On the cusp of a new album and with an Australian tour just completed, Amelia Schmidt caught up with Franz Ferdinand
guitarist Nick McCarthy, and drummer Paul Thomson, in their Sydney hotel for a long chat on
the merits of dub, buying a mixing desk with cocaine in it and African
influence.
PART 1
So how was last night?Nick: Yeah it was great. I love that venue!
You guys have played the Enmore before.Nick: It gets a bit hot. They should get some windows in that place!
I saw you when you played with Cut Copy.Nick: Yeah I really like those guys!
Paul: Is that the third time we’ve played there?
Yeah, probably. Third album. An Enmore show for every album!Paul: Cut Copy had a number one here didn’t they?
They did. That kind of music is pretty popular here.Nick: It’s out with Modular isn’t it?
Yeah Modular’s very trendy. Paul: What does that mean, Modular?
Nick: That’s the record label!
Paul: Oh I thought you meant ‘modular kind of music’.
Nick: No, no [laughing] they’ve got The Presets and Wolfmother.
Paul: Oh yeah.
So tell me about your new album. Pretty excited?Paul: Well it’s kind of modular kind of music… [laughing]
Paul: Um. Yeah it’s very dancey music. It’s got a lot of big bass at the bottom, you know how RnB records have that massive bass? We wanted to get that kind of sound on a few of the songs.
You’re not pulling my leg, right?Paul: No no no… [laughs]
[Sarcastic] “It’s like an entire dubstep album.”Nick: You know when you turn on the radio and hear that really guitary kind of music? It always really kind of hurts my ears.
Paul: There actually is a dubstep track on it.
[Laughing]Paul: You think I’m joking… there’s a deluxe set which is the album split over seven seven-inch singles and there’s also a bonus disc. It’s a bonus dub mix. It’s all dub mixes of the album.
Did you guys do the mixing?Nick: Dan Carey did it actually, the guy who is producing the album. He’s done a lot of dub albums before. He’d always be going in to it when we were recording, he’d be turning up a bit of the reverb, you know, the dub. We’d just tap delete. If we were working late nights too, we’d do our tracks and then just do some dub mixes.
You guys have done some cover songs and other artists have in turn done some cool covers of your songs also. There’s a lot of playing with your music.Nick: Yeah. We really want people to play with our music too.
I loved what the Scissor Sisters did with 'Take Me Out'.Nick: I want people to steal loops from this record as well. I think there are a lot of amazing loops. It’s part of the way we recorded this album. We’d just be going around and around and around as a band, looping the sections of the songs.
Kind of minimalist.Nick: Ah yeah I guess so. We’d be playing the same kind of four bar section for fifty minutes. It’s almost like you don’t really think about it. It sounds great at the start, and then you’re still playing the same notes after ten minutes but suddenly it would just kind of gel. So then we’d just take that bit and put it in. So we have a lot of really long versions of the songs. All the original takes are forty minutes long and then they get edited down to three minutes.
We all know the structure of the three minute song but sometimes when you go in there and the tape’s rolling it just kind of spooks you. You’re more likely to fuck up. You expect the same kind of energy playing for an hour continuously but you get this amazing sort of peaks and troughs. As soon as you remove subconscious thought from it you end up in a sort of trance.
Meditative.Nick: Yeah, yeah. With your eyes kind of back in your head.
You want people to take loops. Were you looking at Brian Eno and David Byrne’s 'My Life In the Bush of Ghosts'. Paul: Oh yeah that’s an amazing record.
Nick: I’ve just read the book too actually!
Apparently they hadn’t even read the book when they chose the name they just thought it was cool. They released it in 2006 in a multitrack way so people could mess around with it. Would you guys ever do something like that?Paul: Yeah absolutely. I’d think about that too because it was all done pre-sampling technology, it was all done in tape loops but then some of the loops were like the length of this room with the sound going from one reel over there to one reel over here. So it’d just be like spaghetti junction inside the studio.
You were saying you’ve got this deluxe edition with seven seven-inches. How do you guys feel about vinyl and the way things are going?Nick: We love vinyl, yeah. It’s still nice to put on a record and let it run through.
That said, seven seven-inches are a bit of an effort to play. Nick: If you’ve got an old jukebox it’ll just drop down.
Because we’ve all got one of those…Paul: But I mean it’s just like for collectors or nerdy people or something. We really like it. It’s for DJs as well I guess. It’s also Domino desperately trying to make money off a record too.
Nick: [laughs] Before the music industry goes down the toilet completely…
What’s the artwork like for the new album?Nick: It’s a photograph of us dancing behind a bowling alley at a quarter past midnight. It’s supposed to look like a forties crime scene photograph, you know like Weegee the photographer? He’s [the photographer] taken cues from him. Kind of catching a moment, where Alex is trying to put his hand over the camera.
What about the liner notes and that kind of thing?Nick: It’s definitely a step away from all the records we’ve done with the Russian stuff because we’ve kind of already done that.
It’s your thing though?Nick: It’s good, but like the music we didn’t want to do the same thing again, it kind of bored us a little bit. It’s that really geometric, angular visual style.
But you have kind of angular music, too. So they go together.Nick: That’s exactly what we’re trying to get away from, that common misconception that that’s all we are…the angular music. Angular guitar music is now a bit of a pet hate of mine, kind of like ‘Oh God, there are so many angular guitar bands out there now these days.’
Read part 2, where our heroes discuss buying a mixing console full of cocaine, African influence and whether Melbourne is better than Sydney