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, for a long chat on the merits of dub, buying a mixing desk with cocaine in it and African influence.

PART 2 - READ PART 1 HERE


Where have you been recording?

Paul: In Glasgow.

Because you’re all Glasgow boys?

Nick: Well I was born there, none of the rest of us were born there. We just settled there for whatever reason.
 
Paul: I didn’t even grow up in Glasgow, I grew up in Edinburgh. [But] we just set up our own studio there.

Did you do your own recordings earlier?

Nick: Yeah all the demos we did ourselves. We bought like a mixing console from the states. There’s this amazing studio in Michigan, in this really most desolate part of mid-America you can ever imagine. It’s like a post-apocalpytic landscape where only black people have survived. But this guy Bill Skibbe who used to work for Steve Albini at the studio for Electrical Audio , he’s up there. He and his girlfriend Jessica built their own studio up there because it was practically free. It’s so dirt cheap. It’s three hours from Chicago to get there.

He’s got this amazing desk from when he used to work with Sly Stone. It’s called a Fleckinger. And this guy Daniel Fleckinger - we found it with cocaine in it - he used to make these desks in the early seventies. They’re pretty idiosyncratic pieces of kit, like every channel sounds completely different and the EQ is totally unsurpassed, it’s incredible. They look amazing too. It was encased in white formica so it looks quite nice.

He used to make these desks but I think his downfall was trying to bribe people in to buying them, he’d set them up with a prostitute and take photos of them, his wife would. You know, in order to not pay for the desk. He had gun compartment underneath too because he was such a paranoid coke-head that he’d always be ready to take the shotgun out from under the console. It took about two years to rebuild and re-ship to Glasgow. We didn’t really know what it would sound like but it just sounds incredible.

We’d found a space, Nick had found it, which is an old town hall in Glasgow so we’d been sort of writing and demoing on our computers or whatever and arranging material there. But the people who were renting the space to us gave us free reign of the whole building. We’d use the theatre space and the concrete bunker underneath the stage. So once the desk got in there - and it weighs a fucking tonne - we didn’t really have a lot of alternative but to record it there. Which is fine, the possibilities are totally endless. We wanted to capture a bit of the character of the building in the recording as well.

How is Alex’s food diary?

Nick: Ah he’s given up on food.

Really?

Nick: Yeah, stopped eating. [laughing]. It was supposed to be the opposite of a food critic, he was someone who was not a food critic, but then he became a food critic, and he got bored of that. We go to restaurants people and people are like, 'Ooh hush, he’s a food critic'. And he’s like 'What? What is this?'

I wanted to ask also about the African influence. The girls outside told me that there really isn’t any African influence at all.

Paul: There is a bit…kind of waves of it ,in the 6/8 time. We were listening to a lot of African music at some point and then we did a gig in Africa too. So there was that. A lot of different music, from Nigeria. It’s been going on for a while. A lot of stuff has  been on air recently, like music from the 70s in Nigeria.
 
Nick: Apparently 70% of the records from that time were destroyed by the Nigerian government. We’re also a fan of Morroccan music. There’s this guy who’s kind of like the Morrocan James Brown.
 
Paul: There’s touches of the Congolese there too, and I like music from Kenya which is all about those kind of bouncy bass lines, super positive happy music.

There’s that energy to their music.

Nick: The sort of African music which is sort of very major, and there’s also a lot of really dark music, like the Ethiopian stuff.

So how do you guys get in to all of this kind of music?

Nick: Just buying records. There’s always new compilations coming out, and we bought some cassettes when we were there. They have a lot of cassettes there.

Is it other stuff as well?

Nick: Yeah like Turkish psychedelic music. Like this band 3 Hur-El, they’re three brothers making this sexy psychedelic music. Using traditional instruments to make freaky music. Also  Brazilian stuff we’re getting in to. After we went to Brazil we bought heaps of records and listened to them when we got home.

It kind of blows your mind, all the new rhythms and harmonies. It’s like listening to jazz for the first time.

Nick: We do even listen to jazz. I have a bit of a jazz background. I studied jazz double bass you know. I do play it on the acoustic version of '40ft'. I still love playing the double bass even though I’ve lost my callouses. When I went to Morocco with this world music band called Embryo - they’re from Munich - they’re also great jazz musicians and I used to play with them. They’re quite raucous and great people. I listened to a lot of jazz with them, and I really started liking it because when I was studying, it was just kind of stuff people were playing that you don’t really feel.

I guess the whole scene of jazz changes how you feel about it too.

Paul: The extent of my jazz is that if I play something wrong then I’ll play it different the next time and pretend I meant it.
 
Nick: In the 60s it was awesome but in the 80s it got really bad you know, with all that fusion stuff.

Do you like Australia?

Nick: Yeah we love Sydney and Melbourne and parts of New Zealand. They’ve got a pretty similar attitude to Scottish people. Definitely a culture of hedonism and an overwhelming positive feeling. And sardonic wit.  

Melbourne or Sydney?

Nick: I don’t know. I like Melbourne I think. It’s the old Edinburgh-Glasgow thing though isn’t it? I imagine if I moved there I’d think the opposite.