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Hours before their show at the Academy in Manchester, the pair were in high spirits. Having appeared live occasionally in the build up to Tonight: Franz Ferdinand’s release, the previous night had seen their “best gig in 18 months,” played to a sell-out crowd at their home town Glasgow’s famous Barrowland Ballroom. The quickfire live sets the band specialises in currently include an equal mix of the band’s older guitar-led tracks and more electronic newer efforts.
Original speculation about Tonight’s style was always misinformed, Thomson noting that long before an album gets released: “people want clues to what it’s going to sound like, and you say that you’re listening to a lot of Afrobeat at the moment and all of a sudden it’s like: “they’re going to make an Afrobeat record!” Really, Afrobeat’s just a tiny fraction of what influences us; the closest we get to it is on that one in 6/8 time ['Send Him Away'].”
The removal of a leading guitar in some of the new songs has been a “subtle shift” rather than a sonic revolution, giving the album a punchier, more rhythmic foundation. Its immediacy is testified to not only by the music, but also by the album cover, which appears to show Franz Ferdinand enacting the aftermath of a mob shooting in 50’s USA: “it’s that bright flash, capturing a moment at night when someone shouts “something’s happened!” That’s what the songs are about – something happening at night time,” observes Bob, “we were already interested in Weegee, so we did a day of promos in his style, never intending to use them for an album cover, but they came out so well.”
In spite of the recurring theme of night-time happenings, Hardy is quick to reject reviewers’ claims that Tonight is a concept album: “that’s just far-fetched. When we finished the record, we didn’t even have a title, and Paul noticed how so many of the songs are set at night, so we went with that title. Also, we can say all this bullshit in interviews and it can be great.”
He laughs when he says this, but there seems to be reason for nervousness when it comes to interviewing the band at the moment. Their recent song ‘What She Came For’ is a biting attack on repetitive interviews, its lyrics saturated with mundane questions (“where’d you get your name from?” and “where d'you see yourself in five minutes time?” to name a couple). Certain quirks of their recent production have become “like coming up with a great joke, before everyone starts repeating it to you ad nauseum for the next year”.
The human skeleton used by the band as an additional drum set on upcoming single ‘No You Girls’ has become something of band folklore, but Hardy is quick to downplay it (though “it was funny at the time”). Likewise, he brings up their idea of swinging a microphone at distance over an amp to capture the Doppler Effect in their guitar sounds on ‘What She Came For’, as a point of interest for some, but not him.
Both Thomson and Hardy are much more eager to talk about the future than the past year’s more trivial points. The band having had the same set up “for a while now,” Thomson “wouldn’t mind a complete revolution,” although: “with us, it’s the same four personalities so even if we made a Gamelan polka record it’d still sound like us.”
Whether Franz Ferdinand’s future lies in subtle change or a grand revolution, their fans and critics will eagerly await developments. Even the band doesn’t know what the future holds, but then again, observes Hardy: “that’s the exciting thing about the future, after all...”
Franz Ferdinand continue touring for the rest of the year, playing numerous festivals including Glastonbury and T in the Park.
Tonight: Franz Ferdinand: our review | Official Site | MySpace
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