“I also had orbital celeritous, which was an infection on my brain. I was dragged into hospital and put on a nebuliser in the back of an ambulance. If it wasn’t for the NHS I wouldn’t have made it. “I’m an asthmatic, and my life was saved three times as a kid. “What is happening with the NHS is heartbreaking,” says Kapranos. On Always Ascending they broach the ubiquity of social media and the disintegration of the NHS in songs such as Academy Award and Huck and Jim. In 2016 Franz Ferdinand contributed a song called Demagogue to writer Dave Eggers' 30 Days, 30 songs project in the run-up to the US presidential election, which Kapronos calls the most overtly political song they've ever written. We ended up selling four million records. I thought, 'oh they'll be, like, somewhere in between Pavement and the Strokes.' I thought we'd sell, you know, up to half a million records. "To what extent I really didn't have any idea. Judging by what Bell reveals in Meet Me in the Bathroom, the feeling appears to be mutual. "They were so good there was no way that people wouldn't like them," Bell says. When I met Laurence I knew he felt the same way. When you're in a band you risk everything to do something you love. Now we're still working with each other 15 years later. When I first met Laurence I made an instant connection. "We didn't know about that until after we signed with Domino," Kapranos says. One of its intriguing revelations is that Franz Ferdinand became such hot property they were the subject of an intense bidding war, which Laurence Bell of Domino Records won after remortgaging his house. In Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011, Lizzy Goodman documents the explosion of guitar bands in the early noughties on both sides of the Atlantic. Admittedly, it took me 18 years to reach that point, but I’m never, ever going to moan about it. I was lucky enough to be able to find out what my thing is. I first started writing songs when I was 14. Also, I love being onstage and performing. The food was just a device to talk about who I was with, and where we were.” Opportunityįranz Ferdinand are very happy on the road. “Oh my God, I absolutely love it,” Kapronos gushes. I was more interested in writing about where in the world I was rather than the food to be honest. “It was just before good phone cameras and people being able to take decent pictures of what they were having for dinner, which revolutionised food blogging. “It was a totally different environment,” says Kapranos. Indeed, he even moonlighted as a food columnist for the Guardian in the mid-noughties and wrote a book entitled Sound Bites: Eating on Tour with Franz Ferdinand years before the relatively recent explosion in food blogging and contemporary foodie culture. Let’s just say I’m very excited about it.” Guinness, fish n’ chips and oysters on the side at the same time. “It is also a great excuse to go to McDonagh’s because they do quite possibly the best fish n’ chips I’ve had in my life. If I hadn’t been in Galway that day Julian might never have joined the band, so it’s really nice to be starting the tour there. Emma Pollack and loads of others who were in the film were there, so I told the guys I was looking for a new member for the band. "I was over at the Galway Film Festival with Stuart from Mogwai and Niall McCann, the director of a movie we did about Glasgow musicians called Lost in France. Kapranos is particularly looking forward to playing Galway as the city was also instrumental for the new line up of the band. We started it in the Roisín Dubh in Galway, and ended it playing to 18,000 people in an arena in Madrid using exactly the same gear.” “When I think about it now, the progression of that tour was crazy.
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