Franz Ferdinand are go

Management strategies generally dictate that any British-based band fortunate enough to score a mainstream hit with their debut album does a swift victory lap of the festivals before girding their loins to take a crack at the grand prize in the US.

But if music biz realities prevail, that same band usually return to their home turf chastened by the muted response of an American audience wondering what all the fuss is about. Cue damage limitation platitudes about never having wanted to spend two years touring the mid-west anyway.
But in less than a year, Franz Ferdinand have cleared that hurdle with ease. Their first album breaching the Billboard Top 40 means the quartet return to the European summer circuit with their machinery running a good two years ahead of most bands’ best case scenario projections. Serious progress for an act that this time last year were still on the stand-by list for the big stages.
“We played T In The Park, we got asked about three days before the festival itself if we could play one of the wee new band stage tents,” remembers singer/guitarist Alex Kapranos, backstage after his band’s Oxegen set and a hectic hotpress-initiated signing session.
“It feels like we jumped a wee bit. It’s really nice the way it’s been going in America, but it’s weird, when you play to the audiences over there it’s almost like you can’t tell the difference. Slightly different accent when they sing along with the songs, but generally the same vibe.”
Yeah verily, there goes the cliché about American audiences disliking fops and not getting irony.
“I think sometimes bands go over there,” Alex says, “without giving them credit for having the same intelligence or appreciation of irony that we have, which is bullshit – of course they do.”
At Oxegen, Franz Ferdinand took a mid-afternoon slot, a move due more to the logistics of making the next show than any indication of hierarchical clout. That they could’ve played a few more notches up the bill belies their spiky melodies and sinewy Euro-centric (as opposed to blues-based) rhythms. In a different year this lot might have found their natural habitat in thousand-capacity venues rather than playing to crowds of 40 times that figure.
“We always thought our music was definitely more indoors sort of music,” Alex concedes. “At first we kind of thought, ‘Oh I wonder what it’s going to be like on these big stages?’ cos it’s not really our natural environment, but it’s been really good. You’ve no idea what kind of buzz you get when you see these thousands of people all jumping up and down and singing along. When we did ‘Take Me Out’ today, all this rain falling and you cannot hear your guitar ‘cos of the noise of people singing along with the riff – it was brilliant.”
Given that the debut album has only been out a few months, talk of a follow-up might seem premature, but as everyone from Patti Smith to Portishead might attest, you can never have enough prep time for a second record.
“To be honest the whole band’s desperate to get back in the studio,” Alex admits. “I know Nick (McCarthy) and I have been writing songs for the past few months or so. Thing is, you can write a song anywhere, you can write a song in the back of a bus.”
Bands usually say that if you’re on the road, you can’t write a song worth a damn.
“You can! You can write a song anywhere, the hard thing to do is arrange a song, to get the song to sound like the band is playing it. That takes hours and hours of sitting around together in a room working it out. I think at the moment what we’re doing is writing songs with the same attitude as we wrote the first album, almost as if the first album didn’t exist. I think of songs in their own right rather than part of an album, and then take a bit of a step back and say, ‘Right, how does this all fit together?’”
Alex points out that the increase in people downloading individual tunes as opposed to shelling out for albums has further sharpened their songwriting craft.
“As a band we’re big fans of the seven inch single, a song that does stand up completely by itself, and I think for too many years of this album culture there’s been this process of bands recording one, one-and-a-half catchy songs, one goes out as a hit, there’s kind of a weaker follow-up and then you buy the album and the rest of it’s shite. It’s unlistenable. It’s not even unlistenable; it’s just boring. There seems to be a laziness in songwriting amongst people who know they can get away with it, and I think downloading’s gonna totally undermine that.”
There is something cool about audiences being utterly mercenary about their consumption of music.
“Of course, they should be! Of course they should be, I know I am. If I don’t like it I’m not gonna listen to it.”

The single ‘Michael’ is out on Domino on August 16