Alex Kapranos: 'I feel very much like a living artist, and I feel very much in the present now'
Alex Kapranos: “I love what happened 20 years ago and I feel very fortunate that we had such an amazing time back then, but I feel very much like a living artist, and I feel very much in the present now."
At a time when anniversary tours which hark back to an act’s glory days are rife, Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos has his feet firmly planted in the present.
The Scottish rockers released a greatest hits album — — in 2022 but resisted the lure of embarking on an anniversary tour last year to mark 20 years since the release of their 2004 Mercury-winning, self-titled debut which sold more than five million copies worldwide.
Instead, Kapranos has been focusing on creating — their sixth album and first since 2018.
The singer-songwriter says he still loves playing their early hits such as 'Take Me Out', 'No You Girls' and 'Do You Want To' but he does not want that to be where the band’s story ends.
“I love what happened 20 years ago and I feel very fortunate that we had such an amazing time back then, but I feel very much like a living artist, and I feel very much in the present now,” he explains.
“There’s often pressure that comes from promoters to do these 20-year anniversary tours... and fair play to anybody who wants to do that sort of thing but, for me, it doesn’t appeal at all. I want to be living in the moment now. I want to be making new songs that are just as good as those old ones and feel alive as an artist now.”
Their new 10 track offering conjures the classic Franz Ferdinand sound of yesteryear with gritty guitar riffs and Kapranos’s signature vocals but it feels refreshed, a 2.0 version of sorts. This evolution was influenced by the addition of new members — drummer Audrey Tait, guitarist Dino Bardot and keyboardist and producer Julian Corrie — joining original members Kapranos and bassist Bob Hardy in recent years.
“We wanted to be unashamed of sounding like Franz Ferdinand,” Kapranos tells me from his parent’s home in Glasgow, the city where everything began for the band.
“‘Yeah, this is us. This is who we are. This is how we sound, like’ but the interesting thing is once you take that attitude, it’s actually quite liberating. It allows you to go to places like ‘We sound like this, but we’re going to do this other thing that we’ve not done before’.
"And so I think there’s actually quite a lot of places on the record that sound like things that we’ve not done before.”
Their new venture has been well received, receiving mostly positive reviews and shooting to number three in the UK albums chart following its release, with only pop megastar Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan holding them back from the top spot.
The singer says the warm reception has made him “really happy” as he still puts a great deal of his attention in to creating “good songs”, despite some of his contemporaries feeling that is “irrelevant” nowadays and shifting their attention to the texture of the music.
“I just wanted the songs to be great,” he says. “The kind of songs that anybody could play and they’d still sound like a good song whether it was somebody busking them on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow or a rock and roll band covering it, or us playing it, or an EDM artist.
“If it’s a good song, it’s undeniably a good song.”
Their new track 'Hooked' was certainty an experiment for the group with its infusion of EDM-style synths but it was actually inspired by how fatherhood has changed Kapranos’ perception of “the human fear”.
Kapranos and his wife, French singer Clara Luciani, welcomed their first child in 2023, and the 52-year-old reveals he was not prepared for the strength of his emotions.
He recalls: “Before he was born lots of people said to me ‘You’re going love your son so much’. I thought ‘Yeah, of course I am. He’s going to be my kid. I’m going to love him’. I wasn’t prepared for how strong that was going to be, but also how unfamiliar that love was going to be as well. It felt like this completely novel, overwhelming experience.”
These new bubbling emotions provided the basis for the song. “I’m singing about those fears that we all have,” he says. “You could call them existential fears, the fears that we all have like solitude or introspection, the big ones, the futility of it all, ‘What’s going happen when I don’t exist?’ The funny thing is that after I felt all this sensation of this new love after my son was born, and I came to terms with it, I realised that all those fears I’d always had were still there, but something had shifted a little bit. They just seemed a little bit trivial in comparison.”
The rock band signed to their label Domino in 2003, releasing their first single 'Darts Of Pleasure' shortly after. But it was their second track 'Take Me Out' which propelled them into the limelight with its punchy guitar riffs and catchy hook.
An appearance at South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Texas in 2004 helped them break into America, a trip which they were able to take after receiving a grant from the Scottish Arts Council.
Fast-forward 20 years and the arts body Creative Scotland announced last summer that it is closing its Open Fund for Individuals to new applications amid uncertainty over funding from the Scottish Government. Franz Ferdinand were among the thousands of artists and music industry professionals who signed a letter which claimed the cuts to arts funding would be a “cultural catastrophe”.
“I thought it was a tragedy that funding was removed because it’s showing a destructive short-sightedness on two levels”, Kapranos asserts.
“Those decisions are made by people from an accounting perspective, and if you treat it purely on that level, it’s a short-sighted and self-harming move to take because the arts from Scotland, or from any country, generates so much income.”
“It’s much, much more than that as well because a nation doesn’t gain its identity through its finances, it gains its identity through its artistic personality and character,” he adds.
The singer emphasises that it is not just established artists who define this, but also the next generation who are coming through, and he believes they need to be supported. He notes the funding can be deployed in “very effective” ways which maximises its impact by funding faculties which nurture the talent and provide them with a space to learn, perform and connect with others.
Kapranos recalls the kindness of a benefactor who supported him, providing equipment and a space at a music venue in Glasgow called The 13th Note Cafe.
“Suddenly all these facilities were there and this wonderful scene blossomed at that time in the 90s, and it was glorious”, he says.
“How can we nurture, how can we give people the opportunity to explore their ideas and to give them some structure within which they can follow their ideas? You can be smart about it without wasting your money.”
- by Franz Ferdinand is out now
