They have been making people's heads move for two decades with the devilish 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 this Friday they will perform again within the Cruïlla festival. They are Franz Ferdinand, the Scottish pop group headed 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 he was fighting to get a water heater. to take his fetish drink, "I prefer it to a whisky".
The indie quintet has not released new material for a long time, except for two singles, published on the Hits to the head compilation. It is about Billy Goodbye and Curious, with the marked seal of the formation, something that makes Kapranos proud, although he acknowledges that these songs "sound old" because they were recorded in 2021. "I have a lot of new songs and I really want to to play”, he explains, and adds that at Cruïlla “we will play some new songs that people have not heard”. He talks about 11 songs recorded before his US tour that will soon be released on a new album. "We'll probably record another five, and then we'll pick our 11 favourites."
The veteran post-punk group is one of those that is committed to vinyl, publishing its latest work in this format because "it's the one I grew up with," explains Kapranos: "I spent years looking at record covers, with that feeling when you take them out from the case and put them on the record player”, he says, emphasizing that he does not speak as an artist, “but as a fan”. “I like vinyl because there is a physical connection to the people who made it, something made by people whose music you love.”
This taste for the past is transferred to their live shows, where they do not give up playing their classic songs no matter how much time passes. “There are artists who despise their previous material, they change it and sometimes there are vocalists who destroy the lyrics,” says the Franz Ferdinand frontman, citing a Bob Dylan concert as an example. “It was an amazing show, but sometimes it was hard to recognize, I think if you don't want to play a song you just shouldn't play it.” On the contrary, he believes that if you mix songs from different eras that doesn't happen because “the new songs keep the old ones company, as if you had a group of friends and a couple of new people come in, they can change and revitalize the conversation. That's why I like to put new songs in a set like when we started doing the Hits to the head hits, that's what keeps them fresh”.
Asked about his musical preferences, Kapranos opens the Spotify account to see what he has heard and names like Peter Green, formerly of Fleetwood Mac, or Witch, a Zambian group that he saw live in the US, appear. He also explains that the night before, he listened to the Californian Julia Holter, “Have you heard Have you in my wilderness? I love this album”, as he also says he adore Andrew Jackman, composer of one of the themes of An American Werewolf in Paris, “a brilliant film”, he comments, specifically recalling the music that plays during a scene in which one of the protagonists visit a porn cinema in London's Soho.
In any case, what Franz Ferdinand seems to like the most is performing at festivals, an environment in which they usually move on their tours. "I love festivals, I've been going since I was a teenager, at 18 I drove from Aberdeen to Glastonbury in an old Lada with no alternator, it took me five days to go 800 miles." Now that he lives the festivals from the stage, he enjoys it because it pushes 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 greatest hits." “There's something really special,” he warns, in a festival setting, “all those people coming together can be one of the most joyous and uplifting experiences you can have. Being with all those thousands of people experiencing the same thing together, jumping and dancing, I will never get bored of that feeling.”
