Andrew Weaver

Franz Ferdinand

Every few years, British music seems to go through a movement in time that is never forgotten. The wonderful ‘war’ between Oasis and Blur highlighted Brit-pop in the mid-1990s, the punk explosion of The Sex Pistols and The Clash will never be forgotten, and it seems that – alongside Arctic Monkeys and the dearly departed Libertines – FRANZ FERDINAND are the latest UK generation’s zeitgeist group.

Nick McCarthy is not a settled petal – instead, he’s locked away in the band’s home town of Glasgow, in their studio, putting the finishing touches on Tonight, the third Franz Ferdinand album. It’s had a much, much longer gestation period than their second effort, You Could Have It So Much Better, with Nick explaining that the amount of time that they’ve spent creating it is much the same as when they recorded their debut.

“The second one was done while we were on tour,” he explains. For Tonight, the band wanted to ease that sense of dislocation and pressure – while they’d been touring for four years in between making it and releasing their sophomore set, he thinks that “…we needed a normal life to be able to write about something again. I don’t want to write about being on tour, or getting on aeroplanes. It’s not interesting… it might have been interesting in the `30s or something! I like stories and songs about people around us – on tour you meet someone for an hour or two and you might become best friends but then you never see them again!”

So, instead, the four-piece returned to Glasgow, where they found an amazing new home to record in, setting up camp in an old theatre. “We’ve got the dressing rooms as a recording studio, and we’ve tried everything out and all possibilities. We’ve had a really good time recording, and it’s nice to be home.”
For You Could Have It So Much Better, the band had come directly off tour and gone straight into it, writing and recording at the same time, with a desire to get the album out as quickly as possible. Nick says that the approach works quite well – he likens it to how albums were made in the 1960s – but for Tonight they wanted to do it completely differently, fully writing the songs before even beginning to consider recording.

“We were writing for about a year and then recording for three months, and then we mixed it for another few months,” he says of the creative process. “We don’t want to overthink our songs, but sometimes they need to go through a certain procedure. It was really important for us to do small tours in between writing sessions and then see if they were working. You have to watch out that you don’t lose the immediacy of writing a song and then recording it and then that’s it – and there were some songs that we did (write and then record straight away) like that. It can be great when you capture a song as soon as you’ve written it – there’s some magic about it. You have to catch that moment in time. However you get it.”

Already, Tonight has garnered plenty of talk of different influences and different sounds making themselves apparent – everything from African rhythms to tribal beats to reggae dub has been cited, particularly in the English music papers, as an influence on the sound of the album. But, as Nick explains, that’s not entirely the case.

“We did this African Express gig in Liverpool, something that Damon Albarn organised, and we were playing with a lot of African musicians, and it came from there,” he clarifies. “We’ve listened to a lot of Arabian music but it doesn’t mean it’s going to be an Arabian record! We take our influences from everywhere. I wouldn’t call it an African record at all; we’re from Glasgow where it rains all the time and our backsides are very white indeed. Although we wanted to make a dance record – something you could swing your hips to.”

While that’s always been the case with the music that the band have created, it sounds to some degree as if Franz Ferdinand have made a deliberate move to step away from what some would argue is their ‘signature sound’, and that has left an indelible imprint upon plenty of British bands since they began gaining notoriety. “We definitely have gone away from what we used to do,” he agrees. “It’s boring. I don’t think you can do that kind of music anymore – maybe someone will want to listen to it, but not me! I don’t want to do records that I don’t want to hear myself.”

Is that simply a matter of growing up, slowing down and taking a deep breath, and wanting to hear yourself make new music? “I don’t know if we’ve slowed down… but that sounds like we’re granddads!” Nick says after a short sharp burst of laughter.

“In general it’s a little bit slower,” he says of Tonight, “and it’s like a dance-floor/dancehall record, and very bass and drums driven. We’ve lost the angular guitar thing that all bands in Britain are playing, with all these octave bass lines and these indie disco drum beats that you hear all the time. We wanted to find new ways to shake your hips.”

Franz Ferdinand are touring in December/January, including performances at the Falls Festival. Their new album is due at the end of January.