20Q: Franz Ferdinand

Q1

[Q] Playboy: In an industry known for unusual band names, yours stands out. How did you come up with it?

[A] Nick: We were all sitting in Alex's flat, watching horse racing on the telly. We'd been talking about band names for ages and had lists and lists of terrible ones. A horse called the Archduke came into the race. We thought, Oh yeah, the Archduke; what was he called again? Then we started talking about the First World War and thought that was a good theme somehow, a historic theme, and we hit on Franz Ferdinand. This one guy's death changed the whole world. History changed in one moment. If you're in a band, you want to do that. You want to change everything. So we thought that would be a cool name.

Q2

[Q] Playboy: Is it fair that we think the British are endlessly obsessed with the world wars and their victories over Germany?

[A] Nick: The British never forget when they actually win something. You never hear the end of 1945 or 1966, when England beat Germany in the World Cup final. Ever since, "Two world wars and one World Cup" has been the chant at football matches against German teams. The British are pretty narrow-minded sometimes.

[A] Alex: Among my contemporaries there is a lot of respect for Germany, particularly for Berlin and Hamburg. They're seen as great centers of creativity and a true bohemianism that's been lost in some areas of the U.K. I think Berlin may be the last truly bohemian city in Europe.

Q3

[Q] Playboy: Are some song ideas so good that you recognize it immediately?

[A] Alex: I knew straightaway that "Do You Want To," on the new album, You Could Have It So Much Better, was a catchy tune. I was in my flat, and my girlfriend was humming it as well, so I thought, Right, it's probably catchy. But there's a difference between good catchy and bad catchy. There are those tunes you can't stop humming but would pay large amounts of money to be able to stop humming. So you have to make sure it's not one of them.

[A] Nick: You kind of know right from the beginning, maybe not when writing a song on your own but when the four of us start playing it. With "Take Me Out," it was like, Wow, this is really good. Then again, sometimes songs don't have that immediacy--like "Matinée," from the first album. That nearly didn't make the record. The producer hated it, but people thought it was amazing when we played it live. We ended up releasing it as a single in Britain, and people loved it.

Q4

[Q] Playboy: Rumor has it a backward message is buried on your first album. True?

[A] Alex: When we were recording the first album we talked about old heavy metal records that had these heavily negative satanic messages telling you to go out and kill yourself and your family, all that bullshit. And we hit on an idea: Wouldn't it be amazing to put in a backward message that was mildly positive? The best one we could think of was "Call your mother. She's worried about you." It's in the middle of "Michael." So any mothers who have been receiving calls from wayward sons who are Franz Ferdinand fans may understand it now.

[A] Nick: There's one on You Could Have It So Much Better, too. Of course, you have to play it backward; you can't really do that with a CD.

Q5

[Q] Playboy: Do you remember the moment you learned your debut LP had gone platinum?

[A] Nick: We were in L.A., rerecording "This Fire" for a single version, and we were totally out of it. We'd gone for three days with hardly any sleep, and then we had to rerecord the song. It was draining.

[A] Alex: Yeah, we'd flown to London from somewhere in Europe, then flown to L.A. for the session. We were completely exhausted. As soon as we put down the last chord, we just collapsed. Then the head of Domino records came in and said, "Hey, guys, you've sold a million albums." Everybody was so shattered that there was only a slight moan of recognition.

[A] Nick: All these people came in with bottles of champagne, and we just fell asleep. It wasn't much of a party, I can tell you.

Q6

[Q] Playboy: Do you ever get to enjoy your success?

[A] Alex: We won the Mercury Music Prize in the U.K., and the next day we flew to New York. Bob Hardy, our bass player, was sitting next to me. On those transatlantic flights everybody sits with a little television in front of them, and they always play the news. At one point I stood up to get something out of the overhead locker, and I could see everybody's TV set. The news was showing coverage of our winning the prize and Bob standing up at the awards show with a look of mild shock on his face. It was so strange to see hundreds of people with headphones on looking at a picture of Bob while he was sitting next to me. That was my most surreal moment of the year.

Q7

[Q] Playboy: You're constantly on the road. How do you know what place to call home?

[A] Alex: I would say I live in Glasgow because that's where my record collection is.

Q8

[Q] Playboy: Does that mean you're all Glaswegians?

[A] Alex: None of us is a true, unadulterated Glaswegian. Paul Thomson, our drummer, was born in Glasgow but grew up in Edinburgh. Nick moved to Glasgow only three and a half years ago, from Munich. Bob grew up in Bradford. Although I went to secondary school in Glasgow, I was born in England and have a Greek father. But the band formed in Glasgow. I've always thought that how you socialize and who you go out with influence you more than anything else. The ideas exchanged over a couple of drinks in a pub are the ones that often form your character. And there are some good people to have a glass with in Glasgow.

Q9

[Q] Playboy: What is it about Glasgow that makes it such fertile ground for music? The Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream, Teenage Fanclub, Belle & Sebastian and many others have come from there.

[A] Nick: It's cheap and easy to live in Glasgow. Artists and musicians can focus on their art instead of spending all their time working in bars, trying to make money to pay the rent, like the way it is in London.

[A] Alex: Glasgow is a major metropolitan city, yet it's so far away from London that people see themselves as independent of any scenes or trends that take place there. I've heard people talk about the miserable weather--you can't do anything outside, so you might as well stay inside and write some tunes. There's also the straight-talking nature of Glasgow, which has a lot to do with its working-class heritage. It tends not to tolerate much bullshit. At the same time, if someone is doing something interesting, people are very vocal about their appreciation. Any band that plays in Glasgow comes to terms with this very quickly because an audience will either go completely crazy for you or bottle you off the stage.

Q10

[Q] Playboy: Were you able to live cheap and easy when you were starting out?

[A] Nick: In Glasgow there are so many old industrial buildings no longer in use and a lot of illegal dance parties. Alex and I were walking around one day and saw an empty building. We went in and walked upstairs, and on the sixth floor was this amazing space with windows all around it. You could see the whole city. We called it the Château, because you felt like king of the world up there. We thought it was a great place to set up because the club scene seemed tired. Eventually we got all six floors. So a lot of artists started using it for studios and rehearsal rooms. We had an amazing concert room on the top floor. It was really cheap to rent and became our headquarters. It was brilliant--until the police arrived.

Q11

[Q] Playboy: Did they kick you out?

[A] Nick: We had to give it up because the police came again and again about the noise. We moved to an old, disused jail. We took that over in the same kind of way. That's also full of artist studios now.

[A] Alex: But the Château is still in use. There's a huge community, 30 or 40 artists. It's a cool place--a very cool place in winter.

Q12

[Q] Playboy: What about religious divisions and the violence between Catholics and Protestants that plagues Glasgow?

[A] Alex: I hate to say it, but the two big Glasgow football teams are at the heart of the sectarian problems. When I arrived at school everybody asked me straightaway if I was a Catholic or a Protestant--in other words, did I support Celtic or Rangers. I said, "I'm Greek Orthodox. What does that make me?" There wasn't a Greek Orthodox team. Still, it's nowhere near as bad as it used to be. It seems to be very much of the older generations. In fact, it bears a lot of similarities to racism. I'm sure you find in America that two or three generations ago racism was a lot more common than it is in ours.

Q13

[Q] Playboy: Do you ever want to mix politics into your music?

[A] Alex: I feel slightly uncomfortable talking about politics because I never want to turn into one of those horrible, moralizing sods in a band who try to tell people how they should see the world.

[A] Nick: For us it's not the right place. I appreciate what Bob Geldof has done, though he's not doing it in his music. Not too many bands do it well. They may be doing it for a good cause, but you often have the idea they don't know what they're talking about.

Q14

[Q] Playboy: Do you have a ritual to get ready for live performances?

[A] Alex: No. Once we were backstage at a festival and we saw a band--I won't say which--all huddled in a circle, doing a basketball-team group hug. We had a good laugh at them.

Q15

[A] Playboy: Does being on the road make writing new material difficult?

[A] Alex: It's strange to talk about touring as grueling. When we were writing the songs for the first record, we were working other jobs. At one stage Bob and I worked as chefs. If you're doing a split shift from 8:30 in the morning until three o'clock the next morning, that's a hell of a lot more grueling than having to play a show in San Francisco for some people who want to hear your music.

[A] Nick: We had six or seven songs we'd already been playing live that we wanted to record for the new album, and we had loads and loads of ideas. But we wanted to be back home, able to relax and write songs the way we used to--hanging out, playing music to one another.

(concluded on page 142)Franz Ferdinand(continued from page 114)

Q16

[Q] Playboy: What has been the best part of your success--expensive dining, fast cars, drugs, girls?

[A] Nick: We haven't had any time to treat ourselves to anything. But I did get an iPod the other day.

Q17

[Q] Playboy: Some musicians aren't very happy about the iPod.

[A] Nick: I'm not quite sure. I think if you're in one place, it's nice to have an actual album, a record sleeve, the lyrics. So there will always be that element of wanting to own something and not just have a song on a hard drive. But I know because I travel a lot--and I've always liked to travel light--I don't like to have a lot of possessions. What I do is buy a CD and stick it in and rip it. Then I can listen to it and have it with me even if I lose the CD or give it away.

[A] Alex: I like the idea that, because of downloading, people are going to buy songs only if they are good. I think that's a positive thing. It means lazy bands aren't going to get away with giving you one hit single and an album full of filler. We like the idea that every song should stand up in its own right so you don't have to listen to a song in the context of an album to understand it. I suppose that's why I'm sympathetic to the download environment.

Q18

[Q] Playboy: Rock-and-roll feuds are a staple of the business. Do you have thick skins?

[A] Alex: I don't like slagging off other bands, and I don't like getting involved in tit-for-tat stuff. I'm being silly, because I enjoy reading that kind of gossip, but I don't want to get involved in it. I don't want to slag off people I've never met. I wouldn't want to run into someone after having bad-mouthed them in the press and find out they're a lovely person. You'd feel like a prat yourself then.

Q19

[Q] Playboy: What about the bands that have come up in your wake--the Futureheads, Bloc Party and Kaiser Chiefs?

[A] Nick: I'm getting bored of it, to be honest. A lot of people saw us as part of a post-punk revival thing or as a band that kicked off a lot of other things. But that was then. It's someone else playing the four-to-the-floor disco beat on the drums.

Q20

[Q] Playboy: Whose career would you want?

[A] Nick: I like it when a band progresses. The Beatles are the big one--they always reinvented themselves from one record to another. Talking Heads did that as well. The Who did it too. We played at a charity concert in London organized by Roger Daltrey. I was talking to the sound guy for the Who, and he said, "Why do bands want to do something special, something different? It has ruined so many bands." I thought, Man, you idiot. I definitely don't want to keep doing the same thing.

[A] Alex: We did our first touring with Interpol. Now, I know they haven't been going for years and years, but when we first went on tour with them they'd been touring for a year and a half, and they were famous in the U.K. The fact that they were so together, loving what they were doing, and that they were completely unegocentric, pleasant people to spend time with was quite inspirational. God, I thought, you can make it and not turn into a dick.