![]() ![]() In his early days in the city the 30-year-old tried anything to make ends meet. He'd followed his German girlfriend to Glasgow where she was studying. I really wasn't enjoying making music much." I was just starting to think it was a bit fruitless. "I didn't have a proper job or anything, I didn't know what I was gonna do. Like Kapranos he'd been in a succession of low-key Glasgow bands. "I was about to give up before this started," says Paul Thomson, 28. This is their moment, and they aren't going to slip up. Keeping busy is part of what Franz Ferdinand are about. And in between those, on what are nominally days off, they're in the studio. In between the main festival events Franz Ferdinand are playing their own "side-shows", such as last night's sell-out at The Palais. Above them are the reformed Iggy and the Stooges and The White Stripes. The Glasgow-based band are third from the top, preceded by fast-rising British acts The Subways, The Go! Team and The Magic Numbers, and by hairy Oz heavy rock phenomenon Wolfmother. Franz Ferdinand are here to appear at Big Day Out, a travelling festival that criss-crosses Australia and New Zealand. A few hours after landing they will be on stage in a Sao Paolo stadium, the first show of a South American tour supporting U2.īut first, the Antipodes. They will come offstage in Bangkok, get a police escort to the airport, fly directly to London, spend a few hours at a hotel at Heathrow, then take a flight to Brazil. Immediately after, they play southeast Asia. They've been on tour since last summer, since before the autumn release of second album You Could Have It So Much Better, which came out a scant 20 months after their self-titled debut. Bunkered inside Hothouse Studios, Franz Ferdinand don't notice. It's summertime in Melbourne and the tropical rain is lashing down on the boho St Kilda neighbourhood centred on Acland Street. Here, at last, was a (omega) sharp, homegrown riposte to the dominance of the US bands (The Strokes, The White Stripes) that had filled the vacuum.Īnd for Franz themselves, the gameplan - the marrying of great songs with strong visual ideas and a rigorous all-round aesthetic - paid off spectacularly: two albums in two years with combined sales of 5.5m Brit Awards and a US MTV gong the Mercury Prize 2004 significant US success on their last UK tour, four sold-out nights at London's Alexandra Palace. Almost single-handedly Franz Ferdinand revived British guitar rock - a scene that had been mouldering since the mid-1990s heights of Britpop and Oasis. It would beget the dancefloor-friendly, retro-savvy, chart-bound, fashionably attired success of Kaiser Chiefs, Maxïmo Park, The Rakes and Editors, and even, arguably, pave the way for Arctic Monkeys. No wonder fashion photographers and designers such as Dior's Hedi Slimane flocked to the band.įor boring old indie music this was visionary stuff. Franz Ferdinand made updated post-punk, clever pop music for the feet and the brain. This "reimagining" of what bands did also entailed cool graphic design, innovative videos and eclectic references - not just inspirational new wave bands (Wire, Gang Of Four) but also magical-realist author Mikhail Bulgakov, Dadaism and the choreography of Busby Berkeley. Even bass player Bob Hardy, normally a picture a blank insouciance - and tonight clearly suffering from the effects of six months' touring - gets a little theatrical during "Take Me Out". Paul Thomson drums with the open-mouthed abandon of Animal from the Muppets. Kapranos boings about on stiff, gangly legs, as if receiving jolts of electricity from the stage. "January in Melbourne is a lot different from January in Glasgow."Īnd nor are they forgetting the edict about putting on a show. "Evening Melbourne, how are you going?" he says, adopting the Aussie vernacular. Not the ones about engaging directly with the audience at all times: singer Alex Kapranos and guitarist Nick McCarthy stare intently at the crowd in the sold-out Palais, as if mesmerised by them (an inversion of the usual performer/punter relationship). In a punkily black, packed-to-the-rafters club on St Kilda beach in Melbourne, Franz Ferdinand are messing with their founding principles.
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