Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand - "I'm a C*nt Myself!"

"Lots of my favourite artists were cunts. I’m a cunt myself. How big a one? That’s for other people to determine!”

Alex Kapranos, who actually gives Dave Grohl a run for his money in the rock ‘n’ roll niceness stakes, is reflecting on how Franz Ferdinand’s new Always Ascending album was recorded under the influence of “well-known cunt” John Lennon’s debut solo offering, Imagine.

“What I can’t stand is the deification of any artists,” the 45-year-old singer expands. “This idea that they’re pure of motive and being is bollocks. It’s not true of any human, although some are much bigger bastards than others. John Lennon was an incredibly powerful songwriter and performer, but in his personal life… total cunt. Despite - or probably because of – that, once I started listening to

Imagine, I couldn’t stop. I’m obsessed with not just the sound of it, but also the period in Lennon’s life that it documents. He’d just come out of the band he’d been in for a decade and was trying to figure out his place in the world. I’m not equating Franz Ferdinand with The Beatles, but we’d just lost Nick (McCarthy) from the line-up and were asking those questions about our own identity.”

Asked whether he’s read Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone, which imagines (no pun intended) Lennon visiting the island off the Mayo coast he bought at the height of the Fab Four’s fame, with the intention of turning it into a hippie commune, Alex gasps and says, “That’s amazing! I haven’t, but I will now. He had Irish roots, of course, so maybe that’s why he bought himself an island there. I thought I knew pretty much all there is to know about John Lennon, but obviously not…”

John Lennon may have provided the spiritual guidance, but sonically Always Ascending bears the hallmarks of Bowie, Byrne, Sparks – more of whom anon – and Cassius’ Philippe Zdar who succeeded in making the recording process fun. 

“As it should be! You should be performing, there should be humanity and there should be emotion. A lot of producers come from an engineering background and see their job purely as sculpting the sound whereas I see their role as being closer to that of a theatre or film director – somebody who knows how to coax the performance out of the artist. Philip has that sonic beauty, sure, but he’s also lush and very human, a master of the dancefloor – he comes from that French scene, and is a DJ himself – and brings the party with him.”

Talking of which, if I were young and foolhardy I’d probably pop an E listening to the Always Ascending title-track.

“You’re never too old for that sort of carry on, Stuart!” Alex laughs throatily. “Another thing I loved about working with Philippe – and this comes from his experience as a DJ – is that he doesn’t think of songs in isolation. They’re part of a whole, which is why there are dynamic builds and drops, which are ideal for pharmaceutical exploration. We’re finding from the Apple Music feedback that a lot of people still like listening to tracks one through ten rather than cherry-picking.”

Always Ascending’s big bang of Sparks isn’t suprising given that Franz recorded and toured an album recently with Ron and Russ under the FFS banner.

“No home should be without a copy of Sparks’ Kimono My House, which used to be mentioned in the same breath as Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust, but isn’t anymore,” he rues. “Part of my motivation for making that FFS record is that I wanted them to be reappraised, and I think there has been a regeneration of interest in their music. A similar thing happened to Talking Heads in the early 2000s. They’d been giants of their era but that stature seemed to diminish for a while. Now, of course, they have legendary status, but bands do get somewhat airbrushed out of history. Of course, Ron and Russell have always believed that they’re geniuses.”

One of the rudest awakenings Alex has ever had was on January 10, 2016 when somebody from the BBC rang up to ask him for his response to David Bowie dying.

“Yeah, it was a terrible way to hear the news. They wanted a comment from me for the eight o’clock news but I said, ‘Sorry, no, I have to assimilate this first.’ Like a lot of people, I was completely shattered that day. He was a total inspiration, a big part of my life and I had presumed he would live forever. Even now, I find it weird talking about him in the past tense.

“We were fortunate enough to meet him several times. He was famous for being switched onto new music, and from the beginning was very supportive of Franz Ferdinand. He was always very interesting and interested. Even though he was being as low-key as it’s possible to be if you’re David Bowie, the charisma level was off the scale.”

Franz ruffled alt-right feathers last year when they contributed ‘Demagogue’ –“He’s fatally famous, he plays with my fears/ My shadow side is dreaming, it feels so good to be dumb/ From the Wall straight to La Quenta, those pussy grabbing fingers won’t let go of me now” - to the 30 Days, 30 Songs playlist for a Trump-free America.

“I got feedback from a certain element in the US saying, ‘Who are you to come and comment about this man who is going to be our president?’ and I was like, ‘We’re as entitled as anybody else because your choice of president will affect everybody in the world.’ We’re all on tenterhooks wondering what the fuck this clown is going to do next.

“I don’t agree that America is broken, though. I was over there recently and my friends are living their lives exactly as they did before. What they have become is more politically engaged in a way that I haven’t known since the age of Thatcher in the UK. It’s the same with my family in Greece who are out every second day on the streets protesting. Unlike Maggie, Trump isn’t motivated by any political idealism. It’s all about needing to have his ego massaged 24 hours a day.”

Talking of mass protests, as Alex and I chat, the Joe Duffy phone-lines are being melted by U2 fans irate at tickets for their 3Arena shows ending up on secondary sites for close to two grand a piece.

“Unfortunately, that’s the way it is nowadays,” Alex notes. “We played with U2 in Spain, which was crazy, and then went to Brazil, Argentina and Chile with them, which was even crazier! There was one gig in the Estadio River Plate in Buenos Aires where I honestly thought the stands were going to collapse. We’d never done anything like that in our lives before, but the lads were really lovely and welcoming. I’m not sure I’d want that level of craziness every night, but as an experience, wow!”

Franz Ferdinand open for The Killers on June 26 in the RDS, Dublin