Onlookers were shocked recently to see Alex Kapranos getting cosy with Agyness Deyn at an MGMT gig in Brooklyn. It appears that the Franz Ferdinand man has prised the supermodel away from her now ex-fiancé Albert Hammond Jr., who’s threatened to “go medieval on his sorry Limey ass”…
That was the story we’d hoped to run after a holidaying Ed Power spotted the celebrity pair enjoying the crazy psychedelic pop stylings of Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden in McCarren Park, but alas, there’s a perfectly innocent explanation for Alex and Agy spending quality time together.
“Run it anyway, I won’t sue!” Kapranos laughs good-naturedly. “No, we were at the same MGMT gig, which was in this old open-air swimming pool where they now throw free parties.”
With the water taken out, I assume.
“We didn’t need snorkels, no! The Ting Tings were also on the bill, so every scenester in the Williamsburg/Greenpoint area was there to see what all the fuss is about.”
They move in the same Burberry-clad circles, but is Agyness Deyn as loo-la as Naomi Campbell?
“What a quaint way of putting it! No, Agyness is absolutely lovely. There are rumours that she’s making a record, but she said she just sang with a friend’s band at a party as a one-off. She’d make a great pop star though.”
Consummate pro that I am, I’m normally abstentious before interviews, but this being the morning after my 45th birthday I have to admit I’m feeling rougher than Pete Doherty after a night round Shane MacGowan’s gaff.
“I know how you feel,” Alex nods understandingly. “I’m still feeling a bit delicate after the party we had two nights ago in Dan Carey’s studio in South London to celebrate finishing the mixing of the new album.”
Which is out early in the New Year, and finds Franz indulging in some “wild sonic experimentation.”
“We employed this thing called the ‘Doppler Effect’,” he reveals, “an example of which is the siren changing pitch when an ambulance races past you.”
Doesn’t Health & Safety preclude the driving of ambulances through recording studios at high speed?
“How it worked is that Dan swung the microphone lassoo-style around the amp, which gave us this fucking amazing guitar sound.”
The use of the word ‘guitar’ is significant, given there've been reports that Alex & Co. had gone all Studio 54 on us and made an old skool disco record.
“No, but what Nick and I did sometimes when we were writing was to take a loop from an old disco song and jam along,” he admits. “It forced us out of the rhythms we naturally find ourselves playing, and made us see the tunes in a different way. There’s a great shop in Brooklyn called The Thing where I’ve spent loads of time recently sifting through the crates of records they’ve got in the basement and picking out ‘70s disco stuff like the Salsoul Orchestra and MFSB.”
As somebody whose current listening includes an antique copy of Disco Tex & The Sex-O-Lettes’ ‘I Wanna Dance Wit Choo’, I know exactly where he’s coming from.
“Those disco guys are really strong melodically, but so not rock,” Kapranos proffers. “I love the inflections and when they put the stress on the beat.”
Although reluctant to shoot their new album load too early, there will be a few Irish premieres when Franz headline the Saturday night at Electric Picnic.
“I imagine we’ll be playing ‘Ulysses’, ‘Turn It On’, ‘What She Came For’ and ‘Kathryn Kiss Me’. A lot of these have leaked on to YouTube, which I absolutely love because we want people to hear them regardless of whether or not they’re at the gigs.”
I seem to recall Franz Ferdinand’s record label going ape over some demos that had appeared on a fansite, only to discover that the source of the leak was the band themselves.
“Er, possibly!” he says switching into guilty schoolboy mode. “The commonest reason for an album being shrouded in secrecy and not played to anybody in advance is the record company knowing it’s bloody awful. The only thing that makes people go out and buy albums is other people saying how great they are. One of the few things nowadays you can’t control is word of mouth.”
Today finds us in the middle of Holland, where Franz are appearing alongside the likes of Editors (there’s still no “the”), The Breeders and the Sex Pistols at Lowlands Paradise 2008, a 55,000-capacity bash, which thoroughly disproves the theory that the Dutch and their Belgian neighbours are inherently dull.
“It’s amazing how much festivals vary these days,” Alex ventures. “A few weeks ago, we went straight from Latitude, a very genteel English affair set against a backdrop of 300-year-old elm trees, to Melt, which is in an old East German quarry full of rusting cranes and has quite a hardcore electronic feel to it. It felt so bleak and detached from the Western world, as if the Berlin Wall was still there – which mentally I think it still is for the people who unification left behind. Add in what’s been going on in Georgia and the talk of Russia re-opening their bases in Cuba, and there’s a real Cold War tension around at the moment.”
In between assembling Franz Ferdinand album #3, Alex has also been penning a weekly Sound Bites food column for The Guardian, which was one of the things Alex James talked about last year when he breakfasted in the Merrion Hotel – are we posh or what? – with Hot Press.
“What did he say?” the other Alex enquires.
Something along the lines of, “That Kapranos fellow writes very well – do you think he’s ghosted?”
“Cheeky bastard!” he splutters with mock indignation. “Of course I’m not ghosted! That’s actually the greatest compliment you could ever get. A lot of people do presume that because, in their eyes, all musicians are inarticulate muttonheads who can’t string a sentence together. What drew me to that column is that I wasn’t a professional writer and didn’t have to exhibit the smug omniscience you get from a lot of food critics. They know everything about everything, whereas I’m coming from the opposite perspective of being totally naïve, but ‘here’s what I discovered while I was on the road'.”
Handily gathered together last year in a Sound Bites book, Alex’s foodie columns have found him searching for the perfect savaloy in South Shields, swallowing bull’s balls in Buenos Aires and munching donuts with Chief Wiggum-types in Brooklyn.
“It was great having something constructive like that to do on tour, ‘cause otherwise you can get quite lethargic and end up spending all your time in the hotel bar.”
Kapranos isn’t the only Franz member who’s been engaging in extracurricular activities, with drummer Paul Thomson setting up a record label called NEW whose first release is a 7” from Chilean ‘tropical rave rockers’ Panico.
“They’re originally from Santiago, but moved to Paris a few years ago and make this wonderful rhythm-heavy music, which I’m going to stop talking about now ‘cause I don’t want to be encouraging the competition,” he deadpans.
So, any more dates planned with Agyness?
“I’m sure our paths will cross again in the future, but for the time being I’m far too busy to concentrate on anything other than this record, which was definitely the most fun I’ve ever had in a studio.”