>>PREVIEW
FRANZ FERDINAND
Wednesday, April 26
The Corral (Stampede Park)
When I first heard of Franz Ferdinand, I was working in an indie record shop in Edinburgh and it seemed every second art school girl with a fringe (not to mention their equally smooth and svelte boy counterparts) asked if we had anything – anything at all – by Glasgow’s newest pop sensations du jour.
We hadn’t yet, of course, as this was before the group’s eponymous debut was even released – but the hip kids parade that came through our door in search of anything bearing Franz’s name was more than enough to convince me something was up.
The timeline’s a bit fuzzy now, but if memory serves me correctly, the following order of events is indeed how things unfolded. Somehow, Franz Ferdinand landed an opening spot with Interpol at the annual T on the Fringe music series. Despite offering nothing more than simple pins at the merch table (which everyone was wearing by the next morning, yours truly included), the venue was packed to capacity for their opening set. Once they were finished, the strangest thing happened. The mob surrounding the stage stepped away from their closeup viewpoints and shuffled back, allowing an all-new crowd (Interpol’s brand of black-suited metrosexuals and their "lady friends") to take their places. The Franz kids at the back looked bored by the time Interpol took the stage.
The second chapter takes place at what, at that point, was doubtless one of the coolest clubs going in Europe. Held in Glasgow’s tiny SubClub, the weekly Optimo party was the type of event where surprise guest performers could be anyone from The Rapture to Erase Errata, or a reformed Liquid Liquid to LCD Soundsystem. The night Franz Ferdinand appeared, those gathered seemed a fair bit younger than usual, but far more enthusiastic. Had the roof caved in, most of indie Scotland would’ve gone down with it – on one side, we stood next to Stuart Murdoch and Stevie Jackson of Belle and Sebastian, while on the other, Arab Strap moped near the bar. Even Lou Barlow showed up having played across town earlier that evening and watched from the sidelines. Playing who’s who was even more fun than watching the stage.
Weeks later, I’d flown back overseas to tour some friends from Scotland across Canada. Four months later, upon our return to the U.K., Franz Ferdinand were staring back from the cover of the NME on every newsstand in sight, captioned as the newest "Band to Save Your Life." By this point, they were already huge.
Drummer Paul Thompson agrees that even from the heart of the action, it can be hard to keep Franz Ferdinand’s quick rise to the top entirely straight.
"We were expecting something when the first record came out, but nothing approaching what actually happened," he says. "It’s all gone quite fast, especially when you start casting your mind back to two years ago and it doesn’t seem like that long ago at all."
Unlike other near-instant rock success stories of late, Franz Ferdinand took the route less travelled by heading straight back into the studio after less than a year’s worth of touring. Erstwhile showmates Interpol, for one, toured Turn On the Bright Lights for twice as long. While You Could Have it So Much Better doesn’t hold quite the same impact as its predecessor, Franz Ferdinand have at least etched out their own distinctly European metrosexual corner in the dance rock set. Whereas before, tunes like "Michael" and "Darts of Pleasure" were cheeky and loaded, Better tunes like "Do You Want To" are strictly surface, but at least those hipster kids are still dancing in droves.
"We found an old stash of demos and started recording them onto (lead singer) Alex (Kapranos)’s computer, which is where a lot of ideas came from. There were a lot of demos dating back even six or seven years ago," Thompson recalls. "We weren’t wanting to waste any time in getting something out and we did push ourselves in working to a deadline. Thinking back, it would have been nice to not have skimmed over things, but we set it on ourselves really. We’re very hard on ourselves and we thought that since the first record was recorded in three weeks and mixed in 10 that we could do just that again. I think with hindsight, it was a bit naive. We won’t be doing that for the third record."
To prove his point, Franz Ferdinand have already spent some time in the studio in recent weeks reworking one of Better’s finest tracks "Eleanor, Put Your Boots On," Kapranos’s ode to his girlfriend Eleanor Friedberger of the Fiery Furnaces.
"We’ve always kind of relied on spontaneity and just want to keep that going, constantly making something that’s new. This new version makes the album sound like just a rough."
Still, despite the worldwide success they’ve found, Franz Ferdinand’s truest (not to mention most rabid) fanbase still resides at home.
"It exploded in Scotland first," he explains. "I’d been in Glasgow for eight years or something, and was ready to pack it in when all of this happened. I’ve since chosen to live in London, but everybody else is still living in Glasgow. Especially when you’re in a band, Glasgow is quite a small place, and I guess you could say that we’re famous as well, although I hate to admit it to myself.
"I lived in Glasgow for eight years and nobody cares who you are. Suddenly everyone knows your name, and you just don’t get that in London. There’s less people there that even give a fuck."
The last time I was in Scotland, Franz Ferdinand were headlining a stadium gig in Glasgow’s massive Scottish Exhibit and Conference Centre. Back in Edinburgh, my friends and I decided to act out an experiment. At roughly 3:30 a.m., we tossed an extra copy of Franz Ferdinand’s self-titled debut out of an apartment window on the Royal Mile, planning to time exactly how long it would take someone to pick it up off the street. In the mere moments it took to move to the other room to fill up our drinks and return, the disc was gone. I knew then that the group we’d seen performing in miniscule basement clubs all of 18 months before had really made it. |
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