![]() ![]() “Not the Joyce thing but the Greek story,” he says. ![]() (“If I had a song idea right now, I’d call it’Paper Cup,'” he explains, looking at the paper cup in front of him.) But something about the impromptu title inspired Kapranos to flesh out the song. The song began as a Kapra-nos melody, which he hastily titled “Ulysses” because he happened to glance at a copy of James Joyce’s masterpiece on his bookshelf. The breakthrough came with “Ulysses,” which opens the album and is the first single. “You kind of go, ‘What the fuck are we doing here?'” “After all that work, you want to go home with a song that you like, and that wasn’t happening,” says Hardy. “It just felt dishonest.” By June 2007, when Franz came out of hibernation to play a few shows, they were still working out the kinks: Of the five new tunes they played, only one would wind up on Tonight. But sessions with Kylie Minogue producer Brian Iliggins, who also co-wrote Cher’s smash “Believe,” didn’t pan out. The band boarded up the windows for privacy - creating a cocoon-like clubhouse - bought vintage synths and other classic gear and began forming songs. The disc came together in a 19th-century municipal building - once a town hall and more recently the site of a rehab clinic - in the rundown Glasgow neighborhood of Govan. “Just listening to the radio in the U.K., it’s all these fucking dull indie-guitar bands,” says I lardy. “It was like complete aimless nonsense.” They agreed on one thing: They didn’t want to recycle overplayed elements from their previous discs, especially the high-hat backbeats and the bouncing, disco-ready bass pattern that powered their 2004 breakthrough hit, “Take Me Out.” (Kapranos went so far as to tell Thomson, “You can’t play that beat anymore - do something else!”) After years of grueling tours, spawned by “Take Me Out” and perpetuated by the success of their second album, 2005’s You Could Have It So Much Better (which sold 2 million globally but left the band and many critics a bit cold), the quartet wanted to shake things up. “We jammed for about 30 minutes and Alex went, ‘Stop, stop, stop, stop!'” says Thomson. When Kapranos and his bandmates - drummer Paul Thomson, bassist Bob Hardy and guitarist Nick McCarthy (who doubles on keyboards) - gathered in Glasgow in February 2007 after a lengthy vacation, they had no clue what direction their next project would take. Satisfied, he heads back to the seaside club and to join his band in road-testing cuts from the excellent, synth-heavy Tonight - which he describes as the product of more than 18 tough months of “crazy sonic experimentation.” ![]() “You can’t get this anywhere in the U.K.,” Kapranos says happily. Tonight’s adventure ends at Roberto’s Taco Shop, where the payoff comes in the form of two carne asada tacos, aside of guacamole and some horchata juice. ![]() “It frees you from patterns that you fall into naturally.” “I love to have no idea where I am, because I have no idea what will happen next,” he says. After soundcheck at Canes Bar & Grill, Kapranos zips up his favorite black leather jacket and heads off on foot with no specific destination in mind. tour in advance of its third album, Tonight: Franz Ferdinand. The Franz Ferdinand frontman, who is such a foodie he recently published a book about his favorite meals, is in San Diego, where his band is wrapping an intimate U.S. ![]()
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