THE TWO MUSCLY frat boys in backwards baseball caps, close-cropped T-shirts
and baggy jeans look as though they’ve just been smacked across the back of
the head by the Zen master’s cane. “This song is for all you beautiful
gentlemen out there,” Alex Kapranos, the lead singer of the Mercury
Prize-winning band Franz Ferdinand, says when introducing their song Michael
on stage at the Tweeter Centre in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
“No way! The song’s about a dude?” one of the frat boys exclaims to the other,
gripped by the sudden realisation that the erotic longing in the song they’d
been dancing to at home for months is directed not at a girl shaking her
thing on the dance floor but towards a man.
But despite having their Bowie-esque gender bending completely misinterpreted
by the hordes, Franz Ferdinand are one of Britain’s most successful musical
exports to America in recent years.
You would expect their ambiguous sexuality, art school backgrounds and love of
melodrama and posture to be a kiss-of-death trinity in the American
marketplace, yet the group’s self-titled debut album has sold more than
650,000 copies in the US (and about 2.5 million worldwide). That may be
paltry compared to someone like Eminem, who moves that many units in a good
weekend, but for a Scottish band on a small independent label (granted, with
a Sony distribution deal), who were complete unknowns a little over a year
ago, these are extraordinary figures — particularly at a time when the
British music industry is wringing its hands over its consistent failure to
break into the American market.
To put this into some kind of context, even with his huge promotional and PR
machine behind him and an enormous contract riding on his success, Robbie
Williams — the quintessential British pop star of the last decade — has
never had an album sell as many copies in the US.
What sets Franz Ferdinand apart from their British peers is their willingness
to pay their dues (they’ve been on tour almost constantly since April —
something that strongly appeals to the American work ethic), and their
attitude. “I think some acts, and I’m not going to mention any names,
thought that because they were big in the UK they should get the same kind
of treatment in America,” says Kapranos.
He is sitting backstage at the Continental Airlines Arena in suburban New
Jersey, where Franz Ferdinand are about to play in a bizarre package concert
with the nu-metal kingpins Papa Roach, Korn and Velvet Revolver. “When they
didn’t get the same treatment they got in the UK, they got huffy. When we
first came here, we were playing to 40 people in the back of some pub. But
we got to go to New York and play to 40 people — that was brilliant as far
as we were concerned. I get the impression that big egos aren’t particularly
popular in the States.”
“Really?” the rest of the band (guitarist Nick McCarthy, drummer Paul Thomson
and bassist Bob Hardy) chime in, somewhat incredulously, reminding Kapranos
that across the hall is Velvet Revolver’s strictly off-limits “Vibe Room”,
part of three dressing rooms assigned to the group made up of former Guns ’N
Roses members. “Well, yeah, yeah, OK — for a band starting out, at least,”
Kapranos concedes.
Franz Ferdinand’s surprising commercial success Stateside has just been topped
off by three Grammy nominations for Best Short-Form Video (for Take Me Out),
Best Alternative Music Album and Best Rock Performance by a Group or Duo
With Vocal (for Take Me Out). It’s been a remarkable year, to say the
least, for the Glaswegian band whose first gig was in a friend’s bedroom in
the summer of 2002.
After their boudoir bit, the group, named after the Austro-Hungarian archduke
whose assassination led to the outbreak of the First World War, sought out
their own performance/living space in a derelict Art Deco warehouse
overlooking the River Clyde. Dubbing it “the Chateau”, Franz Ferdinand
hosted rave-like parties in the space, with local artists given free reign
and some of the best bands in the emerging Glasgow scene playing at
ear-shattering volume. They discovered that the warehouse once stored
sporting equipment, so held “Sports and Leisure nights” where they attached
rowing machines to trolleys and held races.
In lieu of lasers and strobes, the Chateau’s lighting system comprised banks
of sunbeds that flickered randomly as bands such as Scatter (a nine-piece
improvising folk-jazz ensemble that sometimes includes Franz Ferdinand’s
Nick McCarthy), Uncle John and Whitelock, and Park Attack played.
It didn’t take long for the authorities to cotton on and bust the place,
taking Kapranos into custody for running an illegal club.
Finagling his way out of the charges, Kapranos and the rest of the band opened
up “The Chateau Mark II” in a disused Victorian prison on the other side of
town, and continued to put on underground happenings.
The Scotsman said that The Chateau was “destined to be Glasgow’s South
Bank Centre”, and the old-fashioned word of mouth generated by its events
created enough buzz for the group to get spotted and signed by London-based
indie label Domino.
They released their first single, the-Strokes-in-a-glitterball-daze disco-rock
stomper Darts of Pleasure, in September 2003. Four months later,
their second single — the ridiculously catchy Take Me Out — hit
number three in the British pop chart on the strength of a great hook,
skinny-tie rifferama and a lead guitar line that vaguely recalled the early
Eighties bagpipe pomp of their fellow countrymen Big Country.
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Along with the usual hype from the music press (with typical understatement
the NME said, “This band will change your life”) and accolades from
the mainstream media (they were named GQ’s Band of the Year),
their album — which reached number three in the UK charts — won the Mercury
Music Prize in September, almost a year to the day after they released Darts
of Pleasure.
“People were saying that we were the favourites, but it still came as a real
shock,” McCarthy recalls.
“We were told that the favourites never win,” Kapranos adds. “The weirdest
thing was that the next day we flew to New York. You know how they have,
like, the BBC news on the plane? I remember all these people watching
the news and there’s Bob at the award ceremony, and we’re getting all these
strange looks from the other passengers.”
But the sudden attention thrust upon them has made for stories that put a few
awkward moments on a Boeing 747 in the shade. “One of the weirdest things
over the last year actually is how much stories get exaggerated,” Kapranos
says. “I’m mildly asthmatic, and I took a puff of my inhaler on stage at a
gig in Glasgow. The headlines of the tabloids the next day were ‘Alex
Kapranos Suffers Asthma Attack On Stage’. Actually I was taking my inhaler
out of my pocket ’cause it was getting in the way. I thought, ‘Why not have
a little puff while it’s out’.”
Hardy, who has just recovered from a bout of severe gastroenteritis that
required hospital treatment in Japan, adds: “When I was ill I was getting
emails from everybody I knew, and from people I didn’t, saying, ‘God it
sounds horrible. Hope you’re getting better’. I didn’t even tell anybody I
was sick. Two years ago, I was laid up in my flat in Glasgow for weeks and
no one gave a monkey’s, except for my boss, who sacked me.”
Whatever the perils of sudden, unexpected fame, and the potential traps of
being caught up in a Spinal Tap-style rock ’n’ roll circus as they
are tonight, the members of the group remain upbeat. That these four
unassuming Scottish blokes — who play music that owes more to disco dandyism
and arch romanticism than to red-blooded rock’n’roll — are about to share a
stage in a cavernous basketball arena with some of the most iconic figures
in heavy metal merely strikes the band as “funny”.
They are completely impervious to the groupie-groping, testosterone madness
all around them. “It feels like we’re in the only sane place actually,”
Kapranos declares. “We’re in this little quiet cocoon, and all these people
are running around caught in this maelstrom.”
This protective cushioning consists of reading books by Tolstoy and David
Sedaris in their dressing room despite claiming to be “not intellectual, or
even very smart”. They eschew sex with groupies (Kapranos has called it “a
form of abuse that I find absolutely repellent”) and complain about the
bounty of their backstage perks. “They give us, like, 30 bottles of wine,”
McCarthy moans.
“I wish that they would give us just one thing, like a good malt, instead of
all the junk,” Kapranos adds. So much for sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. Of
course, that isn’t to say that Franz Ferdinand are a bunch of moping
wallflowers — their stated aim is “to make music girls can dance to”, after
all. Rather, it’s that sometimes nice guys don’t finish last.
“Problems arise when you become famous and no longer believe that you’re just
an ordinary person,” Kapranos says. “You usually get people coming up to you
going, ‘You’re the guy from that band aren’t you?’ In a situation like that,
if you turn around and go to them, ‘Yeah I am. How are you doing?’, most
people are going to go, ‘Yeah, I’m alright. How are you?’ If you turn around
in that situation and go, ‘Aye, what of it, ya prick?’ someone’s going to
belt you in the face. I think a lot of how people deal with you has to do
with your own attitude. For sure, there are people who are gonna come up to
you and try to start trouble, but you’ve got to keep your head in that
situation and try to grin and bear it.”
Since April, the group have made three trips across the States and two to
Japan. Their tour will finally end tomorrow when they play the SECC in
Glasgow with one of their heroes, the spiky punk-funk group the Fire
Engines, who kick-started the first Scottish art rock explosion some 25
years ago.
“Oh God, does the hell never end?” Kapranos jokingly moans as the band is
escorted to do a live interview with the New York radio station 92.3 K-Rock
before they go stage. “It’s harder to get things done at the rate at which
you want to get things done because you’re always doing things like this
during the day,” Kapranos says later.
“During the summer we spent a couple of hours a day trying to write songs. It
takes a lot of self-discipline, a certain amount of forcing yourself to do
things. I never want to feel like we’re a covers band, where we’re just
covering ourselves all the time. In order to stay alive you’ve got to keep
creating.”
Level-headed, mature and seemingly free of the distractions that plague most
overnight success stories, Franz Ferdinand are poised to avoid the sudden
demise that afflicts so many such bands.
Not even that hoary old music biz cliché, the “difficult second album”,
appears to hold any extra burden for the group, who have been writing songs
for the album (which they will record in January) whenever they have a spare
minute. “The first album’s where all the pressure is,” Kapranos claims.
“That’s like, ‘Hello, we are a band called Franz Ferdinand. This is what
we’re about’.
“The second album’s where you get to have fun, where you get to take things
further and develop things. If anything, it’s less pressure.”
