Despite being critical darlings of the 2000s post-punk scene, Alex Kapranos once found himself dreading an inevitable milestone with his band, Franz Ferdinand: their fourth album. “At that point a lot of people are going, ‘Why are you still here? Why are you still doing stuff?,’†he recalls. Several years had gone by since the group’s last record, the more experimental Tonight, and Kapranos was on the hunt for inspiration that might work for a compelling single to kick off the next cycle. He found it in the form of a postcard around “a spot of wasteland†near London’s Brick Lane Market, addressed to filmmaker Karel Reisz. “All that was written on the postcard was, ‘Come home. Practically all is nearly forgiven,’†Kapranos says. “When I read it, I was just like, Oh my God. This is incredible. This is a song.†Kapranos went back to his apartment and started working on what became 2013’s “Right Action†almost immediately.
Such a lucky — and perhaps a little dusty — flea find illustrates Kapranos’s belief that the greatest song inspiration can come from the most mundane things in life. “Sometimes you find it on a postcard, sometimes you find it in a book that you’re reading,†he says. “And sometimes you find it in a conversation you overhear.†That ethos has followed him and the band into their sixth album, The Human Fear, which will be out January 10. “I feel that lead singles are kind of like salient points in the lifespan of a band or an artist,†Kapranos adds. “And we have some really good ones.â€
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“Darts of Pleasure,†Franz Ferdinand (2004)
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The Song
I had been reading an amazing book called Bel-Ami, by Guy de Maupassant. There’s a section that’s a bit like Madame Bovary. It deals with the fear and terror of death. Bel-Ami is this young journalist and one of his older friends is his mentor who talks about how time ravages you and bleaches your hair white. This was contrasted with the character of Bel-Ami himself, who was a complete cad and seduced his way into positions of power. He’s a horror. “Darts of Pleasure†ended up becoming a longer version of my reaction to reading those passages.
The final section of the song, the “Ich heiße Superphantastisch†bit, is completely different. That was by our guitarist Nick McCarthy. He was teaching a teenage girl guitar in Glasgow when we started the band to get extra cash. They made it up together with nonsense words in German. It’s like, “I’m super fantastic, my name is super fantastic. I drink champagne with the smoked salmon lox fish.†So you have this dark, introspective first part of the song, and then this really fun, upbeat response. The two don’t go together at all. They’re in different keys. I remember thinking, “God, these would sound great if we just ram them together.â€
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The Bet
At this point we didn’t know “Take Me Out†or “Dark of the Matinee†or “Michael†were going to be big songs. When “Darts of Pleasure†came out, we hadn’t even finished “This Fire.†We were still in the process of writing the album. At gigs “Darts of Pleasure†had a real connection with the audience. People always went crazy for it. That’s how we were judging the songs. Most of our single choices were made through instinctive choices.
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The Payoff
I had released singles and records prior to this, and they’d always been in the most indie DIY way possible. You’d press 500 copies, you’d maybe sell 158 at gigs, and the rest of them would sit under your bed for the rest of your life. We always presumed that was going to be the course of the band. But when “Darts of Pleasure†was released, it soared onto the charts. It went to No. 44 in the U.K., which was completely mind-blowing for us. I was like, This is crazy. I’m going to be able to pay my rent by being in a band. After the single came out, that was the first time people started recognizing me in the street. I’d never had that before, which is both deeply unsettling and gives you a strange buzz.
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“Do You Want To,†You Could Have It So Much Better (2005)
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The Song
“Do You Want To†was about the absurdity of fame from a slightly abstracted perspective. It was written after the last gig touring Franz Ferdinand. We finished the tour at a place called the SEC Centre, which is like Glasgow’s equivalent of Madison Square Garden. After, we went to a party some of our friends were throwing. We went from playing to tens of thousands of people to then going back to this environment. I remember scribbling down snippets of conversations people were shouting in my ear. A girlfriend of a band member that opened for us said, “Oh, I love your friends, they’re all so arty.†That’s where that line in the song comes from. I remember thinking it was very funny, this idea of the word “arty,†which is probably a word any artist would hate to be described as. It amused me to hear this description of my friends.
I got into trouble for going into too much detail about this one time, but I also got propositioned by somebody in the toilets of the venue earlier in the night and was offered a particular … favor. So that’s partly what the song is about as well. I knew this character from Glasgow before, and there’s no way they would’ve offered it to me in my old life.
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The Bet
When you’re choosing the singles for your first record, you’ve played a lot of them live so you know how people react to them. On the second record, we had no idea which of the songs we loved were actually single-worthy. We hadn’t played them to anybody, but when we played “Do You Want To†in the rehearsal room, it gave us that kind of buzz. You just go, “Oh yeah, that’s got it.â€
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The Payoff
It was a strange collision of our worlds, because we suddenly had this bizarre year where the first record had become quite successful and our lives changed radically. Internationally, “Do You Want To†took us further than anything we had done in the first record.
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“Ulysses,†Tonight: Franz Ferdinand (2008)
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The Song
We wanted to do something that sounded different from the bands that were around us. During our first two albums, there were groups like the White Stripes and the Strokes and the Libertines. I wanted to bring in a more pure pop element. Over the course of those first two albums, as always happens with bands, you find that your sound permeates the surrounding cultural landscape. There were other bands that were beginning to sound a little bit like us. Also for your own artistic reward, you don’t want to repeat yourself.
“Ulysses†is talking about two things simultaneously. My dad’s Greek, and when I was a kid, he told me lots of stories both from Greek folklore and classical mythology. The Odyssey has always been something that I’ve loved. I felt there was a parallel between Ulysses’s life — the decade he spent being thrown across the seas, dealing with adversity, and misbehaving atrociously — and the life of somebody in a band. Particularly the sense that you’re never going home.
And then the beginning of the song is a mashed-up version of a story I heard from a friend. Three of them were sitting around getting really high, as one does, and having a nonsense conversation. They started reminiscing about the childhood television Airwolf, from the ‘80s; Airwolf was the name of the helicopter. There was eventually a pause and one guy who was unaware of what Airwolf was, said, “Am I Airwolf?†It’s like, “Yes, tonight you are Airwolf. And from now on you are Airwolf.â€
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The Bet
It instinctively felt like the song was going to connect with people. We just had that tingle when we played it together in the rehearsal room.
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The Payoff
Julian Corrie, who now plays keyboards in the band, told me something interesting when we started learning “Ulysses†together. He said, “Oh, I wasn’t expecting you to do that. But it’s good to be surprised.†That’s the kind of reaction that I would’ve liked to have heard from more people. I’ll leave it at that.
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“Right Action,†Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action (2013)
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The Song
I took a trip to Brick Lane Market in London. There’s a lot of junk being sold from house clearances and amongst all this junk was a set of postcards. Most of them were blank, but one wasn’t. I still have it at home. I loved it because it was so evocative. There was an entire plot suggested by those few “come home†words within the card to Karel. It was addressed to him at 11 Chalcot Gardens, England’s Lane, Hampstead, London, which I also included as lyrics. But what’s the situation surrounding this? What has been forgiven? What is home? Every single one of the verses repeats that lack of specific detail.
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The Bet
There was debate over “Right Action.†I disagreed with the label over this one. There was another song called “Love Illumination†that I thought would’ve been a better fit. I enjoy playing “Love Illumination†more than “Right Action.†Even in the band there’s still dissonance over it. So with the greatest respect to that song, I would’ve preferred “Love Illumination†as the lead single.
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The Payoff
This album came out about ten years into our career. It’s the most difficult and testing period to be in a band. It’s almost more difficult at that time to convince people that they should still listen to you than it is when you start out, or even later in your career. It’s kind of like, Oh, you’re still hanging around? I remember being very aware of it with Leonard Cohen. I think you have to go through it and weather it. It’s the test as to whether you’re a true artist and have a long-term vision.
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“Always Ascending,†Always Ascending (2017)
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The Song
It was my response to some horrific film footage I had seen. It’s a bit like 2 Girls 1 Cup. You know it’s there, but you don’t have to watch it. The footage is from the 1930s. There was a group of sea scouts who were holding onto an airship, and a gust of wind blew the ship into the air and pulled them hundreds of feet with it. Most of them let go, but three or four of them didn’t. You can see these young lads hanging on for dear life. Then one by one, they lose their strength and fall to their deaths, apart from one who managed to tie a bowline around himself. This footage had such an emotional impact on me. Even now when I’m describing it, I feel sick imagining what went through their minds. “Always Ascending†came about with me imagining myself in that situation. It’s a metaphor for the things we experience in our lives. We’re inevitably going to be confronted by fear, and we sometimes lose control and just let go. When you have the feeling of falling through air, you have a loss of orientation. You can’t tell whether you’re falling or ascending. The idea is, as you are tumbling, you are convincing yourself that, no, I’m not tumbling, I’m always ascending.
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The Bet
It was another instinctive decision. The only thing that initially gave me pause was the length, since it’s around five and a half minutes. Sometimes I feel weird when I do the long introduction live. It’s just like, “Fuck me. This is really self-indulgent.â€
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The Payoff
If you look at the comments below a new song on YouTube, you’ll see one comment saying, “I hate this because it doesn’t sound like the old stuff.†And then the next one, “I hate this because it sounds just like the old stuff.†I learned on this song that, there’s going to be some people who love this and there’s going to be some people who hate this. But it’s not because of the nature of the music, it’s because of what they want or their presumptions of what the music should be. You’re never going to satisfy them and you should never read the comments. I know there were some people who loved “Always Ascending†and there were some people who thought we should have just done “Darts of Pleasure†again.
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“Audacious,†The Human Fear (2024)
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The Song
I’ve always been fascinated by fear — how we respond shows us what our makeup is. The fear in “Audacious†was: “Did you ever get the feeling there’s something to come undone? An unreeling in the seaming and the stitching gone? So you rip a little harder til that rip becomes a run.†It’s about how you feel when everything is collapsing around you. I was sitting at the piano as I wrote this melody and that’s how I was feeling. And I was like, Wait, how am I going to respond to this? Damnit, I’m just going to be as audacious as I possibly can be. The best things I’ve done in my life have always been done with an audacious attitude and not caring about the consequences.
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The Bet
There were other songs that we considered but “Audacious†prevailed. When we play the song, it’s very easy to sing along with it. That’s a good measure of a single. This album feels like a very singles-y album. Always Ascending wasn’t a singles album at all. It was more like a mood piece. I’d say The Human Fear and the first album are like compilations, where you feel like going from one single to another.
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The Payoff
We recently played “Audacious†for the first time. When I got to the first chorus, I was thinking, This isn’t just a single, it’s a significant one. The majority of the audience knew the words. It’s a slightly surreal and difficult to comprehend experience — a bit like “Take Me Out†in the beginning.
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