Franz Ferdinand Press Conference

Whilst this Glaswegian quartet are still out in full force promoting their cracking new single ‘No You Girls’, I thought it appropriate to reprint the result of my day trip up to London to attend the ‘Tonight’ student album launch. This was indeed every bit as awesome as it sounds. Essentially, as part of a collective of student hacks, I was invited to up to the Hilton hotel in London where we were first played through the album, two weeks before its eventual release, at ear splitting volume and then given the chance to quiz the band in a mini press conference. Franz themselves, stuck rigidly to the unwritten law that all post-punk bands must simultaneously be jaw droppingly cool/self important. Still, this was a time before the eventual disappointment of ‘Tonight’ had hit home or indeed I had suffered the horror of viewing the band on ‘Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway’ and so of course, I will probably never stop blabbing on about it...

Q: Was it a conscious decision to differ the sound of this album differ from the dance floor centric sonics of your previous efforts?

Alex Kapronos: We like the dance floor, we wanted to do it in a different way. There are elements of our first two records that came ubiquitous after release and we wanted to move away from that. This record has a different feel to it which reflects the night time vibe. It follows the principle of the 70s, which was the melodies lead by the bass guitar and partly the mixing and the arrangement of the songs.

Paul Thompson: It’s just one big sex metaphor [the dance floor] and usually when I’m dancing I’ll clear it completely.

Q: Tell us the story behind first single off the album ‘Ulysses’?

Alex Kapranos: When we write songs, we just write songs. We don’t think in terms of lets write a single now. The story of ‘Ulysses’ is just a great tale as 2000 years after it was written you can still emphasise with this character feeling that he’s never going home. There are always times you feel like that. Even when you’re in a band, there are sometimes when you feel ‘God where the hell am I! Am I ever going to go home?’ If you let that get you down then it’s disaster but if you treat it as an adventure and something to be embraced then that’s a grand thing.

Q: How did you find the experience of working with Brian Higgins and Xenomania [producers for Girls Aloud] in original sessions for the album?

Alex Kapranos: I enjoyed it. It was really interesting to go down there and see how they worked.

Paul Thompson: We did some stuff for the pre-album sessions with James Ford and Erol Ankin and we took something from each of those. They’re all completely different people with completely different working methods.

Bob Hardy: Xeno have an amazing work ethic which we took in and took back to Glasgow with us. James Ford is completely different work ethic though, which is go and the pub and have a couple of pints before we do any kind of recording.

Q: How are you finding the process of reworking the songs for a live setting?

Alex Kapranos: It’s still a learning process for us. We’re still figuring out how to play ‘Lucid Dreams’ for that. The songs are going down really well though, especially now when people know them and you can see which ones are swinging the audience. Certainly ones like ‘Ulysses’ and ‘What She Came For’ are sounding great.

Q: The record seems to have been designed with a certain flow to it. Was this a deliberate decision?

Alex Kapranos: When we were putting the record we were thinking about the dynamic of a night out. ‘Lucid Dreams’ is the climax and the come down is through ‘Dream Again’ and ‘Katherine Kiss Me’. We do see it as a complete album rather than a collection of songs. There’s a lot of effort that goes into the arrangement of a song, which melody goes where and so forth. But the same effort goes into the construction of an album and I think that’s important. It’s like making a compilation album. You can tell how much somebody loves you by how well they put a compilation together for you. If you listen to it and it flows really well, you can tell that person really cares for you and that’s what we’ve tried to do with this album.

Q: You’ve described the album as a ‘revolt against what everyone else is doing’. What do you mean by that?

Alex Kapranos: I think as a band that’s how you define yourself. I know when we first got together we wanted to do something that was completely at odds with what was around us. There weren’t many guitar bands around and there just seemed to be a load of formulaic pop music in the chart. Now there seems to be a degree of formulaic guitar bands and we wanted to rebel against us on the album.

Q: Which other bands do you think follow this ethos?

Paul Thompson: I think Late Of The Pier are very much going against the grain, I don’t think they sound like anything else.

Alex Kapranos: They’re so original in that they have very weird songs with such strong melodies.

Q: What is it about Glasgow that gives the city such a strong musical tradition right from Orange Juice to Glasvegas?

Alex Kapranos: I love Glasvegas I think they’re a great band. They’re continuing a tradition of bands from Glasgow that sound nothing like each other and that seems to be tradition of Glasgow to me. Mogwai sound nothing like Belle and Sebastian, who sound nothing like the Delgados. They want to kick out at what’s around at the particular time.

Q: Two of the highlights on the album are ‘No You Girls’ and ‘Katherine Kiss Me’, they both share a common story. Can you explain that for us?

Alex Kapranos: Two songs are about how we recall different events in our lives in different ways. Both ‘Katherine Kiss Me’ and ‘No You Girls’ are about kissing a girl for the first time. ‘No You Girls’ is sung like an anecdote to your friends down the pub when you exaggerate and become the hero of the story; you make things a little more glamorous. ‘Katherine Kiss Me’ is recalling the same event and remembering how emotional fragile and venerable you felt and maybe how it wasn’t as good as you thought it was.

Paul Thompson: There’s something about Glaswegians telling a story and then embellishing it.

Bob Hardy: It’s probably to do with the cold weather.

Q: Finally, what happened to the African influences on the album? (Guitarist McCarthy was quoted in the Independent as saying "Our new songs have an African feel – the whole album does.")

Alex Kapranos: Over the course of the album we tried to talk to the press as little as possible but when we did do an interview it tended to get blown out of all proportion. So when we came off stage after African Express and a reporter from the Independent asked whether we liked African music we said ‘of course we do’ and that through a series of Chinese whispers, also known as the internet, became ‘Franz Ferdinand to make African album’.

Paul Thompson: The influence is so minimal so much more has gone into the album than that.

‘Tonight’ the third album by Franz Ferdinand is out now (MySpace)