Franz Ferdinand are one of the biggest UK bands in the world with over 10 million albums sold, 1.2 billion streams to date and 14 platinum albums.
Formed in the early 2000s they have won Brit and Mercury prizes and had Grammy nominations.
The band has just released Hits To The Head, a 20-track greatest hits, with two new songs included.
Charlotte Ryan spoke to frontman Alex Kapranos and bassist Bob Hardy from the band about their 20 year anniversary and reflected on their success.
Franz Ferdinand Photo: Supplied
Choosing songs for the greatest hits was an enjoyable process, Kapranos told Ryan.
“Usually when you record you put it out in the world and you don’t listen to it again and compiling it all together and listening to it is a reminder of everything that’s happened over the last 18 years.
“It’s a bit like flicking through a family photograph album.”
Their sound, guitar rock with a dance edge, was a quite deliberate, Kapranos says.
“We did a lot of talking before we did any playing and it was about how we wanted to sound different from the bands that were round about us.
“There’d been bands before us like The Strokes, The White Stripes and The Hives, which were all really cool bands, but we thought let’s do something different from what they’re doing.
“Also, to combine the different things we liked, we liked going to clubs and listening and dancing to dance music, but we liked that raw edge of rock n roll and I guess we put those two worlds together and made something new.”
From the beginning they were never a band for the boys, they say, it was about making music for girls to dance to.
“It was just our social group, it was very female-heavy. We realised we were different from a lot of the bands that were around.
“A lot of the bands in Glasgow at that time, and bands in general, were blokey doing this post Brit Pop thing and being very laddy or the post-rock thing which was very chin-strokey and beard-strokey for guys.
“We were playing music and most of our friends were girls and they wanted to dance so it seemed like a glib way of summing up what we were doing.”
Looking back their rise to the top happened very fast, Hardy says.
“We were kind of in the eye of the storm so it didn’t really sink in exactly what was happening until two or three years later when you look back at things.”
The band still has the hunger that drove them in the early noughties, Kapranos says.
“If you don’t have the desire to do it, if you don’t have that burning inside, you probably shouldn’t be on the stage.”
And it remains a privilege, he says.
“Getting to travel around the world, it’s such an incredible opportunity and to do it playing music, I still pinch myself and can hardly believe that it’s true, that we’ve managed to do that.”
