When did you first decide you wanted to make
music for a living?
I started writing songs with my close friend
Andrew when I was about 14, but we never
thought of playing them for anyone else.
Neither of us had ever been to a concert until
Andrew got us tickets to see Huey Lewis at
the Scottish Exhibition Centre in Glasgow,
because he knew that Back to the Future
was my favorite film. Our seats were in
the back row of this massive ballroom,
and the band was at the end of a two-year tour,
so they didn’t have much energy left, and we
both came to the conclusion that gigs were
crap and records were amazing. It wasn’t until
I started going to smaller punk shows around
Glasgow that my opinion changed. So I toiled
around in bands for the next ten years and he
became an astrophysicist.
You attended divinity school for a year. Were
you religious at the time?
I was certainly curious. But it was the wrong
school to go to. I was a 17-year-old sitting in a
classroom with middle-aged men who wanted
to be ministers. These people had already expe-
rienced a bit of life, and they had decided they
had a calling for the Church of Scotland. One
day a fellow student told me, “Alex, we’ve been
holding prayer meetings about you because we
heard you were smoking grass.” I thought to
myself, “I’ve got to get out of here.”
Had you been smoking pot? [Laughs] It was a terrible rumor. I don’t know who started it.
realized he was all right, so I got him a job as a dishwasher. During our downtime, we’d drink cooking brandy and talk about our imaginary band—about how we’d meet the eyes of the audience, be incredibly emotional, and capture the experimentation of the avant-garde while keeping melody. But he had no interest in being a musician. Then my friend Mick, who was in the Amphetameanies with me at the time, offered me a bass guitar on the condition that I do something useful with it. So Bob and I drank some whiskey, and I showed him how to play an early version of “This Fire.” I think in Bob’s head, he was going, “I’m in art school. Getting a band together is the sort of thing you do when you’re in art school.”
You were a promoter at the Glasgow club
13th Note when Mogwai and Belle and
Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch played their
first shows there. Did you help create that
scene? Or do you object to that word?
I don’t think it’s a word you need to shy away
from because it’s true. Basically, this guy
Jim had the idea to start a club night on
You worked in various restaurants for many
years before forming Franz Ferdinand. Is it
true that kitchens are crazy places where
loads of drugs are done?
Oh, yes. Those guys party a lot harder than
guys in bands. Traditionally, lots of vagrants
and unemployable characters wind up work-
ing in kitchens. The fact that it was this hard,
bright, frantic place full of misfits and extreme
characters appealed to me straight away. It’s a
job I would return to whenever I was skint.
Tuesdays. Nobody turned up for the first gig apart from my band, the Blisters. It was a thrashy band and we had too much energy, but we thought it was fantastic that we got to play without anybody telling us to stop. Jim decided he’d had enough, so I thought: I can be a promoter! And I made a rule to stop listening to bands’ demo tapes and instead just talk to the people in the group. That was really why the club worked—it was all based on whether we got on together. It was very raw and unpredictable, and I loved it. Of course, most bands, when they start off, are pretty awful. I didn’t grasp the basic principle of being a promoter, which was: Put on music but also generate an income. I was on the dole most of the time.
Your 2006 book, Sound Bites: Eating on Tour
With Franz Ferdinand, is a very obsessive
food diary. Do you plan to continue writing
about food?
No. When [U.K. newspaper] The Guardian
first asked if I’d write those food columns,
I was quite chuffed, but I was worried because
I wasn’t a food critic. Then I remembered
working in my first restaurant job in Fort
William [in the Scotland Highlands] when a
chef asked, “Hey, you want a slice of shark?”
And my response was, “Shark? What the fuck?”
So I figured it would actually be interesting to
write from a naive perspective. But then the
book was published and all of a sudden I was
becoming a food writer. I had a couple of calls
from TV stations asking if I wanted to present
food programs, and I thought, “God, this has
got to stop. This is not who I am.”
As a band, you guys seem very chummy.
When was the last big fight you had, and what
was it about?
Bob and [drummer] Paul [Thomson] are very
peaceful. It’s Nick and I who are more extreme
characters. At the end of 2004, we were play-
ing a festival in the Zenith, which is this big
arena just outside of Paris. I can’t remember
what started it—something about a light
switch. This huge fight erupted and we ended
up laying into each other in the dressing room.
Then we were told, “You have to be onstage in
five minutes.” So we played the gig. It was a
great gig! Then we went backstage and picked
up the fight. Chairs were upturned and food
was everywhere. Then someone comes to the
door and tells us that the guys from our label
want to give us our gold discs. So we stopped
the fight again and got the gold discs. And
then our manager says, “Oh, we’ve just got
this message from the queen. She wants you
to come play a garden party at Buckingham
Palace.” And we’re like, “What the fuck is going
on here?” But we go back inside and start the
fight again and now there are gold discs flying
all over the place. I remember being dragged
out of the dressing room by five guys and Jarvis
Cocker staring at us. It was totally embarrass-
ing. I realized I’d been a complete idiot.
Guitarist Nick McCarthy once described
Glasgow as “hardcore.”
Well, there were some real wankers who
weren’t famous but would act like aloof rock
stars. Mostly, though, it was insular in the
sense that it was apart from the rest of the
world. The late ’90s in the U.K. was the era
of Britpop. It had absolutely nothing to do
with our lives in Glasgow, and there was a
major rejection of it. That was a London scene
created by the press to glorify people who sang
about being out in London.
You spent many years playing with experi-
enced musicians in bands like Yummy Fur.
Why did you form Franz Ferdinand with
bassist Bob Hardy when he couldn’t play an
instrument?
It started as an argument about how anybody
could be a musician. In 1999, Bob was going
out with my [then] girlfriend’s best friend. He
told awful jokes about dead babies—I thought
he was an idiot. But we had a few drinks and I
Looking at bands who had big moments around the time you guys came out but are no longer on people’s radars, do you worry about Franz Ferdinand’s ability to remain popular? I don’t know. I like the fact that a band can disappear and come back after a while. At the end of 2006, we had to force ourselves to do that. I’ve always been awful at planning for the future. My family and my girlfriend and everyone I know have been completely disappointed by the fact that I can’t plan five hours ahead, much less five days or five years.
Did you take a break after 2005’s You Could
Have It So Much Better because you were
disappointed with it?
Well, after the first record, I was thinking I
wanted to do album after album like they did
in the ’60s, not considering that those bands
didn’t tour around the world the way we did.
CLOCK WISE FROM TOP LEF T: S TUAR T REIDMAN; MAR TIN CLARK; DANN Y CLIFFORD/RE TNA; THEO WARGO/ WIREIMAGE FOR DIESEL; GREG ALLEN/REX FEATURES
70 MARCH 2009 / SPIN.COM: THE MUSIC WEbSITE
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