Franz Ferdinand's Personal Best

ALEX KAPRANOS: I feel that our second album is really a continuation of the themes and textures that were developed on the first album. We went into making that second record very quickly, because when the band took off, it was intensely rewarding and enjoyable — I loved it. We’d had this great period of creativity where we were writing prolifically and so much music was coming out. But I also found it very frustrating as well, because suddenly with the nature of touring and how busy we were, that [kind of studio work] went on hold. I was desperate to get back into the studio and to continue the ideas that we had.

“Walk Away,” that song was written — I remember it very distinctly — I had an acoustic guitar with me on tour [in 2004], and I wrote it pretty much in a dressing room in Hamburg, Germany. Some songs can evolve in stages, or you write a melody and then you come back to it two years later and work on it again. But with “Walk Away,” it came out very complete, like it just formed and existed as a complete song. What you hear on that record is pretty much how it sounded. There were two things that were added later; Nick and I worked on the riff, and we added it at the beginning later. But other than that, it’s pretty much as it was at that time.

BEST FIT: What about the lyrical make-up of the track? What’s the story there?

ALEX KAPRANOS: I guess I was talking in a very open and honest way about how I’d felt about a relationship that had been very important in my life and how sometimes you can convince yourself that you’re strong, that you’re brave, and say, ‘It doesn’t matter if it ends, I’m going to be fine, I’m going to be strong, it won’t be a catastrophe.’ And then when it actually does happen and they do walk away, it does feel like everything is actually collapsing and you were wrong. You weren’t as strong as you thought you were and you’re actually a mess and completely destroyed. That’s what was going on in my mind.

I was trying to find the most dramatic examples of it being ‘the end of the world as you know it,’ and there’s a line in “Walk Away” about Radio 4 static. It was a reference to this story that I’d heard about submarine captains, apparently during the Cold War, who would be under the water for a long time without communication. If they felt there had been a nuclear assault, they would rise to the surface and the first thing they would do is tune in to Radio 4, the spoken word news broadcast from the BBC. If they could get Radio 4, it meant that the world still existed. But if they couldn’t, if all they got was static, it meant that everything had been obliterated. I loved the poignancy of that image and maybe that’s how I felt emotionally at the time. Like I felt like I was trying to get Radio 4, but all I was getting was static.

I can’t keep myself from dancing to it whenever we perform this song live. It always feels like a bit of a workout when I’m on the stage, like I always feel like such a physical response to it and, to me, that’s always a measure of a good groove. I feel like we did get there with that one and when you listen to the song, I think that’s kind of how the band — at that time — played at their best, we were really kind of loose and tight simultaneously.

“Stand On the Horizon” is also collaborative too, of course it’s always collaborative with the other band members, but Todd Terje came in and worked on that song with us in a producer role. He’d done this song called “Inspector Norse,” it had become this kind of underground dance floor smash which kind of went overground [in 2012], and everybody loved it.

I went over to Terje’s in Oslo to go over the final part of the song with him in his studio; we built up all those vocal harmonies and things together. The song is about humility, admitting that you’re wrong and understanding that you can be wrong sometimes, accepting and owning that. It’s also partly about my relationship with my grandfather. In the middle-eight, I sing about Marsden Rock [in Tyne and Wear]. My mother’s family are from South Shields in the North East of England. It’s on the coast and that coastline is dominated by this huge rock called Marsden Rock, it was always in every family photograph when I was a kid. If you can imagine, it was huge, probably the size of a city block or something like that. And there was a huge archway about a third of the way along the rock. There was a huge storm in the late 2000s and when it came through that archway collapsed and the rock above it collapsed. It split into two pillars, and this huge, unchanging figure from the landscape was destroyed, suddenly gone; it felt like the perfect metaphor for how I felt when my grandfather died because he felt like this strong figure in my life who I could never imagine not being in my life. I loved him very, very much, I still love him.

When he died it was almost incomprehensible. He wasn’t there and that’s exactly how it felt with Marsden Rock going as well. It’s like, he can’t possibly have gone. He’s indestructible. He’s just like Marsden Rock, always there. So that’s what I’m singing about whenever I sing that song.

ALEX KAPRANOS: “Black Eyelashes” is a song about my Greek identity. My father is Greek, but he moved to England when he was ten years old. So, like all children of immigrants, I know where I’m from but I also know that I’m not truly from there at the same time. I go back to Greece and I feel that I’m not properly Greek. I understand Greece in a way that a tourist would never understand, because I would go there, spend time with my family, but I don’t speak the language properly. When I used to go there as a kid, they’d say, ‘Well, you look very blonde for a Greek kid.’ My mother is of mixed English/Irish/Scottish heritage, but I grew up in Scotland and in the North East of England where my mother’s from. You have this strange, mixed feeling of knowing where you’re from, but you’re never truly going to belong there. My way of finding that identity was through music. Like so much in my life, finding and understanding things has been through music.

I’ve loved this form of music called rembetika: it was the urban music of Piraeus, Greece that had come over from Smyrna [Greece] in the 1920s. When you hear “Black Eyelashes,” that’s kind of my interpretation of that music. And again, like my Greekness, it’s not “right.” It’s not a true representation of rembetika. It’s this kind of twisted Anglo-Scottish version of rembetika. In the song, I sing about searching for black eyelashes, and in a lot of that music you have the themes of either black eyes, black eyebrows or black eyelashes.

BEST FIT: So your heritage is core to “Black Eyelashes,” this is fascinating.

ALEX KAPRANOS: It is! It’s kind of like a motif that repeats in a lot of these songs and that became like a metaphor for my Greekness. I was searching for my Greekness, my black eyes, my black eyelashes because my eyes are blue. I guess I was looking for that thing that I know I’m never going to truly have, but I really, really wanted to have. In the song, I actually sing in Greek for the first time. I’ve never sung in Greek on a Franz Ferdinand song before. In the song I’m singing, ‘He doesn’t see / He doesn’t speak Greek / Why doesn’t he speak Greek? He’s not really Greek!’