Skip Matheny— currently a songwriter in the band Roman Candle and former bartender in a retirement community — caught up with Alex Turner and Matt Helders of the Arctic Monkeys before their show in Chicago, Illinois, last fall.
Did you write these songs for the newer record after you had moved to Brooklyn?
AT: No. But I have written a lot since I’ve moved there.
A lot of writers have a newly infused life behind their writing once they leave their home country… it’s like they can write with an almost clearer eye about anything. Robert Frost, for example … his writing really took shape when he moved his family to the U.K. Have you experienced anything like that?
AT: Yeah. I think moving there seems to have given me like a kick up the arse or something. I mean I’ll sit there quite often, more frequently than I used to, and write. I feel like there is a lot more room here or something. But actually the songs on this record all came before [I moved]. But the next record probably will all be these songs I suppose.
Did either of you, have sometime when you were a kid when you heard a song and thought, “This thing or idea of a pop song, I get that. I might try to do that one day?”
AT: Well, I remember I must have been like twelve years old or something, and hearing “I Am the Walrus” and thinking, “Well, this is just like nonsense. I could write something like this, surely.” And sort of attempting to write in that style and really struggling with it. I distinctly remember getting aggravated because it’s like, “Well, he’s singing about custard and a cob sitting on a cornflake and why can’t I think of that?”[Laughs] And I still can’t do that exactly.
It reminds me of when I saw a Jackson Pollock painting as a kid and I thought, “Oh man, this guy has fooled everybody. This is some really easy stuff.” And then you get a little older and realize that there is something else going on there.
AT: Exactly. And there are other things: I remember being on car journeys with my parents and, I feel like that situation is the first time that I would hear music, as a kid. I suppose my Dad was talking to me about Beach Boys tunes and the harmony aspect of [their songs] as well. They evoke feeling from you—almost involuntarily—and the idea of that is something that’s stayed with me, because before the lyrics or anything in those songs, the chords and the vocal harmonies sort of get you. I remember being stirred even at a young age. It’s almost like you can’t help it.
Come On Home
Although my lover lives in a place that I can't live A kind of find I like a life this lonely It rips and pierces me in places I can't see I love the rip of nerves, the rip that wakes me So I'm dissatisfied, I love dissatisfied I love to feel there's always more than I need
So come on home So come on home So come on home
You're where you want to be, I'm where I want to be C'mon we're chasing everything I've ever wanted I replace you easily, replace pathetically I flirt with every flighty thing that falls my way
But how I needed you, when I needed you Let's not forget we are so strong, so bloody strong
Come on home So come on home So come on home
Blue light falls upon your perfect skin Falls, and you draw back again Falls, and this is how I felt And I can not forget this And I can not forget this
Come on home So come on home But don't forget to leave
It was around 3 in the afternoon when Alex Kapranos’s hangover began to wear off. Mr. Kapranos, the lead singer of the Scottish rock band Franz Ferdinand, and his bandmate Nick McCarthy, who plays guitar and keyboards, had spent the previous evening in a refined version of debauchery. They went to a concert — by the British group the Last Shadow Puppets — followed by a late-night feast at the Spotted Pig, the West Village gastropub. Mr. McCarthy capped it off with some dancing at a downtown club, staying out until 5 a.m.
Now both were sitting at Momofuku Noodle Bar in the East Village, recovering.
“I’m feeling very, very tender,” Mr. Kapranos, 36, said.
“Do you have any tea?” Mr. McCarthy, 34, asked the waitress.
“No hot beverages,” she replied. They ordered water.
The odyssey of a night out, from drug-fueled anticipation to dance-floor frenzy to post-hook-up comedown, is also the subject of the band’s third album, “Tonight: Franz Ferdinand,” released on Tuesday on Domino/Epic Records. On it, the group — which includes Bob Hardy on bass and Paul Thomson on drums — aimed away from the wry, propulsive post-punk that defined its first two records and made its global 2004 hit, “Take Me Out,” an unlikely stadium anthem; even the Yankees used it.
Since then the members have found that their aesthetic — from their high-hat beat to their mod wardrobe — has gone mainstream, especially in Britain, Mr. Kapranos said. “You feel like, right, that’s become so much a part of musical vocabulary of the contemporary band, it’s now a cliché, and you have to leave it,” he said.
So no more “angular guitars,” Mr. McCarthy said, a description that has stuck to the band as surely as their slim-cut suits. (Or their angular haircuts.)
But though the band added more keyboards, bass (“It’s nice to be the lead onstage occasionally, so that I can show off a bit,” Mr. Hardy wrote in an e-mail message), unusual instrumentation, echoes of dub and even an acousticy ballad, “Tonight” will sound familiar to Franz fans, with Mr. Kapranos again singing disco songs about girls and hedonistic behavior.
He has a reputation as a foodie: he met Mr. Hardy when they worked at a Glasgow restaurant, and eventually wrote a food column for The Guardian in Britain. (A collection was released in the United States as a well-received book, “Sound Bites: Eating on Tour With Franz Ferdinand,” in 2006.)
Over an elaborate lunch — kimchi and other pickled vegetables, East and West Coast oysters, pork and shitake mushroom buns, noodle soups and hamachi with beet purée — he and Mr. McCarthy discussed their attempts to sidestep the clichés of postpunk stardom while still making a record people could dance, and debauch themselves, to.
“It’s a mixed blessing when a band gets that much attention early on,” said Jason Bentley, the music director of KCRW, the influential radio station in Santa Monica, Calif., and the host of “Morning Becomes Eclectic.” In 2004 that program, with Nic Harcourt as the host, first featured Franz Ferdinand in the United States. Less than a year later the band was opening the Grammys with “Take Me Out.”
“For a while there, you thought, ‘Are these guys going to go down as a one-hit wonder?’ ” Mr. Bentley said.
Not that they mind having their music back arena-size sporting events. “I always thought it was funny,” Mr. Kapranos said, “because we are the least sporty people in the world.”
Still, “Tonight” is an attempt to regroup as the small Glasgow band the members started, rather than the stylish name brand one they seemed poised to become after their self-titled debut, which had a narrowly defined look and a taut signature sound and sold more than a million copies in the United States.
Nick Nick Mccarthy, guitar player of Franz Ferdinand, told the press that he likes Peruvian folk music very much, and he would have not any objection to include some Peruvian rythms in any future production.
“A Peruvian girl taught me Spanish, and she also told me about the cotton and the big mountains of Peru. Maybe someone can take me to a Peruvian music show while in Lima,” he said, adding that it would be “great.”
He also said that they tried some Peruvian food in Brazil: “we went to a Peruvian restaurant and had some pisco sours. It was a quite funny mixing after the caipirinhas,” he added.
Singer admits his flights of fancy were taken a little too seriously
Franz Ferdinand's Alex Kapranos has declared he will not be writing a musical, despite declaring that he had "an amazing idea" for a show.
The frontman was speaking about his inspiration while on tour in Australia, but has since used Twitter to declare he has no intention of hitting the West End or Broadway.
"I'm not writing a bloody musical. I was talking about an idea I had for one. Doesn't mean I'm going to write it," he wrote, before explaining that it was just one of a series of fantasy projects he has had.
"I had an idea for a sitcom in a Russian abattoir. I'm not writing that either. Or the sci-fi movie script Time Bin," he explained. "But In Through The Outbox, a rom-com about business rivals falling in love over internet while unaware of their real identities, is a hit."
He was later informed by one of his followers that In Through The Outbox was very similar to the Hollywood film You've Got Mail, causing him to quip: "What? They stole my bloody idea!!!"
Kapranos also admitted the misunderstanding about the musical idea was his fault as he replied to the Triple J radio station that broadcast the initial interview.
"My fault! Opening my mouth and letting my imagination go etc," he wrote. "It was fun to chat about it though."
Lily Allen broke down mid-show after witnessing a fight.
The ‘Not Fair’ singer was horrified by the brawl in the crowd at London’s O2 Arena and left the stage in tears as security escorted the middle-aged men out.
Upon her return, she said: “That’s the worst sort of violence. It’s f***ing sick and you lot should be ashamed of yourself.”
However, controversial Lily did not end the night on a low point, and dedicated her expletive-filled song ‘F**k You’ to Conservative Party leader David Cameron, who last month declared her music unsuitable for children.
She said: “I’d like to dedicate this next song to someone. David Cameron.”
The 24-year-old star was playing one of her last performances before her retirement from music – she plans to set up a vintage clothes shop and launch a record label.
Lily recently revealed she wanted to take a break from music for five years, saying: “I'm just doing a different job for a bit. I'm having a career change. I just want to stay in London for a while. It's not a particularly healthy lifestyle being on the road."
Monday March 8th 2010 – The Future Music Festival hits Adelaide's Rundle & Rymill Parks with The Prodigy, Franz Ferdinand, Empire of the Sun, Erick Morillo, Boys Noize and Spank Rock...
An up-and-coming hip-hop star’s album sounds more psychedelic than MGMT and Ratatat combined. An Australian discards a decade of writing classic rock ballads for electronic extravagance. Big-name trance DJs enlists Pitchfork’s finest as guest vocalists. A British indie mainstay headlines a self-confessed “rave” festival. And a rock music reviewer, complete with inappropriate attire, is meant to feel welcomed at said festival.
I say “meant” because, at the end of the (festival) day, the Future Music Festival was not the most welcoming place for what it attests to have accommodated for through its lineup. This has nothing to do with organisation or the bands, yet the atmosphere itself. If this festival is indeed indicative of the future of humanity, I do not want to be a part of it.
Any festival where a guy simply trying to leave the heaving throng of the main stage crowd is greeted with “Wat du fuk R u doin u fagget! Git ‘way frum me U Gaylord!!!” (pronounced as written) will not be seen in a positive light. Especially when the person making this call is only wearing a pair of G-Star underwear and watching David Guetta.
For the record, it is this select majority that makes festivals unbearable for many a music fan. If it were up to me, most of my word count would be used to write a scathing open letter directed bluntly at that select majority. But I have a word count, an editor, stakeholders in this content, and really much better things to do than to whine for 800 words or more about the several girls and guys who look like they’re on the set of an amateur porno and make normally danceable, fun music akin to the experience of chopping off one’s ear.
That’s not to say it was all bad. For every failed-attempt-at-avoiding-an-overhyped-superstar-DJ, there were quaint moments of brilliance. And by quaint moments of brilliance, I mean The Prodigy headlined. Everyone else phoned it in.
Or at least everyone that I saw. Operator Please were the first interesting act in a clash-heavy timetable (apologies, I did indeed miss Does It Offend You, Yeah? Booka Shade and Sven Vath). They’ve always been good with simple, twee pop, today giving a set of rehashed debut tracks that slight rave feel (read: they added synthesisers to most of songs).
The song that was once in everyone’s head, Just A Song About Ping Pong, hardly causes a ripple today but at least they’re playing well and enjoying themselves amongst paper flowers and streamers. They leave and the Aston Shuffle arrives on stage. Someone screams “Yes! Real dance music!” I leave.
I contemplated many a scenario behind Franz Ferdinand being booked for this festival, of all festivals to be booked for. Money? Stupidity? Intense risk taking? All of the above? Probably just the money, actually. And, well, they didn’t even try. They felt uncomfortable on stage in front of ravers and the ravers felt uncomfortable with a guitar pop band pulling out a greatest hits set in front of them. Sure, everyone sang along to the songs they knew, but otherwise it was a strange setting for them.
The worst facet, removing their peculiar performing environment, was that they were just plain. When Metric was faced with the same problem at last year’s Parklife, they pulled out all guns and eventually had the crowd in their hands. Alex Kapranos and company seemed content to just poke them every now and again.
If Franz Ferdinand were poking the crowd, then Empire of the Sun had built a 2ft-thick concrete wall between his audience and himself. Was he lip-synching? Was he bored? Was he too concerned with his impending UK tour? Has months of performing to the same disrespectful festival crowds with the same old lot of songs paying its toll on Luke Steele? The over-the-top performance aspects were all there (wait, there goes the LCD screen), but any sense of connection, albeit impersonal or personal, was gone. He began to warm to the crowd as he wandered around the edges of the stage singing Without You, but by that point I was already on my way out.
As so far I’ve had mediocre bands, bad sound, poor timetabling and crowd members from the seventh layer of hell. Aside from a brief run at “roller disco” and Bowie-themed face painting this festival has become akin to stress incurred when post-festival season credit card bills arrive. Then, in an act signalling a truthful plea for forgiveness, Liam Howlett, Keith Flint and Maxim Reality take the stage screaming World’s on Fire. A sea of bodies became a leaping, hypnotized chorus and the stage becomes a crucible, leaving behind the passion, testosterone and ferocity that the entire festival till this moment lacked.
Suddenly my worries were alleviated; the grandstand I am on feels like it may collapse and I may soon die amongst the same ilk that I’ve spent the past six hours detesting. But does that matter when you’re witnessing over twenty thousand punters being controlled by legends of the rave genre as they slap out Firestarter? Of fucking course not.
In what I had pictured as an escape to beat the crowds became simply a necessary departure, albeit without any sense of loss. Would I return next year to face another day of horrid conditions just for (presumably) one of the greatest live bands alive again? Knowing my spur-of-the-moment attitude, probably. Will I like it? Ask me in a year’s time, u fagget.
I time every journey to bump into you accidentally.
I charm you and tell you of the boys I hate, all the girls I hate, all the words I hate, all the clothes I hate, how I'll never be anything I hate.
You smile, mention something that you like or how you'd have a happy life.
If you did the things you like.
Skip Matheny— currently a songwriter in the band Roman Candle and former bartender in a retirement community — caught up with Alex Turner and Matt Helders of the Arctic Monkeys before their show in Chicago, Illinois, last fall.
