Five minutes in, and things are going to the dogs. “So,” I ask Franz Ferdinand, “what are your influences?” There is laughter. The snorting type. “What do you want us to do?” scoffs Alex Kapranos, the band’s lead singer. “List every record we’ve ever bought?” My earlier question, about the rumour that Kapranos is not 29, but in his mid-thirties — which he clearly isn’t, unless he is Dorian Gray with a floppy side parting — elicited a similarly withering response. “I am 29, and the only people who ask me about that are journalists looking for a scoop on the band. There isn’t one.” I say I’d heard the age rumour from a friend of theirs. “Well, I don’t know her very well.”
Kapranos clearly finds the whole interview process intellectually disappointing. This could, of course, be a symptom of fast and vast success and the relentless work schedules of new pop stars. From virtual obscurity in spring 2003, Franz Ferdinand’s catchy, clever brand of pop has made them the most successful act of 2004. You could compare them to Blondie; they also fit, a little, alongside the new punk sound of the Hives, the Strokes and the Libertines. But best not to compare them at all — Kapranos is “annoyed by comparisons”.
The band’s first album, which has just gone gold in the United States, has gained them some high-profile A-list fans. Chris Martin, Brad Pitt, Kate Moss, Jennifer Aniston and Elijah Wood all turned out for recent gigs, while Hedi Slimane, the Dior menswear designer, has turned them into unofficial poster boys for the label, showering them with free £1,000 suits.
But what makes Franz Ferdinand different from most accessible pop acts today is that they weren’t dreamt up by a record-industry bozo with a coke problem. Their image — and their music — was already hot to trot before they signed. They are good-looking boys in flamboyant thrift-store chic, with pointy shoes and tidy partings, who jump around on stage with a pretty vigour. And they’re brainy, with the experience and self-confidence to give up being pop stars if it ever starts to feel like a job. As Kapranos says: “What’s the point of doing a job if it’s crap?”
I meet up with him backstage at the Swedish festival that the band is about to headline. He’s looking like a kind of polyester mod: second-hand cycling top from Paris, flat, hard-soled plimsolls from Oxfam in Manchester and orange socks from “a really flash pimp shop on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side”. A newspaper finishes off the thinking-hipster look.
We pick up the other band members and wander out to a park bench in Gothenburg’s botanical gardens. There is the quiet baby-face of the group, the bassist Bob Hardy, and the chip-toothed drummer Paul Thomson in a hound’s-tooth Dior suit (the only actual artists in the band, despite the “art school” label applied by overenthusiastic music journalists). Thomson used to be the guitarist and only swapped on the condition that the drum kit was arranged so that the audience could see his face. He had only been abroad once before the band took off, to Spain on holiday when he was 13, and until last year, was sofa-surfing because he was so broke. Nick McCarthy, the fourth member, is wearing a pair of pointedly ugly white, plastic shades and more thrift-store polyester. They all immediately focus on the inscrutable beauty of a small blue bird.
It’s a typically Franz Ferdinand moment. The band started out as part of a Glasgow, Factory-type art-and- music scene centred at reclaimed derelict buildings that they called the Chateau — first a warehouse, then a prison. The Chateau threw free parties with illegal bars, art shows, gigs, all with electricity “borrowed” from Scottish Power. Glasgow, they say, gave them a freedom they wouldn’t have had in Edinburgh or London, where “we wouldn ’t have time to be in a band, because we would be doing shit jobs to pay the rent”. You didn’t need to be there to know it’s a prospective art student’s wet dream of a life. The boys still claim the band is “as good a thing to do as go to the pub on a Friday night. It’s primarily a social pastime”.
I’d say it’s a bit more than that. They are slowly building a Franz Ferdinand manifesto. They chose their Swedish producer for his “wideness of thought and unblinkered approach”. They have a stated “no groupies” rule backstage (“We’re all quite romantic guys and prefer real love rather than being in some squalid dressing room with someone you’ve never spoken to,” Kapranos has said). They are also closely involved in all aspects of their graphic design and merchandising, which includes proper Hoxton Twat-style sweatbands and matching Y-fronts and vest in shades of brown and orange.
There’s something too clever by half about it all. Even the name, which came about after a racehorse called The Archduke inspired a conversation about the first world war — not something you could imagine happening in many pop or rock households. At the time, Hardy famously said that he “wanted the band to convey the raw emotion of Field Marshal Haig’s tears as he read the casualty reports from the front”. Of course he did.
After playing to the capacity crowd of beaming Swedes, Kapranos and Thomson give me an opportunity to try to ask questions that meet with their intellectual approval. Even Kapranos seems to realise that attitude only gets you so far — “You can’t be arsey about (the media),” he says, “or you’ll look a c***.” And when I ask about the great thrift and vintage stores of Europe and New York, the conversation finally starts to flow. Esther, Thomson’s wife, is here with him, sporting some staggering vintage orange platforms he bought her in Berlin. (She gets the plain-speaking quote of the night: “It’s nice not to be supporting Paul any more.”) But platforms or no platforms, it’s Kapranos I look at, Kapranos I talk to, Kapranos who is fascinating and well informed on any subject, even town planning (someone told me that). I expect his fellow band members are similarly intellectually able, but they aren’t as loquacious.
And so we’re off, and the conversation passes Dutch deconstructivism by way of Detroit techno. The band’s videos reference Dadaism. The word postmodern appears twice in my notes. It is clear that Kapranos and the other members of Franz Ferdinand are creative, clever boys first, pop stars second. Lines like, “Everything you do should have an air of subversiveness to it” may make them seem affected. But perhaps it’s not such a bad aim in life. And it makes a change from plain old-fashioned rock-stud ignorance.
Franz Ferdinand’s new single, Michael, is out tomorrow
