A few months ago Alex Kapranos, the Franz Ferdinand frontman, found himself reliving a scene from his favourite horror movie. Coming off stage from a concert in Mexico City, a peckish Kapranos had ordered a taco from a stall in the artists’ area. With just one bite he knew something was amiss. The tainted taco had triggered his peanut allergy. Half an hour later he was speeding from the venue, re-creating a sequence in the nerve-shredding 2018 film Hereditary, in which a young woman sticks her head out of a moving car and gets more than she bargained for.
“I said, ‘Are there peanuts in that sauce?’ I might has well have eaten cyanide. I can feel myself immediately getting ill. I know it’s wrong. There were medics there that gave me the [life-saving] jab. That stopped my throat from swelling up. But I still always have this thing where … it’s nothing like any kind of normal throwing up. Your body goes into spasms. I was, like, ‘We need to get out of here really quick’.”
Kapranos and his bandmates were soon driving down the 10-lane highway that crosses Mexico City, with the usually dapper singer leaning out of the window, barfing into the void.
“I was, like, ‘F**k, I’m going to be sick.’ I had my head out as I started throwing up. ‘Oh my God, this is f**king Hereditary. This is f**king Hereditary in Mexico City.’ I was plastering the side of the car in the most violent vomit,” Kapranos says from the Paris apartment he shares with his wife, the French musician Clara Luciani, and their 14-month-old son. “But I survived. And now I’m telling a story about it. When I finished throwing up, and I got back to my hotel, and I was alive, I felt f**king amazing.”
He tells the anecdote with the same charisma and enthusiasm that have been defining qualities of Franz Ferdinand’s livewire postpunk since their 2004 break-out hit, Take Me Out, a tune that blended Joy Division guitars and Top of the Pops hummability.
I never sat down to write a concept album – I never had an idea I’m going to write a record to. I’m kind of in awe of people who can do that. I don’t think I’ve got the discipline
But Kapranos isn’t merely shooting the breeze. He shares the story by way of explaining the philosophical underpinnings of the chart-topping Glasgow outfit’s fantastic sixth album, The Human Fear.
Musically, The Human Fear is driven by the familiar Franz blend of propulsive riffs and bright, splashy melodies. You could dance to these songs at an indie disco (if indie discos were still a thing), but they make just as much sense slap bang in the middle of a daytime-radio playlist.
Yet in its themes it marks a departure from the group’s previous meditations on subjects such as the farcical side of lust or the dark underbelly of hedonism. The topic at hand is the universal human experience of fear. With stand-out numbers such as The Doctor and Black Eyelashes, Kapranos, singing in his swishing croon, confronts the anxieties of everyday life – whether that be a reluctance to express your deepest feelings or a dread of meeting new people.
Or eating from a taco truck backstage at a music festival – a matter of life and death if, like Kapranos, you have a potentially fatal peanut allergy.
“That’s all relating to this theme of fear. I never sat down to write a concept album – I never had an idea I’m going to write a record to,” he says. “I’m kind of in awe of people who can do that. I don’t think I’ve got the discipline.”
Often it’s only after the record has gone out into the world that he recognises there was a unifying message there all along, bubbling beneath the surface.
“There are always things that become apparent afterwards. And they’re only noticeable when you have finished. This time I was looking back, and it was, ‘Oh yes, there are all these fears underlying the lyrics.’ The fear of saying goodbye … the fear of social exclusion, the fear of being rejected by your peers … the fear of not knowing your heritage or losing your identity, your roots – in my case being Greek … The fear of committing to a relationship.”
If it were another band, a rumination on the fears we all suffer through could make for glum or foreboding listening. Not so with Franz Ferdinand, the party starters who, from their very first single, Darts of Pleasure, in 2003, have injected into their music an irrepressible zing that owes as much to funk or electronica as to the Glasgow art-rock scene from which they emerged.
That remains the case on the new LP, whether it’s on the effervescent disco onslaught of Everyday Dreamer or the thumping Build It Up. “You gotta get sooooome/ to take sooooome …” Kapranos sings on the latter, delivering the catchiest hook this side of Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso.
It’s a remarkable new chapter for Franz Ferdinand – all the more so when you consider that, in the past decade, they said farewell both to their guitarist Nick McCarthy and their drummer Paul Thompson, both of whom left for personal reasons. Band chemistry is a precious commodity. Remove one musician, let alone two, from the equation and it can all fall apart. “It is literally an existential thing,” Kapranos says of the reshuffle that saw Dino Bardot join on guitar and Audrey Tait take over on drums.
“I remember when Paul left the band, in 2021, he literally kicked the drum kit over one night and walked out. Bob [Hardy, the bassist] went round to him in the morning. I presumed he was going to have a bit of a tantrum and then come back in again the next day, as was his wont. But no. Bob came in and said, ‘He’s not coming back.’ And I remember saying to the others, ‘Right, okay … Do you want to continue?’ I remember turning to each, and each one said, ‘Yes, absolutely.’ The funny thing is, it makes you ask questions that you don’t ask otherwise. And there’s something affirming about asking the question, ‘Like, do I want to do this?’”
I think U2 are an easy target. It’s easy to lay into a band when you become big ... You can’t argue with the power of those songs – Sunday Bloody Sunday … what an amazing song. I have a lot of friends who profess to hate U2 – if that song was by A Certain Ratio they would love it
When Franz Ferdinand broke big in 2004, rock music was in a weird place. Britpop was long dead. But the so-called landfill-indie resurgence of guitar bands was still a few years off. When it did pick up speed, Franz Ferdinand felt alienated from its widespread culture of debauchery – from the unpleasant rehabilitation of the groupie culture that had been a grim feature of the music industry in the 1970s.
They went so far as to flag that they had an “anti-groupie” policy. The Glaswegians believed in treating all their audience equally – male, female, young and old – and of not taking advantage of people. “I’m not going to say who the band was, but I saw a guy in a band being extremely predatory with girls who were underage. And I found it kind of gross. I didn’t like it, and I felt he was exploiting his position,” Kapranos says.
“And I wanted to say that we were apart from that and were not doing that sort of thing. I remember saying it publicly. And the weird thing is, at that time, it seemed like a farcical thing to say. There were some journalists I remember taking the piss out of me because I said that at that time. And the irony is that it’s very much an accepted stance [today]. Of course you shouldn’t be behaving like Russell Brand. It’s appalling. At that time there was a bit of a kind of, ‘All right, yeah, yeah. Give her one from the lads …’ That’s not my vibe.” (Several women, including one who was 16 at the time of the alleged offence, have accused Brand of sexually assaulting them in separate incidents between 2006 and 2013; the English actor and comedian has strongly denied the allegations.)
Landfill indie was a huge move backwards in many ways. In the early 1990s, alternative music had been elevated by the feminist rock of Riot Grrrl artists such as Huggy Bear and Bikini Kill, while grunge musicians such as Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain had spoken out on subjects such as reproductive rights. To go from that to propositioning underage fans was a horribly retrograde step.
“I think it started with the lad-mag kind of mentality. My roots came more from that sort of Riot Grrrl-adjacent scene. When I was 19 or so I started promoting bands. I had a club in the 13th Note in Glasgow. That scene was also very much connected with other places around the country via the fanzines. I don’t know if progressive is the right word – it seemed to be a more open, egalitarian way of thinking. A form of anti-sexism: of course you want to share the stage with girls; you wouldn’t think anything differently of it. But I do think it did regress a little.”
Kapranos was born outside Bristol, in southwest England, the son of an English mother and a Greek father. (One of the themes the new LP touches on is his wish to reconnect with his Greek heritage.) The family moved to Sunderland, in the northeast of the country, when he was two months old and then, when he was seven, to Scotland.
Before Franz Ferdinand he’d done a bit of everything: promoting gigs, lecturing in information technology and working as a barman. In 2001, after meeting Nick McCarthy at a party, they decided to start a band, named after the Habsburg heir whose assassination triggered the first World War. (They were fascinated by Ferdinand as historical lightning rod; they also liked the alliterative qualities of his name.)
Success came quickly. In late 2003 they supported Interpol at the Village in Dublin. Eighteen months later they were traveling across South America, opening for U2. It was the sort of overnight rise musicians dream about. “That was cool for us at the time, and the guys in [U2] were good too. I’ll never forget that. When you start as a band and open up for other bands, different bands can have different attitudes. Some can be very welcoming and some can be quite aloof. The guys in U2 were very cool.”
Kapranos recalls U2 going out of their way to say hello.
“They all came to hang out, chat and make sure we felt wanted. I think U2 are an easy target. It’s easy to lay into a band when you become big. We had a moment with our first album when we became quite big. I had a sense of that myself. You can’t argue with the power of those songs – Sunday Bloody Sunday … what an amazing song. I have a lot of friends who profess to hate U2 – if that song was by A Certain Ratio they would love it.”
The landfill-indie groups have long since faded away – or turned into glorified cover acts, doomed to spend the rest of their days regurgitating the same quasi-hits over and over. Franz Ferdinand, by contrast, have always moved forward. In 2015 they made an acclaimed LP with the vintage Los Angeles pop geeks Sparks, released as FFS. And now, with The Human Fear, they have released one of their finest long-players to date.
“I think it’s my best record. I’m normally bashful. I don’t go for that rock’n’roll swagger – the Muhammad Ali, I’m-the-greatest things. But it’s me being frank: I think it’s the best thing I’ve done,” Kapranos says. “I’m not boasting. That’s more me coming to terms with my other stuff not being up to that standard. I hope it continues into the future. I loved making the record. I’m happy putting it out to the world. I can’t wait to play it for folk.”
The Human Fear is released by Domino
