The

Interview

When Franz Ferdinand broke big,

Alex Kapranos seemed older and

wiser than many of his buzzy peers.

Little surprise, then, that his band is

still thriving five years on. “I hope we

haven’t written our best song,” he

says. “That’s the sign a band is still

alive—they’re not satisfied.”

By Phoebe Reilly

Photographs by ChRiSToPheR MoRRiS

Edish of beans on toast has played a pretty memorable role in his life. The Franz Ferdinand singer-guitarist will refer to it twice within an hour: once as an example of a meal he couldn’t afford while playing in ’90s-era Glaswegian acts such as the Amphetameanies and Yummy Fur (“Being in a band didn’t buy me my beans on toast!”), and again as a symbol of the normalcy he would like to ITHER ALEX KAPRANOS is hungry or the traditional English

preserve now that his band has sold more than five million records worldwide (“There’s a character that I play onstage, and I can’t let him loose in the supermarket when I’m buying my beans on toast”).

It is breakfast time in New Zealand, where the 37-year-old frontman and former chef/lecturer/amateur food critic is on Christmas holiday with his longtime girlfriend, Fiery Furnaces singer Eleanor Friedberger. Tomorrow, he will embark on a tour to support Tonight: Franz Ferdinand, a dance-floor-friendly third album, which the foursome intended to be a departure from the post-punk bonhomie of their breakout single “Take Me Out” and everything after it. “We started out rejecting what we were hearing on British radio, and we’ve returned to that contrariness,” says Kapranos. “Except this time we are rejecting our own sound.”

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