While on tour in support of their new album, The Human Fear, three members of Glasgow-based band Franz Ferdinand — specifically, Alex Kapranos, Bob Hardy and Julian Corrie — visited The Current studio to perform semi-acoustic versions of songs from the album.

Following the set, the three sat down with host Mac Wilson for a fun and wide-ranging conversation that touched on Franz Ferdinand’s discography and everyone’s shared admiration of Belle & Sebastian, as well as pigeon keeping and even a bit of armchair linguistics.

Watch and listen to the performances above, and watch and listen to the interview using the video player below. Beneath that, you’ll find a full transcript of the interview.

Interview Transcript

Mac Wilson: Hello, friends. My name is Mac Wilson, and I'm joined in The Current studio by Franz Ferdinand: Bob Alex Julian, thanks for stopping by today.

Alex Kapranos: Thank you.

Bob Hardy: Thanks for having us.

Mac Wilson: So you just played some songs in The Current studio, and one observation that I had off the top of my head, the last one that you played, what was the name of that one?

Alex Kapranos: Oh, "Bar Lonely." Yes.

Mac Wilson: "Bar Lonely." So one of my favorite bands ever is Belle and Sebastian, which I'm sure that you've heard a lot because you're both from Scotland, but I've never, like, put together really much of a sonic link between the two. But hearing that in the stripped-down piano version, I'm like, "You know, I can hear the link here between the two."

Alex Kapranos: That's cool. I mean, those guys are kind of contemporaries of ours and certainly friends of ours, and we actually, in a roundabout way, have to thank Belle and Sebastian for the formation of the band, because Mick Cooke, who used to play trumpet in Belle and Sebastian, gave me a bass guitar, and it was that guitar that Bob came round to my flat and started playing bass with, and was kind of the genesis of the band, really. So thanks, the Belles! 

Mac Wilson: That seems to be the case with Belle and Sebastian; like, any given member of the band, like they could probably have their own band, but they work so well as a collective, that's cool.

Alex Kapranos: Ah yeah, they're great. But, I mean, Stuart Murdoch is like an incredible talent, though, as well, like a brilliant songwriter.

Julian Corrie: He's a real story songwriter, I think, that there is a crossover there with "Bar Lonely," because it's kind of a story song.

Alex Kapranos: Yes. That's true, actually, yes. Yeah, yeah. He's very good at characters as well. Like, the characters always seem very vivid and believable.

Bob Hardy: Yeah, but they often are real people as well.

Alex Kapranos: Yes, yeah. I guess that's what we were going for. Like, Bob and I wrote that song, "Bar Lonely," together after going to the real place. Bar Lonely, it is an actual bar in the Golden Gai, which is in Tokyo. And so, yeah, we were inspired by that to write the song.

Mac Wilson: Yeah, Belle and Sebastian, they have a couple of songs about Tokyo, too. I wanted to make sure that you are on good terms with the band, so I'm frantically Googling before, and I'm like, "Franz Ferdinand, Belle and Sebastian," and Alex, I found your cover of "Le Pastie de la Bourgeoisie" from a couple of years back. And I'm like, "OK, he knows the deep cuts." So that's OK.

Bob Hardy: Actually, a very early press shot of Belle and Sebastian, when they were averse to having photographs of themselves, was just a photograph of Alex.

Alex Kapranos: Yeah, from about 1996; it's a picture of me with my favorite bike. It's this old 1940s Raleigh on Byres Road in Glasgow. Yeah, that was their press shot.

Mac Wilson: And we got to go look that up at some point. But we are here with Franz Ferdinand in The Current studio right now. So the new record is out now, The Human Fear. And I was both surprised and heartened by the fact that this is your sixth studio album, and I feel like that's good spacing with it. It feels like you are able to keep in what makes you special as a band without it feeling like, "Oh, we have to keep up, like Guided by Voices level, like a new record every single year," where you can be you, and we remember who you are, and yet still be pleasantly surprised by each subsequent release. So what prompted getting back together and deciding now was the time for the new album?

Alex Kapranos: I mean, it wasn't really a case of getting back together, it was just when everything was ready, I suppose. You know, you can't really predict how it's going to come out and what the timing is going to be, and I've no idea what the next one's going to be, whether it's going to be six years or six months. It's just, it's ready when it's ready. You know? Like, all the good things in life.

Mac Wilson: One, like, lyrical thing that I've noticed with one of the songs, "Audacious," that you played here, where you said, "Don't stop being audacious," is the idea that you're not, like, resting on your laurels at all, even when you look back at like themes, like Always Ascending, like you're never just sitting back, you're always moving on to the next thing. And that seems to be what you're doing with this new one as well.

Alex Kapranos: I definitely feel that as an — I think we all do, don't we? — that you can't sit back and just enjoy what you've done. If you do that, then you cease being an artist. It's like you become a tribute act, a tribute to the band that you were. And I love playing the old songs that we've got live, but only because we've got the new ones' company.

Mac Wilson: When you talked about being a tribute act, that isn't necessarily the case, but you had the Hits [to the Head] album that came out a couple of years back. So as you're out on this tour now, do you think of it like, "OK, we're going deep back into the well, we're changing it up with different deep cuts every night." Or are you keeping it more focused on the new stuff? So like, what's the set list? Which form are they taking on a night-by-night basis?

Bob Hardy: Yeah, we've been adding some deeper cuts from early albums here and there, and then rotating the sort of the songs that were on Hits to the Head, because that's one of the great things you can do, and playing a lot of the new album. So, yeah, there's a big, big mix really, which is refreshing for us. It's nice to do that after having toured the greatest hits for like, 18 months, or whatever it was.

Julian Corrie: And we're pretty quick with picking stuff up as well. I'm pretty sure "Evil and a Heathen" [off 2005’s You Could Have It So Much Better] came about — which we're playing in the set — because we were just like, "Oh, should we try that one?" And then it just kind of happened, and it was like, "Oh, there we go." So the band feels very kind of flexible at the moment, and feels like we can just pick stuff up and when we want to, which is great.

Mac Wilson: So here's a question I'm curious about: So when you hit the scene, I was in college at the time when the self-titled album came out, and I remember thinking, "OK, we've got to do the European pronunciation, 'Frahwnz Ferdinand’.” I was on the air the other day, and I said, "Well, that's Franz Ferdinand." So I've totally Americanized it over the last two decades, and I don't know how that happened. So I'm wondering where you're at with it?

Bob Hardy: I've never said "Frawhnz." That doesn't make any sense anyway.

Alex Kapranos: I say Franz Ferdinand, yeah.

Bob Hardy: Americans always say "Frahwnz." Am I ... what's going on?

Alex Kapranos: Oh, so that's Americans trying to sound British! That's amazing! I didn't understand. I thought that was Americans just being American.

Mac Wilson: We're trying to do you justice by going, "Oh, this is the European pronunciation, 'Frahwnz'."

Alex Kapranos: Do you want to hear our American accents? They're really bad.

Bob Hardy: I think maybe, maybe in German, that would be like how you'd say it. I don't know. 

Alex Kapranos: No, no, because Nick used to pronounce it like a German person. Well, actually, to be specific, like a Bavarian person, which is not like a regular German.

Bob Hardy: I guess Austrian would be more accurate.

Alex Kapranos: Yeah, it's more like an Austrian accent, like he would call "Frants Fertinant.”

Bob Hardy: Yeah, that's right, he put a T in it.

Alex Kapranos: "Frants," "Frants."

Bob Hardy: Yeah, no, I guess we have Franz, because...

Alex Kapranos: Maybe it's like the Z in "pizza." Maybe it has like an unwritten T. 

Bob Hardy: Maybe.

Alex Kapranos: I don't know, I don't know.

Mac Wilson: And see, you say that like "zed," there's absolutely no "zed" in the American lexicon.

Alex Kapranos: Oh, yeah, you're a "zee" aren't you?

Mac Wilson: Absolutely none whatsoever. Like there's places where we pick up, you know, various, U.K.-isms and whatnot. But no "zed," absolutely not.

Bob Hardy: You mean you don't use the letter in your spellings? Because I've noticed—

Alex Kapranos: No, no, they call it a "zee."

Bob Hardy: Ah, right, right, right.

Alex Kapranos: Yeah.

Mac Wilson: So we, yeah, we use the letter, but just at the actual—

Bob Hardy: Yeah, but you replace S sometimes, don't you? And use a Z instead.

Alex Kapranos: Like, in which case?

Bob Hardy: I can't think off the top of my head. Isn't that, right? It's like Americanization and things.

Julian Corrie: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah!

Alex Kapranos: Oh, like "Americanisation" would be with a Z rather than an S.

Julian Corrie: Yeah, that's true, yeah.

Alex Kapranos: That's weird, isn't it? It's fascinating. Yeah, there are some things like, like you get in America that are much older, like there are sort of like bits of old English that survive. Like, I always find it fascinating when people say — I don't if they say it in Minneapolis, it seems more like a New York thing to me — but like, "gotten," "I've gotten something." Would you say "gotten"?

Mac Wilson: Yeah, "I've gotten that before." Yeah.

Alex Kapranos: See that, to me, sounds really archaic, but like, beautiful that it's been preserved, that's really cool.

Mac Wilson: So here's a word that's difficult to say in American parlance, that U.K. wise, Scottish works fine. The word is spelled L-O-R-D. 

Julian Corrie: Lord?

Alex Kapranos: Lord.

Mac Wilson: See, it sounds fine with you, but in my Minnesotan accent, it always comes out as "lohhrrrd." So it manages to become two syllables no matter what I do! I can't — I would have to sound British in order for it to be just the one syllable. Otherwise, it's always lohhhrrrdd.

Alex Kapranos: Lord.

Mac Wilson: I hate saying it. 

Julian Corrie: You can hear, you can hear every letter, though, which is good!

Mac Wilson: Lohrrd.

Julian Corrie: Because I say, I say it like "laud," and it just, it's, there's no R in it.

Alex Kapranos: Yeah. Yeah. How would you pronounce — this is the one that always gets me — right, so you know the big reflective piece of glass that you look in to see yourself? How would you call that?

Mac Wilson: Right. A "meer."

Alex Kapranos: I always find that so funny! Like, because it just sounds like, it sounds like "smear": "meer", like it sounds like all the vowels are, like, kind of rubbed into each other, where I'd call it a mirror.

Mac Wilson: A mirror. OK.

Alex Kapranos: Yeah.

Mac Wilson: No, it's a mirror.

Alex Kapranos: Oh! so you do! Like, you just—

Mac Wilson: I even toned down the Minnesotan a little bit. Mirror.

Alex Kapranos: Oh, yeah, right. OK, yeah. See, to me, it just sounds like "meer." "Meer."

Mac Wilson: And we haven't even gotten [q.v] into like, the A, like "beg." Like you pick up a "beg" of something.

Julian Corrie: A “beg”? Oh wow.

Bob Hardy: Do you say "beg"?

Mac Wilson: It's not "bag," it's "beg."

Alex Kapranos: I love the thing you did the other day where you tried to get your name written on your coffee cup.

Bob Hardy: People don't understand when I say my name, like in Starbucks or whatever. So like, I'm like, "Bob," and they'd be like, "What?" And I know that. I know that Americans go, "Baahhhb." So I was like, "It's Baahhhb." And then they spelt, they wrote, "Barb," as in "Barbara."

Mac Wilson: All right. So here's a word that's fairly universal between the languages, the one that caught my ear on the new album, "The Birds."

Alex Kapranos: Oh, yeah!

Mac Wilson: So that's about pigeons.

Alex Kapranos: Well, if pigeons can, like, appear as a metaphor. Sure, yeah. It's about acceptance after rejection, I guess, which is kind of a more and more common theme in the era of social media. It's something that happens a lot more easily, social isolation. There was an amazing book by Jon Ronson called So You've Been Publicly Shamed. I don't know if you read that, but like, it talks about that issue very well. And while the song's not about that specifically, I think it's something that we do come across a lot.

Mac Wilson: But that is sort of the plight of the pigeons, too, where they were domesticated and then totally abandoned to the cities. So I mean, it does fit in with that. I asked, because we have a flock of pigeons that we keep at our house. So I was really—

Alex Kapranos: Oh, you have got one!

Mac Wilson: Where there's a reference in the song to pigeons. I'm like, "You're talking about the birds! This is great."

Alex Kapranos: I guess, like, when you look at a flock of pigeons, like, I was thinking of pigeons in George Square [in Glasgow], like, they're all anonymous. Like, none of them are judging each other; they're just accepting that they're all in the flock. And I was imagining somebody who'd been ostracized and, like, repelled from society, wanting to blend in and be just like another mangy pigeon and accepted by the flock, and not wanting anything grand in their life, other than just to be anonymous and to be accepted.

Mac Wilson: Well, here's something really interesting for you, Alex, because we have six pigeons that we keep at our house, and two sets of them have paired off, and they're laying eggs, which leaves two of them left out. So I was even thinking this morning, I'm like, "They must feel ostracized."

Alex Kapranos: That's fascinating. There you go. Wow.

Mac Wilson: So maybe it isn't as easy an escape as we think. 

Alex Kapranos: I don't know, maybe I should have looked into the social behavior patterns of pigeons before I used it as a metaphor.

Bob Hardy: Is keeping pigeons a common thing in North America?

Mac Wilson: It's not super common. 

Alex Kapranos: Are they homing pigeons?

Mac Wilson: They are homing pigeons. So you keep them in a coop, that's, you know, maybe the size of one of those stands there, and they've got a couple of entrances where they can come and go, and you can close them and you feed them on the side, and then you can let them go, and they will fly around for the whole day, and then they'll come home at night.

Bob Hardy: It's quite, it's quite a very traditional hobby in northern England—

Alex Kapranos: And Glasgow as well.

Bob Hardy: …is keeping pigeons, right, yeah, the northern U.K. Do you know, do you know what they call…? What do they call people who keep pigeons in America? 

Mac Wilson: I don't, the phrase escapes me.

Bob Hardy: Because you'd be called a pigeon fancier.

Mac Wilson: A pigeon fancier, yeah.

Alex Kapranos: It's quite a romantic term, yeah. I can imagine it's really satisfying. You know, like, taking your wee pal, like, hundreds of miles away, and then when they come back, it must just feel great!

Bob Hardy: Yeah.

Mac Wilson: We don't quite take them that far, but they still, they get the...

Alex Kapranos: They do in the U.K., like the pigeon fanciers will take them, like, really long distances.

Bob Hardy: Do you know a song called "The King of Rome"? It's like a, it's a children's book, I think, originally, called The King of Rome, and it's about a pigeon fancier who has his favorite pigeon. And there's a band called the Unthanks, who were from the North East of England, and they wrote, I think they covered the song. I don't know if it's a cover, or if it's their original song, which is, you'll have to excuse me for that, but if it's called "The King of Rome" by the Unthanks. It's absolutely incredible. It's one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard. It's about a pigeon fancier in Derby racing his favorite pigeon, and it's absolutely heartbreaking and incredible.

Mac Wilson: Wonderful. Well, we'll add that to the playlist at some point. Franz Ferdinand, thank you for taking the time to stop by today ahead of your show in Minneapolis tonight, and best of luck with what's next.

Alex Kapranos: Thank you. Thank you so much. Been a lovely chat, yeah.

Bob Hardy: Thank you.

Mac Wilson: Thank you very much.

Julian Corrie: Thank you.

Gallery: Franz Ferdinand in studio at The Current

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Songs Performed

00:00:00 Audacious
00:03:38 Night Or Day
00:07:27 Bar Lonely

All songs from Franz Ferdinand’s 2025 album, The Human Fear, available on Domino Recording Company.

Musicians

Alex Kapranos – vocals, guitar
Julian Corrie – piano, vocals
Bob Hardy – bass

Credits

Guests – Franz Ferdinand
Host – Mac Wilson
Producer – Derrick Stevens
Video – Evan Clark
Audio – Eric Xu Romani
Camera Operators – Evan Clark, Jeanne Barron
Graphics – Natalia Toledo
Digital Producer – Luke Taylor 

External Link

Franz Ferdinand – official site