The SPIN Interview: Alex Kapranos

Photographed for SPIN by Christopher Morris

Either Alex Kapranos is hungry or the traditional English dish 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 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."

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 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 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.

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 attended divinity school for a year. Were you religious at the time?