Alex: Hi, my name is Alex; I play the guitar and sing in Franz Ferdinand.
Paul: I'm Paul; I eat, sleep, and play the drums for Franz Ferdinand.
Rebecca: These Scottish rockers who had a string of hits and their collective catalogue has at least of few numbers to have you shaking your but.
Hi, I'm Rebecca Brayton and welcome to watchmojo.com and today we’re speaking with Franz Ferdinand.
I'm sure you guys have told the story many, many times, but why don’t you just tell me how Franz Ferdinand originally got together.
Alex: Paul and I have been friends for a long time. We knew each other through the Glasgow music scenes, like through ten years ago or longer, a really long time.
Alex: Bob our base player and I were pitching together we’re talking about an imaginary band going together. Then one day we met Nick at a party, had a big fight with him and then decided to form a band together. Originally Nick played the drums and Paul played guitar.
Paul: Yeah, and then we switched.
Alex: Paul can play guitar, and Nick—oh, you can hear the drums but not really in the right order or in any kind of recognizable rhythm.
Rebecca: You guys still consider yourselves, like influenced by the scene in Glasgow?
Alex: I guess we’re aware of it. There's something peculiar about the Glasgow scene, it's not like a scene like let's say Manchester where a Liverpool in a particular way tend to get most bands sounds the same, like you can tell when a band from Manchester and Liverpool, we all sound bloody the same. And Glasgow, we all tend to sound quite different from each other. Everything in Glasgow bands like Belle & Sebastian sound nothing like teenage fan club who’s nothing like Travis, who sound like nothing like McGuire.
We’re all aware of them and they are friends and you can along on with them, but I don’t know if that necessarily influence. If usually is an influence because you try to do something different from, it's competition really, isn’t it?
Paul: yeah, I guess in smaller bands, we do it—we have the respect, a lot of time in Glasgow, there could be a lot of stuff going on, that we want to get by and we’ll hear all about it.
Rebecca: I noticed when you guys are starting out that you were doing kind of secret gigs under a pseudonym?
Alex: While we were writing for this record, we get to a gig in the basement of a pub and see each other and have a Christmas Party, just talk it over the phone and after that, we text our friends, and after that we get the word out that we’re going to be playing a few songs, so it's fun to do that.
Alex: We’re not very technically, particularly Nick actually who set up all the gear and he plugged the PA and all the amplifiers at one socket and we blew up all the electricity for the block, we shut down the box. But, it's a good laugh.
Rebecca: What type of venue is your favorite to play?
Alex: Sometimes we play in crazy places. We played in Nin and Leon. We played at the Roman amphitheater. It's pretty cool, imagining the lions eating the Christians, it's kind of fun.
Rebecca: On that note, what was your first ever concert?
Paul: In Playhouse in Edinburgh.
Alex: Huge lose in the news, Glasgow at CCC, Back to the Future is my favorite film.
Rebecca: Me too.
Alex: Oh really, right, yes, it's so my favorite film.
Rebecca: And what about the fashion icon title that I've seen labeled on you guys.
Alex: I cam across a term, recently it was just a Canadian Tuxedo, which I never heard—have you heard about that?
Rebecca: Yeah, is it like a completely denim outfit?
Alex: Yeah, which is what we’re rocking today.
Paul: I suppose I got the car keys, yesterday I was wearing the Canadian Tuxes.
Alex: Yeah, I love that, it's a good look.
Rebecca: Rock it, that’s all I'm saying, rock it.
Thanks again.
Alex: Oh thank you too.