Tag: Bus

“It wasn’t the plan,” says Kapranos, a well-preserved, short-haired 52-year-old, when I point this out to him. He’s in the Charlotte Street Hotel in London with Hardy, the two remaining original band members after the guitarist Nick McCarthy left in 2016 and the drummer Paul Thomson followed in 2021. “It was only afterwards that I realised, oh my God, every single song has the same essential fear,” he adds.

On the album, The Doctor is about the fear of leaving an institution. Night or Day is about the fear of committing to a relationship. Tell Me I Should Stay is about the fear of saying goodbye to someone. And so it goes on, with a dissonance between the cheerful music saying one thing and the anxious lyrics saying another.

Kapranos became a father last year, which made all his usual fears seem trivial — and easier to write about. “The songs simply come from me and Bob talking about the things on our minds. That is how we started: as an imaginary band. Most bands are made up of people who want to play guitar and be good musicians, but we had no desire for craft for craft’s sake.”

At least Kapranos had ten years of experience of being in actual bands before Franz Ferdinand took off; Hardy had none whatsoever. “I never had the patience to learn a musical instrument so it was a steep learning curve for me,” says Hardy, who was yet to graduate from Glasgow School of Art when the music took off. “But the price of entry was learning to play the bass and even I could do that. All I knew is that in art school anything goes, so I brought that attitude to the band. You know, ‘Why don’t we project this film against the stage?’”

Kapranos and Hardy were working in the kitchen of Groucho St Judes, Glasgow’s outpost of the London private members’ club, when in 2000 they had the idea of forming a band to play at their friends’ parties. “Alex showed me how to play a song he had written called This Fire, which only had two chords, and then we met Nick and Paul,” Hardy recalls. “Our first gig was in a friends’ bedroom in 2002. Before I knew it we were recording our first album in Sweden.”

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Before long Franz Ferdinand were a phenomenon, featured on the January 10, 2004, cover of the NME alongside the proclamation: “This band will change your life.” By then Kapranos was 31, and had come to the conclusion only a year or so earlier that it was never going to happen for him.

“I remember reaching 27 and thinking, this is the age I’m meant to die. But I can’t, because I’m still not a rock star,” he says. “When we recorded our first single, Darts of Pleasure, I had to pull a sickie.”

Right from the off, Franz Ferdinand’s sharply written pop songs with an underground edge made an impact. “In the early 2000s Britpop was over and it was all post-rock — long, meandering jams with no melody whatsoever,” Kapranos says. “And we liked the Everly Brothers. So, touched with a bit of Scottish contrariness, we aimed to do something completely different from everything that was happening.”

Hardy, who left his native Bradford for Glasgow in 1999, remembers joining Franz Ferdinand and then not returning home for the next three years. “I had nothing to compare it to, so I thought, well, we’re good, so of course we’re playing to thousands of people each night all over the world. That’s what bands do, right?”

“After so many years of rejection I said no to nothing,” Kapranos says of that time. “I wanted to talk about my songs, I wanted to play as many concerts as possible, and as a result we completely exhausted ourselves. I ended up living in a state of euphoria mixed with self-loathing, which is very unhealthy.”

It led to some friction. In 2004 the band had a punch-up in Paris. McCarthy, the band’s natural extrovert, had a tendency to invite whoever he met that day to come backstage after the concert, which led to blazing rows between him and Kapranos. “He’s a good-hearted guy, but he always wanted to keep the party going. The real problem wasn’t Nick but the incorrigible people he kept bringing back.”

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Even Kapranos and Hardy had a falling out around the release of their third album, Tonight: Franz Ferdinand (2009). “We decided to meet in Orkney to sort it out, simply because neither of us had been there before,” Kapranos says.

Was that such a good idea? Surely a remote island like Orkney would be an excellent place to murder someone. “The cliffs! He just slipped!” Hardy gasps, imagining the scenario.

The reason for the argument was comically trivial. In 2006 Kapranos was writing a food column for The Guardian and using it as a covert tour diary for the band. “I started one of the pieces with the line, ‘I wake up to the smell of my bandmates’ farts’,” Kapranos says, after a bit of to and fro between him and Hardy on whether he should recount the unfortunate incident at all. “Because what happens on a tour bus.”

“The implication was that you don’t fart,” Hardy retorts, still sounding aggrieved after all these years.

“You don’t smell your own farts,” Kapranos protests.

“If a journalist on the tour bus had written it, you would have gone apoplectic.”

“So basically Bob was pissed off that I told the world he farted. He hasn’t ever since, obviously.”

Kapranos says the worst thing about being in a band with friends is that by spending so much time together on a tour bus, odorous emissions and all, you end up not talking to each other because you’re trying to preserve your independence. Hardy adds that constant drinking, which raises the highs and lowers the lows, doesn’t help. It all got too much for Thomson, who quit in a dramatic fashion: refusing to turn up to a tour rehearsal. Did he give a reason for leaving the band?

“He had just bought a new coffee machine,” Hardy says. “He didn’t want to leave it.”

“That and his cats and dogs,” Kapranos adds.

Both say that the Franz Ferdinand trajectory follows a formula: they come off the road, go back to their lives, and make no plans to see each other again. Then Kapranos sends over a few songs and before they know it they’re in a kitchen, talking about what to do next. Where does Kapranos’s drive come from?”

“Oh God, lie back on the couch and tell me about your mother,” says Kapranos, who spent his early years in Sunderland before moving with his Greek-British family to Glasgow when he was seven. “It was the usual shit. Alienation, isolation, a childhood retreat into the imagination to escape from an environment that was deeply unpleasant … It’s why singers tend to be introverted people. On stage, you amplify a small part of yourself to make up for the rest of you. And as the child of an immigrant you know where you’re from while also knowing you’re not from there, which is also odd.”

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At least Kapranos has now got his life on a relatively even keel. As well as becoming a father, he’s married to the French singer Clara Luciani. “She has a totally different approach to me,” he says. “Before going on stage I want to talk to nobody for two hours because someone might say something that will get in my head, but if you go to her dressing room she’s got 15 hairdressers around her. It’s good to see a different way.”

Despite its fretful tone, The Human Fear continues with Franz Ferdinand’s approach of never taking anything too seriously, least of all themselves. Take Me Out, their biggest hit, was partially inspired by the outrageously cheesy Eye of the Tiger by Survivor, while a song on the new album called Black Eyelashes references a style of Greek folk music called rebetiko. As Kapranos points out, guitar bands were unfashionable when Franz Ferdinand started out and they are unfashionable today, which is a good argument for carrying on regardless.

“When we began, there was an assumption that we would not be played on the radio,” he concludes. “We never worried about that then and we don’t worry about it now. We did once stumble accidentally into fashion, which proved to be a disconcerting experience. Since then we’ve just got on with our own thing.”

The Human Fear (Domino) is out on Jan 10