This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
I saw Franz Ferdinand in 2003, at the Leadmill in Sheffield, just before they got big. I would love for this to be a story about how I immediately spotted their brilliance and bought all their records. It is not. To my shame, I was not a very good audience — I was on the guestlist and there to see the headliners, a now-forgotten pop-punk outfit called Hot Hot Heat.
So instead of paying attention to the raw talent in front of me, I drank free double vodka Cokes and chatted with my friends all through the support. When a man turned around to shush us, I remember feeling sort of sorry for him: poor sap, probably trying to get maximum value from his ticket price by pretending to enjoy the bottom-of-the-bill makeweights.
Anyway, a few months later Franz Ferdinand released “Take Me Out” (their second single and their first hit), and I remembered that gig and felt very stupid. Because “Take Me Out” is great — enormously, unignorably great, from the crunch of the first chord to the trembling fade of the last note. There are a lot of bands I wish I’d seen, but Franz Ferdinand are the only ones I’ve seen and wish I’d been paying attention to.
“Take Me Out” has a martial urgency that would be irresistible almost regardless of the lyrics that go with it. But it’s the lyrics that make it a truly spectacular pop song. The title is both romantic plea (take me out … on a date!) and masochistic invitation (take me out … with a punch!), a version of the trick Britney pulled when she sang “hit me baby one more time”.
It’s just shy of four minutes of fantastic, dizzying, unconsummated desire: the sound of the crush, which is the soul of pop. Follow-up “The Dark of the Matinée” was equally lust-riddled: “I time every journey to bump into you accidentally,” croons singer Alex Kapranos in his wry glasgow-tinged tenor, a voice that’s somehow absolute in its confidence whilst never being entirely settled on sincerity.
But it’s also a song about another kind of wanting: the desire for celebrity. “I’m on BBC2 now/ Telling Terry Wogan how/ I made it,” goes the middle eight. This is, I’m pretty sure, a direct reference to either Roddy Doyle’s novel The Commitments or the film adaptation, in which protagonist Jimmy Rabbit has the same Wogan fantasy; it’s the kind of reference a music obsessive like Kapranos seems likely to have known.
Though Franz Ferdinand are definitely a band, they’re also definitely Kapranos’s band: he and bassist Bob Hardy are the only founder members remaining. Previously, Kapranos had been in indie undercard act the Yummy Fur, and he was embedded in the Glasgow music scene as a club promoter before that. (If he did happen to notice a bunch of too-cool girls gossipping by the bar during his set in Sheffield, he was probably used to that kind of nonsense.)
By the time he made it to Top of the Pops, Kapranos was in his early thirties: basically a hundred in pop star years. But rather than this making him desperate, he seemed to take the prospect of finally getting what he wanted lightly. He could joke about it, like in the laconic Wogan interlude of “Matinée”.
Later, he would say that he always thought “Take Me Out” would sound good on the radio, but he imagined a Peel session rather than number three in the top forty. But though his expectations were lo-fi, and his style was austerely art school (helped by a set of cheekbones that belonged to the Bauhaus movement), his interests were unpretentiously popular.
In the noughties, the dividing lines between indie and pop still held: Kapranos cheerfully swished across them. He collaborated with Norwegian singer-songwriter Annie, and with Little Boots from Britain — both of them the kind of pop princess who should have been absolutely massive, and probably would have been if their fans hadn’t been the kind of hyper-informed consumers who knew their way around digital piracy.
There was also a brief, tantalising moment in 2008 when Franz Ferdinand went into the studio with Xenomania — the production squad behind Girls Aloud. It didn’t work out because, Kapranos said, Xenomania functioned too much like a band in itself: there wasn’t anything left for Franz Ferdinand to do. But just the idea that they existed in the same world was thrilling.
It’s that appetite for the new that means I still get excited when a new Franz Ferdinand album arrives, including this year’s The Human Fear. It’s a short, sharp 35 minutes, and though there’s nothing as vivid (or, frankly, horny) as the songs on their first three albums, there’s still plenty of wit and invention.
Opener “Audacious” sounds unexpectedly ELO-like, with its never-give-up lyric and its abrupt finish on the line “Get on with it”. (So abrupt, in fact, that the first time I listened to it I went back twice to check I hadn’t accidentally skipped half the track.) “Everydaydreamer” is a sweetly catchy piece of wordplay, slicing its title into every possible meaning.
But my favourite is probably “Doctor”, where Kapranos imagines being a patient refusing to give up a hospital bed: “I’ve become accustomed/ To this level of attention.” You can also take those as the words of a pop singer who never plans to leave the stage. He deserves to be there, too: I know better than most people that he had to pay his dues.
