Franz Ferdinand is not your average Brit band. Since hitting the scene
hard with their Grammy-nominated 2004 album Franz Ferdinand, the
Glasgow, Scotland-based quartet has been busy crafting a steady stream
of radio-ready rock hits, replete with anthemic hooks, guitar-laden
choruses, and soaring pop melodies. Tunes like “Take Me Out,”
“Michael,” and “The Dark of The Matinee” launched an aural assault on
the record-buying public, and earned the band legions of fans and an
impressive array of awards as well. And along for the wild ride since
the beginning of it all has been founding member, keyboardist,
guitarist, and vocalist Nick McCarthy.
McCarthy and company followed up their eponymous debut with 2005’s chart-topping You Could Have It So Much Better. But following the whirlwind tour in support of that album, the band took time off to rest and reassess its musical direction. Not content to simply retrace its previous steps, Franz Ferdinand set out into uncharted territory, reinventing their sound, riff by riff. Holed-up in a Glasgow recording studio, the band focused its efforts on marrying material to technology, a symbiotic union of song and sonics. They found inspiration in new tracks and old gear, all the while maintaining the synchronized strut that has become the epicenter of the Franz Ferdinand sound.
The result of their hard-fought lab work is out now on their new 2009 release Tonight: Franz Ferdinand (Domino/Epic). Tracks such as “Ulysses” and “Turn It On” groove hard with funkified bass lines and ’70s guitar riffs, with McCarthy’s shimmering synth work front and center. It’s a bold musical move by a band that has made a consistent habit of shattering preconceptions.
Over proper English tea in a posh midtown New York hotel, McCarthy delved deep into the making of Tonight, and the remaking of a renowned band’s signature sound.
It took a lot of guts to go where you guys went on this new album. The core of your sound is still very identifiable, but it’s as if you said, “Don’t think you know what we sound like!” It’s a new beginning in a lot of ways.Well, the British scene is full of all these guitar bands now. It’s getting really boring, and it’s kind of peaked. And we didn’t want to repeat ourselves and be in that scene — we were fed up with angular guitar music. We just didn’t want to do that anymore.
Tonight, your new album, has a real vintage vibe to it, with the keyboard component playing a much heavier presence than on your previous albums. Did these old synthesizers and keyboards play a major role in the recording of the record?Yes, definitely. We used ridiculous amounts of keyboards on the album. We’ve been traveling around the world, buying old keyboards, guitars, and guitar amps. Portland, Oregon, for example, is an amazing place to buy stuff. So we traveled around, just sending gear back home. Finally, when we got home and started recording, we set up a keyboard room — there must have been about 30 keyboards in there, a lot of weird ones as well.
One that I absolutely loved, which had an incredible bass end to it but also a hornlike high end as well, was a Korg Sigma. I didn’t know anything about it — we got it quite by chance. But it was a really important instrument for us. It had this thing called a quarter-tone function on it: You could do trills with quarter tones. You could play it normally, but if you held down one key and pressed the next, it would go up in quarter-tones. It sounded very Oriental, and very unpredictable.
Was that what you used on the shimmering intro to “Twilight Omens”?No, that sound in the beginning was an old ARP. It had four presets — string, piano, harpsichord and one other — I think trombone, or something. [Laughs.] If you pressed them all together, that was the only sound that sounded good anyway. The first time I pressed it, I was like, “Wow, that’s amazing. Listen to that.” So we recorded it on a laptop right then, because we wanted to remember it. And that’s what ended up on the album, it just had something, because it was recorded in a room and it just sounded badly recorded.
It seems like you found an amazing balance on the record, between the quirkiness of the sounds that these vintage instruments have, and the depth behind them. Some of these old keyboards really had a personality of their own.Exactly. It’s really funny. When you switch on these old keyboards, and you come across a sound and you say, “Bloody hell, that’s that song.” It reminds you of other songs. Like the MiniKorg; someone turned on the MiniKorg and it just sounds like “Warm Leatherette” by Grace Jones. That sound is definitely from that song.
Another sound, the pads on “Live Alone”, has a real OMD (Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark) quality to it. Where did that come from?We found this amazing string synth, actually it’s from before synths, more like a string organ, called a Godwin. We used it a lot. It has just a few simple levers on it — you can raise the bass end, or the cello. We were recording in this amazing place, an old theater. Most of it was recorded in the dressing rooms, but there was also a massive hall. So we put an amp out in the massive hall, and I played the string parts through the amp into the hall. It sounds like an orchestra, and also a bit synthy as well.
You co-wrote all the songs. Would you say that these vintage keyboards played a central role in the writing of the songs as well?Definitely. The Korg Sigma, for instance. We did this whole session where [lead singer] Alex Kapranos was playing the Korg Sigma, and I was playing the Clavinet. We had a lot of old drum machines as well. We had a LinnDrum, and we played along to this beat we found for two hours. That really long song “Lucid Dreams” came out of that. It was just a massively long jam, and we edited it down from that.
There’s a real play on contrast on the record. Sneaky verses, then big choruses, and each recorded under different circumstances. There’s a real sonic shift between different sections of the songs.Exactly. Like on “Ulysses”, we recorded it in a lot of different rooms. The “middle A section” we did in the theater, and the chorus we did in the dry room. It was great, because in Glasgow you have all these old industrial buildings — big empty places that nobody’s using. This place we recorded in was really cheap to rent, and we had so many possibilities. All these rooms, this big theater, underneath the stage — then we recorded different parts of the songs in four or five different rooms, and we could cut it together from there. That’s why it has, as you say, sonic shifts.
It’s like you guys are approaching the sonic treatment of the songs as an instrument itself. And that really imparts a sense of identity to the music.It’s true. That’s really important to us. We all have certain records we love, like Beatles records. They had their own place, and their own sound. Even apart from their songs, which were amazing, they had incredible sounding records.
I bought an amazing book called Recording the Beatles, written by Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan. It’s got lists and photos of how they got sounds. That was in the studio a lot — we were reading it all the time. We used some tricks from it, like recording piano. I was never really happy with the sound of a recorded piano, it always sounded like a sample. Totally sterile. So I brought my old upright piano from home, and we recorded it from the back of the piano. That’s what ended up on “Katherine Kiss Me.”
It sounds like this record is living proof of your own philosophy: Find your own sound, and go for it. Was that something that was always important to you? Not to emulate anybody?Well, you want to sound like the things you love. You can switch on a modern keyboard as well, and find the right sound, but usually the presets are so generic, and you hear them so often. The idea is to create your own world in your sounds. That’s what I think it’s all about.
Paring it Down: Nick McCarthy’s live rigFor the upcoming tour in support of Tonight, Nick McCarthy plans to streamline his touring rig down to the bare essentials. “When we’re recording, we use all sorts of things,” he says. “But when we’re playing live, it just needs to be simple. I don’t want to be fiddling around too much.” McCarthy’s live rig will center around a vintage Hohner D6 Clavinet, anchoring the bottom of his three-keyboard setup. “I’ll have the Clavinet for my main rhythm and piano parts,” he continues. “Plus, it looks really cool. It has these sexy legs on it — it looks great. I’ve tried doing it with samples, but it’s just not as much fun. Playing a Clavinet is just like playing a guitar — you can really get into it. It played a big part on the record.”
Above the Clavinet, McCarthy plans to have an as-yet-undetermined, semiweighted MIDI controller to trigger some of the vintage sounds from the record. “We’ve got all these old keyboards on the record, and the last time I took them out on the road, none of them worked,” he says. “This time, I don’t want things to get too complicated — and I don’t want to rely on a laptop.”
The top of his live rig will feature a Moog Minimoog Voyager. “The Moog has the bass end — the really bass-y keyboard sounds from the record,” he explains. “The combination of that and the Clavinet will be great. Plus, the Moog has presets — you can work it out all before, but you can also twist the knobs a little bit when you’re playing live.” McCarthy also plans to utilize the Voyager’s on-board filters to process other keyboard modules as well. “On the record, we used a Nord Electro for piano sounds,” he says. “But we ran it through the filters on the Moog. It gives it an edge. It’s brilliant. I think I’m going to do that live.”
A Selected Franz Ferdinand DiscographyTonight: Franz Ferdinand (Domino/Epic)
You Could Have It So Much Better (Sony)
Franz Ferdinand (Domino)
For more on Nick and Franz Ferdinand visit www.franzferdinand.co.uk