do You Want To.' Their third album contained 'Ulysses,' produced by Dan Carey (CSS, Hot Chip, La Roux), adding an LCD Soundsystem–ish dance-punk weapon to their arsenal. After 'Take Me Out' exploded them across the Atlantic, they spent a decade carving out an equally rewarding back catalogue. They were happier than Bloc Party, smarter than Kaiser Chiefs, and contained none of the hunger for self-destruction that imbued the everyday existence of the Libertines. But,” he pauses, “all of them are having a great time, and that's not too far removed from the world that we're in.”įranz Ferdinand always had more potential legs in them than their 2000s cohorts. “When I was researching old footage, some of these guys genuinely believe they're doing something good.

Instead, he addresses the room spouting his own thoughts on “the spirit of optimism.” He recognizes, of course, the parallels between getting this congregation animated versus driving a paying concert crowd wild through the power of jangly guitars and tongue-in-cheek lyrics. Kapranos is not a believer, so his initial attempts to follow religious scripture fail. “I've got an alternative career here,” he says with a smile, his hair a friskier blond than the mousy brown it used to be. He takes pleasure in his role as an extroverted leader, and today he's imposing himself on someone else's stage again, except this time it's a real deity’s stage, should you believe in such a thing. The power, the pomposity, the fun of commanding a room. In turn, Kapranos has been studying his preaching. Diane Martel, the video's director, is notorious for wanting musicians to truly dig into their roles. Kapranos is pacing the halls, gee-ing himself up for his big performance as a televangelist leader. In a church in Valencia, California, the corridors are filled with actors posing as members of a congregation. Regaling with this story on the set of their “Feel the Love Go” video shoot-the song’s inspired by bassist Bob Hardy's dabbles in Buddhism-the now 45-year-old marvels at that notion of inflated self. Alex Kapranos, a most gentlemanly rebellious frontman, decided he’d waltz down it anyway. They were told that under no circumstances should they use Bono's so-called “ego ramp”-a catwalk extending into the audience-during their own performance. Back in 2005, a then-quartet from Glasgow, Scotland, named Franz Ferdinand was opening for U2 on their Vertigo Tour, one of the highest-grossing tours of all time.

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