For two decades they have been making people’s heads move with the demonic guitar playing of Take me out or Do you want to, a ritual that they have taken to festivals all over the planet and that they will perform again on Friday at the Cruïlla festival. They are Franz Ferdinand, the Scottish pop group led by the charismatic and elegant Alex Kapranos, a lover of festivals and green tea, as he explained to this newspaper on Wednesday from a hotel in Madrid while fighting for a water heater to drink his fetish drink, “I prefer it to whiskey”.
It’s been a while since the indie quintet released new material with the exception of two singles, published on the compilation Hits to the head. It’s Billy Goodbye and Curious, with the line-up’s hallmark, something Kapranos is proud of, although he admits those songs “sound old to me” because they were recorded in 2021. “I have a bunch of new songs and I have really looking forward to playing”, he explains, adding that at Cruïlla “we will play some new songs that people haven’t heard”. He talks about 11 songs recorded before his US tour that will soon be released on a new album. “We’ll probably record five more, and then we’ll pick our favorite 11.”
The veteran postpunk group is one of those that bet on vinyl, and publishes its latest work in this format because “it’s what I grew up with”, explains Kapranos: “I spent years looking at the covers of the records, with that feeling of when you take them out of the case and put them on the record player”, he says, and emphasizes that he is not speaking as an artist, “but as a fan”.
They transfer this taste for the past to their live shows, where they don’t give up playing their classic songs no matter how much time passes. “There are artists who despise their previous material, change it and sometimes there are vocalists who destroy the lyrics”, comments the leader of Franz Ferdinand, giving a Bob Dylan concert as an example. “It was an incredible show, but sometimes it was hard to recognize, I think if you don’t want to play a song you just don’t have to play it.” On the contrary, he believes that if you mix topics from different eras this doesn’t happen because “the new songs keep the old ones company, like if you have a group of friends and a couple of new people come in, they can change and revitalize the conversation”.
In any case, what Franz Ferdinand seems to enjoy most is performing at festivals, an environment where they tend to move during their tours. “I love festivals, I’ve been going since I was a teenager, when I was 18 I went from Aberdeen to Glastonbury in an old Lada without an alternator, it took me five days to do 800 miles”. Now that he experiences the festivals from the stage, he enjoys them because they push him to play “in a different way, a lot of people only know you from the songs they’ve heard on the radio, and you want to play the bangers, the big ones achievements”. “There is something really special”, he warns, in the atmosphere of a festival, “being with thousands of people experiencing the same thing together, jumping and dancing, I will never get bored of this feeling”.
