It’s the second night of Franz Ferdinand’s homecoming gigs and excitement bristles the air. The Darkness may have temporarily relieved our anxiety but they're now a fond memory of Weimar-style hedonism. Instead, the really dark war has begun. Gallant commanders as they are, Franz Ferdinand aren’t going to quell the general hysteria over the ‘international situation’ with one magic music bullet, but their popularity signals a definite change of mood.
It takes a very special band to move from bedroom gigs in dreich Glasgow to become the toast of 'Time Magazine' and the subject of a reputed £1.5 million US deal in a matter of months. The credo was simple: to make, like their heroes Roxy Music and Talking Heads, cerebral pop. Or – to use their slicker idiom – to make music to make girls dance to.
Launching into explosive opener "Jacqueline", the girls are certainly dancing and hollering - “we only work when we NEED they money” - in between screams so fervent you’d think these four miss-shapes were Blue. This never happened to Orange Juice or Joseph K! But the fact this is happening to a band who – despite their veneer of accessibility – can be every bit as awkward as those Scottish forebears is exhilarating.
When they play Irn Bru-fuelled Top Three single "Take Me Out", the live experience only amplifies its inescapable weirdness: it has a prologue! it starts fast! it slows into a disco squiggle and stays there! "Cheating On You" is even more subversive with Bob Hardy’s bass chunddering inelegantly over ex-life model Paul Thomson’s beats.
Never blatant cribbers, Alex Kapranos & co have obviously spent a few afternoons imagining some of their favourite bands collaborating with each other. The crunching stutter of "Love & Destroy" is Simon Le Bon fronting bleak post-punkers Bauhaus, while the venomous "Auf Achse" is a definite riposte to Pulp’s "I Spy", albeit delivered by The Rapture. What carves their diversity into razor-sharp coherency is their driving sense of romance. Not wine and roses schmaltz, but the escapism of new single "Matinee" or the hormone-charge of "Michael".
Franz Ferdinand, like the boys outside after the show singing “ahm jist a cross-hair/ahm just a shot away frim yoo”, seek glamorous release from the hum-drum. To become, without the aid of ‘anglified vowels’ or a ‘4x4’, the real New Scottish Gentry.
