Kapranos said the wrong kind of hedonism. Isn’t that part of the contemporary rock star life? On tour, “it is very easy to slip into that total vegetative state and not do anything but drink beer and play PlayStation,” he said. Kapranos had a hard time meeting his deadlines, he is considering picking up nonmusical writing again. Kapranos is less a foodie in the name-dropping sense he didn’t mind admitting that he’d never heard of the four-star restaurant Per Se than a fan of the eccentric, like Diner in Williamsburg, where the menu is written on each table’s paper tablecloth. McCarthy said he liked the kimchi the best. Straddling the mainstream and the more aesthetically refined seems a good fit for Franz Ferdinand. Though “Ulysses” was a hit on KROQ in Los Angeles, he added, “it’s a perfect record for us.” That has proved the one-hit-wonder concern “wrong enough,” Mr. Kapranos, who is part Greek), has already begun climbing the Billboard modern rock chart. The lead track and first single, “Ulysses,” named for James Joyce but inspired by the Greek myth (“My dad used to tell me all those stories when I was young,” said Mr. “I don’t know whether it came from our personal lives,” he said, “or the fact that we sealed off all the windows in this building.” But it was only when they compiled the tracks that the nighttime theme emerged. “So we’d record a song in the cellar, which has a harsh, hard rock ’n’ roll kind of sound, and then for the middle eight we would cut to the large hall.”įor the vocals, “we would line all the microphone stands up on the end of the stage, and we’d have all the lights out in the middle of the night, and we’d be singing into complete pitch blackness,” he said. “We were quite into this idea of cutting between takes, in the same way you’d cut between locations in a film,” Mr. Kapranos said like a musical playhouse, amplifying hand claps in the dome and using the theater for reverb. They treated the 19th-century space rented for about £400 ($560) a month, “half the daily rate of a London recording studio,” Mr. The members spent a year and a half recording the new album in an enormous former town hall in Govan, an industrial area of Glasgow. “When you’re there, when you’re hanging about, you feel quite detached from musical movements or fashions or anything like that. “It’s quite shocking.”) When the band members reconvened in Glasgow in 2007, they would occasionally play shows in basement clubs for 150 people to test out the new songs. (“Without being mean, I’d say Paul was probably the most puerile member of the band, and now he’s by far the most mature and responsible,” Mr. Having spent nearly every day together for several years, the band took a break after the tour. Released a year later, their second album, “You Could Have It So Much Better,” did just half as well, and didn’t have a hit radio song. Still, “Tonight” is an attempt to regroup as the small Glasgow band the members started, rather than the stylish name brand one they seemed poised to become after their self-titled debut, which had a narrowly defined look and a taut signature sound and sold more than a million copies in the United States. Kapranos said, “because we are the least sporty people in the world.” Not that they mind having their music back arena-size sporting events. “For a while there, you thought, ‘Are these guys going to go down as a one-hit wonder?’ ” Mr. Less than a year later the band was opening the Grammys with “Take Me Out.” “It’s a mixed blessing when a band gets that much attention early on,” said Jason Bentley, the music director of KCRW, the influential radio station in Santa Monica, Calif., and the host of “Morning Becomes Eclectic.” In 2004 that program, with Nic Harcourt as the host, first featured Franz Ferdinand in the United States. (A collection was released in the United States as a well-received book, “Sound Bites: Eating on Tour With Franz Ferdinand,” in 2006.) Hardy when they worked at a Glasgow restaurant, and eventually wrote a food column for The Guardian in Britain. He has a reputation as a foodie: he met Mr. Kapranos again singing disco songs about girls and hedonistic behavior. Hardy wrote in an e-mail message), unusual instrumentation, echoes of dub and even an acousticy ballad, “Tonight” will sound familiar to Franz fans, with Mr. (Or their angular haircuts.)īut though the band added more keyboards, bass (“It’s nice to be the lead onstage occasionally, so that I can show off a bit,” Mr. McCarthy said, a description that has stuck to the band as surely as their slim-cut suits. “You feel like, right, that’s become so much a part of musical vocabulary of the contemporary band, it’s now a cliché, and you have to leave it,” he said. Since then the members have found that their aesthetic from their high-hat beat to their mod wardrobe has gone mainstream, especially in Britain, Mr.
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