Hello,
You join us this morning for an entertaining chat with Alex Kapranos, as the Franz Ferdinand frontman takes on our Life & Times questionnaire. The Scottish quintet recently released their excellent sixth record The Human Fear, another debonair delivery of artful, sharp-suited indie-rock for a band who blew up big from the moment they released Take Me Out in 2004 and haven’t been seen with their shirts untucked since.
The band embark on a short UK tour in early March, by which time they will already be well into the groove thanks to the European jaunt leading up to it. Alex checked in with Niall over Zoom on Friday from his dressing room in Zurich on a delightfully crisp and cold blue sky Swiss day. Alex says that it’s favourite weather. “We don’t get it a lot in Scotland,” he adds.
The band’s new record is a celebration of the magical alchemy of a rock’n’roll band, the weird, wonderful sounds that emerge from people playing in a room together. “It’s eternal, the sound of people playing together,” Alex says. “There’s something that only happens with that particular combination of people, that energy that you get. People have different dynamics and when you get a collection of people where it works really well, you can't replicate that in any way. I love electronic music, I love dance music, and I love music that's constructed but, for us, that way of doing it works really well.”
They’re a band who’ve constantly found a way to revitalise themselves without ever losing the spaghetti junction dynamism that made them so exciting in the first place, even if they have lost a few members along the way. But Alex has always been there front and centre. He’s a smart and friendly fella, as you’lll see below.
Before we get to that, though, here’s a reminder that today’s edition is free but if you don’t already, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to The New Cue so we can keep the good stuff coming. It costs £5 a month and you’ll get full access to every edition as well as our Raiders Of The Lost Ark-style archive. Come on, it's £5, wise up.
You can become a better human by subscribing here, and then enjoy our chat with Alex below.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted and Niall
The Life & Times Of… Alex Kapranos
What was the first record you loved?
It would have been one of my parents' records, probably The Beatles’ red album. My mum had a copy of that and we used to play it to death when I was a little kid. I remember jumping around and going crazy for it.
And the last?
Lewsberg's In Your Hands. There's a Velvet Underground kind of vibe to them mixed with a bit of Jonathan Richman, but it's colder than that. There's a song called The Corner and his lyrics are like Raymond Carver, he's got that conciseness about his writing, there's that cold observation of very heated emotion which I really love, when you're having somebody with a bit of distance, observing something quite close to them, and obviously quite dramatic and the emotional exchange that's going on. Very few people can capture that well from that perspective, and Ari, the singer of Lewsberg, does it incredibly. They're a brilliant band, really incredible.
What’s your earliest memory?
If we're talking more abstract sort of stuff, I can really remember the smell of inside the pram when I was a baby. I can also remember the texture, it was one of those old fashioned silver cross kind of prams and it was lined with these blue PVC cushions. I can remember the noise that it would make when I would run my fingernail across it.
What is your daily domestic routine?
It depends where I am. If I'm back in Paris, my son will wake me up early in the morning, about six or something like that. I'll get him together, I'll play with him for a bit, give him his breakfast, change his nappy, dress him. I'll go out, get some baguette. He loves baguette. That's one of the first words he's learned to say, he calls it baggy! I'll play him some records - he loves 45s. His current favourite is You Showed Me by The Turtles. I've got that and he recognises it from the label on the 45 and whenever I'm going through the records, he'll see it and go "nanana" and he'll want me to play it.
Then maybe I’ll play a song or prepare for something I've got to do. Go for a walk. I like to walk a lot. Paris is a good city for walking in and where I stay, it's at the bottom of the hill. If I walk up, I can get to the Sacré-Cœur. I like walking up there at night time actually, you get a good view of Paris. It's a particularly good view because the Eiffel Tower is obscured by trees, so you see the city below you and you know it's Paris but it's not Paris in that familiar sort of way when you've got a particular famous landmark like that and your eye is automatically drawn to it and, in a way, you don't appreciate the other details, the other landmarks. It's good not being able to see it because there's always different things that you see when you're up there.
Apparently Émile Zola hated the Eiffel Tower so much when it was built, he absolutely detested it and felt that it destroyed the Paris skyline and it was an ugly monstrosity, like a lot of people felt about the Shard when it went up, so he used to have his lunch every day in the restaurant at the top of the Eiffel Tower so he didn't have to look at it.
What's your worst habit?
Disorganisation. It drives my wife crazy. She's a very organised person, I'm a very disorganised person. I'm terrible for looking at dates in the calendar and forgetting I've got to do things and stuff, and daydreaming. Apparently that's a very bad habit as well. I think it's a good habit.
What's your desert island disc?
I'm going to choose that song I was just talking about, You Showed Me by The Turtles. I know there's going to be a moment when my son can't sit on my shoulders anymore and ride around the room, and I know that whenever I hear that song, I'll think about those magic moments with my boy.
Has anyone you've ever met made you feel starstruck?
When David Bowie brought Lou Reed into the dressing room, that was pretty insane! We started that tour at the Roseland Ballroom in New York, and we finished the tour at the Roseland Ballroom in New York. The first night we played, the tour manager knocked on the door and said, 'Oh, you've got a visitor'. I thought it'd be somebody from the label or something and it turned out to be Bowie. That was completely unexpected. I was starstruck and he was brilliant, such a cool guy, amazing, but when we came back at the end of the tour, we knew he was coming down again this time and he was coming down with a pal. We had no idea who it was. He came back and it was Lou Reed. Apparently they hadn't seen each other for years and they decided to come to our gig to hook up again. There was a moment when they just paused talking, then went over and gave each other a big hug. It was kind of bizarre to see that, these figures who'd been such a massive part of my growing up and my understanding of music - if music were a cityscape, they would be the Eiffel Towers that I navigated it by, they were huge figures. So to be in the room with those two was... yes, I was starstruck, what can I say.
What's your pet peeve?
Because we've been touring and I've been flying a little bit - I know flying is a bad thing to do but I've had to do it recently - it's people who stand right on the edge of the luggage conveyor belt. Why do that? Just stand back when your case comes out, step forward and pull it off, because when everybody's standing in front of it, nobody can get in to get their cases. I think it peeves me because it's short sighted, it's self-centred and it's not seeing the bigger picture. Maybe I don't like that kind of behaviour in other humans or myself and that's a very distinct physical manifestation of it.
What would people be surprised to learn about you?
When I was 17, I went to Aberdeen University to study Divinity, by mistake. I thought I was going to go to Glasgow University and study philosophy. I got all the grades but I didn't pass my Higher maths. Highers are like A-Levels in Scotland. They said to me, 'Go back and pass your Higher maths and then you can come back and do it'. I guess I was a heady mixture of both cocky and lazy and I didn't study at all for my maths, just presumed I would pass it second time. I learned my lesson pretty radically. When I called up Glasgow University and said, 'Yeah, I didn't quite pass my Higher maths, am I still OK to come?', they went, 'No'. And then I realised that when I filled out my form, again in my cockiness and laziness, for my insurance offer I just picked the first place, which was Aberdeen, and one of the first things was Divinity. And I thought, 'I'm not gonna study Divinity, I'm not gonna go to Aberdeen, that'll do'. And then I was like, 'Oh shit, I'm going to Aberdeen'. I stayed there for a year. It was a bizarre experience. It was all these guys about my age now who'd had a career and another life who'd then had their road to Damascus moment, and decided they were going to become ministers for the Church of Scotland. Nice people but I was 17 and wanted to be a rock’n’roller. I didn't really have a lot in common with them. Haha!
What are you scared of?
I watched Jaws on a pirate video when I was too young and I have a fear of sharks. It was the bit in Jaws where the kid is on the yellow lilo and the shark comes out the water and everybody panics and they run out and his mum is on the edge after everybody has left the water shouting his name, there's just tatters of the yellow plastic of the lilo in amongst bits of flesh and blood lapping on the shore, and she's calling his name, and she's saying, 'Alex… Alex…. Alex…', because the kid's name was Alex. It scared the fuck out of me. I had nightmares for months afterwards. What had seemed like an abstract horror movie, which was terrifying enough as it was, suddenly became something that applied to me personally. But I love that film, I'm kind of obsessed with that film. The second half of Jaws is amazing, it's like Beckett or something, where it's the three of them talking about love and injury. Brilliant film.
If you could go back in time, where would you go?
I've always had a romantic notion of Europe in the inter-war years, between the end of World War 1 and before Hitler was elected in 1933, it could be Berlin but it could be Zurich as well. There's so much art and music and general life at that time I find very inspiring. It seemed like a very magical moment in history and I would love to go back and experience those kind of Weimar years, fascinating, totally chaotic but so many ideas which were radical and new, people thought about art in a way that they'd never thought about it before, about literature in a different way, about music in a different way. It seemed very exciting.
What do you wish the 18-year-old you knew?
That I knew more distinctly there were certain people in my life who were not going to be in my life because they were going to die and that I should spend more time with them and appreciate their company while I had that opportunity. You don't see that when you're 18, you feel invincible. You think everybody else is invincible when you're that age as well. You don't realise that they're going to be gone before too long.
What one book would you recommend we read?
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver, I think it's the best writing of the 20th century.
What was the home you grew up in like?
It was, in many ways, a typical nuclear family. I grew up in a suburb of Glasgow, a suburb of Edinburgh before that, a suburb of Sunderland before that, went to a state school, very ordinary in some ways yet in other ways it was really not ordinary at all. My dad was Greek, so I had a different cultural perspective from everybody else that I went to school with who were very Scottish. My dad was also very intellectual. My mum was a seamstress, my dad was an academic, so it was a strange mixture. My grandfather was a carpenter, and so I had this one side of my family which was very down to earth and very much working with their hands and then my father, who was very intellectual, always reading, always pushing ideas, always wanting to have conversations that were challenging and stimulating. It was an interesting mixture thinking about it, looking back, it's funny.
What’s your favourite film and why?
I've got a few favourite films. It could be Back To The Future but let's choose The Servant, with Dirk Bogarde and what's his name… what's that cunt called, Lawrence? The right-wing prick who was married to Billie Piper. Fox! It’s his dad, James Fox and Dirk Bogarde. It's fucking amazing. It's brilliant. I really love those psychological dramas that you got in the late 50s and through the 60s and it's a very British version of that. It’s this really fucked-up relationship between this upper-class guy and his butler and the butler is Dirk Bogarde, who's one of my favourite actors of all time. It's about the tension between the two of them and the classes that they represent, the whole film is like a metaphor for the collapse of the British class system as it was happening at that particular time. The rules begin to reverse a little bit and it's such an intense film, almost unbearably so, beautifully shot and dramatic and all of the performances are superlative. It's a brilliant piece of cinema.
What talent would you most like to have?
Being able to play football. I've always been really bad at football, my coordination lies in other areas. In my mind, I'd always be like, 'I'm going to kick the ball in this beautiful arc to the top left-hand corner of the net', and I would slice it every time.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
My friendships, the good friendships that I have.