We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

The last time Franz Ferdinand put out a new album, in 2018, Donald Trump was president, Hollywood was being rocked by #MeToo scandals, while Kendrick and Beyoncé were driving the discourse. So it’s oddly appropriate that the Scottish indie icons are now reemerging into an eerily similar cultural moment, because, over the past two decades, Franz Ferdinand have functioned as a textbook case of “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

The Franz Ferdinand of 2025 look decidedly different than the one that overtook student-disco danceloors 20-plus years ago. With the departures of guitarist Nick McCarthy in 2016 and drummer Paul Thompson in 2021, only two founding Franz members remain — singer/guitarist Alex Kapranos and bassist Bob Hardy — while the classic quartet configuration has given way to an expanded five-piece lineup that now includes drummer Audrey Tait, guitarist Dino Bardot, and keyboardist Julian Corrie. The Human Fear’s opening track and first single “Audacious” functions as a microcosm of that evolution — what begins as the sort of lo-fi indie-rock tune Kapranos might’ve cooked up in his Glasgow flat in 2002 suddenly blossoms into a string-swept, piano-gilded, stardust-speckled anthem, as if the band were throwing a confetti-strewn ticker-tape parade to celebrate their return.

“Audacious” effectively serves as the mission statement for the album as a whole. At at a time when Franz’s formative years are being mythologized through indie sleaze Instagram accounts and American Apparelized fashion spreads, The Human Fear is a reminder of Franz’s foundational role in that moment, with “Night Or Day” coming on like a Richard X mash-up of “Take Me Out” and “Still D.R.E.” and the lecherous electroclash banger “Hooked” thrusting you right into the middle of a circa-2005 Vice-sponsored SXSW afterparty where the open bar is only serving some disgusting booze-spiked energy drink.

But the album is also a gauge of how far Franz have moved beyond that era — certainly, it’s hard to imagine the debonair dance-punks of yore pulling off a song like “Tell Me I Should Stay,” where a classical-piano prelude gives way to a seductive reggae rhythm, before kicking into a romping chorus straight out of some Spector-produced girl-group golden oldie. And I can’t think of any other mid-2000s NME pinups today who could attempt something as esoteric as the Greek folksong-inspired cabaret of “Black Eyelashes” while still making it fit seamlessly into their urbane, rhythm-forward milieu.

Stereogum recently connected with Kapranos as he enjoyed some pre-Christmas chilltime in the south of France with his wife, singer-songwriter Clara Luciani, and their 15-month-old boy. As the following interview makes clear, Kapranos remains an artist equally enamoured with both the mass-appeal mechanics of pop music and the subversive strategies of the underground — after all, this is a guy who, in just a few short years, went from booking Mogwai’s first gigs in Glasgow to sharing a stage at the Grammys with Black Eyed Peas. We get into that and many more unlikely chapters in the Franz Ferdinand saga in this career-spanning conversation.

The Human Fear (2025)

On paper, it appears there’s been a seven year gap between Franz Ferdinand records. But obviously, there was a lot going on in those seven years: the pandemic, getting married, fatherhood, members coming and going, a greatest-hits album and tour… so at what point did this album actually start to take shape?

ALEX KAPRANOS: I mean, I didn’t really stop working. In fact, there are songs on this record that I was working on when we were making Always Ascending. Like, “Night Or Day” was actually the first song that Julian [Corrie] played with the band, a really early version of it. And it’s the song that made me kind of go, “Oh, wow, yeah, he’s going to be the keyboard player, he’s brilliant!” I was working during the pandemic, and there were the two new songs that we put on the Hits To The Head album, and we toured that as well. I’m actually really glad we did that tour, because it was a new lineup with the band, with Audrey on the drums. Dino had been playing with us for a while, but there’s something about getting a new lineup together, and if you actually tour that lineup before you go into the studio, it just means you’re super-tight and you’ve got that telepathic thing going on, and it makes going in the studio that much easier and more satisfying as well.

With the lineup changing over the years, was it hard for you to give up that romantic notion of Franz Ferdinand being a band of four best mates with that last-gang-in-town attitude?

KAPRANOS: I think it’s similar to how gangs actually operate in real life! Members come and go — you know, someone’s got to get whacked every once in a while! Paul and Nick are both still making music and are both very happy, but I love this gang that we’re in at the moment. Audrey’s a brilliant drummer, and very funny. And also, there’s enthusiasm. I’m not saying Nick or Paul were taking it for granted towards the end of their time in the band, but it’s easy for people to get jaded. And when somebody comes in with a fresh enthusiasm and excitement, it becomes infectious and it’s lovely.

I was wondering if the song “Audacious” was written as a reminder to yourself to hang onto that enthusiasm.

KAPRANOS: Yeah, it was. It’s about how I felt in a wider sense, creatively and personally, where I was with my life at the moment. It’s an easy state for us all to fall into: Sometimes you’re overwhelmed by things and you’re wondering what the point of going on is, and then you’ve got to work out what your response is going to be and do something completely audacious in response. That definitely informed the attitude of making the album.

The structure of the song reflects that: It starts off in familiar Franz indie-rock mode, but then that chorus comes in and it turns into “All The Young Dudes“…

KAPRANOS: It’s funny, we’ve heard a lot of different references — a lot of people have been saying Queen, or the Beatles. Somebody even said ELO, as if that was going to be a slight — I love ELO! My mum used to be obsessed with ELO when I was a kid. The sound of that song came about from a conversation that Bob and I were having about how to get the song going from as small as possible to as big as possible. And Bob was getting so enthusiastic about it, he was like, “I want it to sound like the curtains are falling away on a huge stage and revealing dancing girls and then there’s an elephant bouncing on one foot and there’s trapeze artists”— we wanted to orchestrally represent that. But the beginning of the song is actually the demo I recorded on the phone of me sending Bob different ideas for different riffs for the song. It reminded me very much of the beginning of the band, which started off in the kitchen with me and Bob talking about an imaginary band that we were going to do together. And all our conversations still kind of feel like we’re talking about this imaginary band, except we ended up putting it into practice, which never ceases to amuse us.

Covering Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” For BBC Radio 2 (2024)

Franz Ferdinand have always been a very pop-conscious band, and I’m wondering if this song was just a one-off obsession for you, or are you very much plugged into what’s on the charts and taking notes?

KAPRANOS: I like a good song. It’s that simple. I don’t care if the song is 60 years old or six days old — a good song is a good song. That Chappell Roan song is brilliant. I think she’s really cool as well. She’s got many, many good songs, and I like her attitude.

But that Radio 2 thing was with Jo Whiley, and she’s a fantastic DJ. One of the first sessions we ever did for the BBC was for her on Radio 1 and we had to do a cover of a contemporary pop song at the time for that as well. We did a Britney Spears song, “Womanizer.” And then later on we did Gwen Stefani’s “What You Waiting For?” And it was the same criteria for all those covers: We were asked to do a cover and we just chose a song that we’d all been enjoying as a band. In other sessions, I remember we did a cover of “It Won’t Be Long” by the Beatles, we did a cover of “Mis-Shapes” by Pulp, we did a cover of “Sexy Boy” by Air.

There’s loads of things that we’ve covered, and we always enjoy it. And I particularly enjoy it when the cover ends up sounding a bit like a Franz Ferdinand song. That always feels like a small victory. But, yeah, I still listen to what’s going on. I like to know, on both an uber-pop level, but also on a more emerging level. Last time I was in London, I got down to the 100 Club and saw this great band, Home Counties – they had such brilliant energy. I remember going to see English Teacher early on. And there’s a lot of great stuff going on in Glasgow still — we took this great band called Brenda on the road with us. They’re really worth checking out—they’re a three-piece girl synth-band, but with a total pop sensibility. You know that that good feeling you get—and I had this with Chappell Roan as well—where it feels like this song has always existed? Like, she’s just captured it from the ether and it’s always been there. It’s that good, it’s that complete. Brenda feel a bit like that, in a slightly more DIY radical kind of way.

Playing Electric Piano With Urusei Yatsura And Booking The Kazoo Club In Glasgow (mid-1990s)

Well, speaking of Glasgow, let’s talk about you sitting in on electric piano with Urusei Yatsura, who were the first band that clued me in to the fact there was something going on in Glasgow in the mid-’90s…

KAPRANOS: What a great band! They did a reissue of their first LP recently and Graham [Kemp], the guitarist, sent me a copy of it, and it was so good to put it on the turntable again. It’s such a brilliant record. And again, it was coming from a total DIY aesthetic and attitude. It was a bit of a “fuck you” to the general music industry at large, but they still had amazing pop tunes with super-great hooks and great melodies.

And it was a good time there in the early to mid-’90s. There was a bar in Glasgow called the 13th Note. And when I was 19, I kind of by mistake ended up booking the bands there. This guy Jim [Byrne] had started a club [night] there called the Kazoo Club, and I turned up with my band at the time, and there was literally nobody there, and I think he got a bit disillusioned with it and said, “Oh, do you want to run this club?” I said, “Yeah, I’d love to!”

I just ended up getting my pals down, and then friends of friends and ended up having a booking policy based more on potential than what a band could actually do. In Glasgow at that time, it felt very much that you had to be doing covers or be very established as a band to get a gig, and I wanted to do something for the freaks who couldn’t really play their instruments yet, but were super-enthusiastic and creative. The guy who ran the place really helped out. In a sort of — how can I put it — grey-market kind of way, he managed to get his hands on a bunch of amplifiers, microphones, a PA, and a drum kit. And most of the bands were kids…

It almost sounds more like a community center than a nightclub.

KAPRANOS: It kind of was! “Community” is the right word. Very quickly, a very strong sense of community developed and it would be the same people hanging out each week and seeing each other’s bands. And word would go about and more folk would come down. And what was particularly wonderful about it was seeing how people would evolve. They would come down and could barely play, and then six months later, there’d be something pretty special going down. I remember Stuart Braithwaite first coming through — he was in Edinburgh at the time, in college — and he would have been about 17. He had a band called Deadcat Motorbike, and I’d see him evolve over the course of about two years, and suddenly Mogwai was there — it was like, “Fuck, where did that come from? That’s amazing!” And [Belle and Sebastian’s] Stuart Murdoch came down early on with these acoustic songs that he started writing just when he came back from San Francisco and then suddenly I was like, “Oh my God, this is very, very special.”

But there were also loads of other bands that maybe didn’t make it into the international consciousness as much as maybe Urusei or Mogwai did, like the Stanleys, the Girlfriends, Glen Or Glenda — there were literally about 700 bands from that period, so to list them would be a mistake and a waste of time. But it was a very exciting time, and it felt very much at odds with what was happening in the UK generally. Like, the very glitzy cocaine sheen of the music industry, which was doing all the Britpop stuff down in London, felt very, very far removed from what we were doing in a pre-internet Glasgow. We felt like we were in a completely different universe.

In 2016, you reunited with a lot of your old Glasgow music-scene mates for the Lost In France documentary. Given how dramatically your life had changed since the mid-’90s, was it easy to reconnect with everyone?

KAPRANOS: Yeah, I was still in touch with a lot of them. Like, RM Hubbard, I had been in bands with him back in the day, and was still pals with him. Paul Savage from the Delgados was involved in recording quite a few of our records and came in and engineered and produced stuff with us. So I’d always been in touch with him over that time. A couple of them I hadn’t seen for a wee while maybe, but it was very easy to slip in. They’re a nice bunch of people. And Allan [Stewart], who played in Holy Mountain — the band who were playing the kind of metal gig during that performance — tours with us now as a guitar tech. And when he’s not touring with us, he plays with Idlewild. It’s Glasgow — it’s a fairly small community. We all will know each other, we all stay in touch. I still see Stuart Braithwaite quite often as well.

“Indie Sleaze” Nostalgia (2021-present)

What’s your gut reaction when you hear the words “indie sleaze”?

KAPRANOS: What’s that? [laughs], I’m not connected with that. That’s not for me, but I’m finding it quite amusing from a distance. It reminds me a little bit of the late ’80s and early 90s when people got into the 1960s. It was like the ’60s, but not really, which is always what it’s like when people look back over a couple of decades to rediscover a scene at a moment in time. And that’s great— enjoy that moment! But it’s never going to be exactly as it was. It’s going to be a different version, seen through the prism of time. So I’m not paying it too much attention, but I’m very happy for the people who are enjoying it — knock yourselves out! Everything seems a lot more exotic when it’s seen across the gulf of a couple of decades. But to me, it just feels like a continuation of the same moment, because it’s the same lifetime, you know?

Dating Fellow Half-Greek Indie Rocker Eleanor Friedberger Of The Fiery Furnaces (mid-2000s)

Well, speaking of that era, that was the time when Eleanor Friedberger was in your life, and I’m curious what influence she had on your songwriting, given that your bands were quite different from one another.

KAPRANOS: I think Eleanor is a brilliant songwriter, and I remember that when I first met her, when we were touring together with the Fiery Furnaces, I was blown away by what a great and inventive band they were. Eleanor is very good at writing a brilliant, classic song and [her brother] Matt is, um… from another planet. [laughs] His arrangements were wild and unpredictable. I always felt there was a little bit of self-destruction happening as well — it’s almost like he felt that commercial success would destroy the purity of the band. He made some deliberately contrary decisions, which I totally respect — we all make our own artistic choices. I love them. I have a very warm feeling towards the two of them, and everybody that played in that band. There are some amazing songs in the Fiery Furnaces back catalog — like, “Leaky Tunnel” is incredible. A great band.

Was your shared Greek heritage something you bonded over?

KAPRANOS: Yeah, we definitely had a lot in common, yet we had completely different backgrounds. I think her growing up in Chicago and me growing up in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and the north of England were very different experiences and yet we had a shared heritage, which made for a very curious, interesting combination.

The song “Black Eyelashes” on The Human Fear seems to have an overt Greek influence…

KAPRANOS: Absolutely. That song is me attempting to find my Greek identity and failing, and kind of addressing the situation. [laughs] It’s funny because it’s me kind of doing rembetiko but knowing I’m never going to do rembeitko, because I’m not a rembetiko singer. But I love that music. Throughout my life, I would try to find my sense of Greekness and listening to that music was one way I would do it: I would close my eyes and be transported back to some smoking den in Piraeus in the 1920s. It was a very exotic experience.

It’s funny, I played it to a friend of mine who had organized an event I took part in at the Barbican in London recently. I sent it to her and said, “I’ve got this song, and I think you might find it interesting.” She’s like an expert in rembetiko and really knows that stuff inside out. And she said, “This is great… but it doesn’t sound very Greek to me.” That’s it exactly! That’s what I sing about in the song: I would go to Greece and people would say, “You’re Greek, but you’re not really Greek are you? You look pretty blond for a Greek.” That sensation is not unique to me — I think anybody who is the child of an immigrant, or the child of a child of an immigrant, feels like they know where they’re from and yet they know that they’ll never truly be from there. That’s what I’m singing about in that song.

Forming The Supergroup FFS With Sparks (2015)

So when you collaborate with a group as unique as Sparks, does that permanently alter your songwriting DNA?

KAPRANOS: It certainly permanently altered something in me. It was very inspiring to see guys who, at that point, were in their 70s, who were still artistically pure and driven in what they were doing. For any artist who survives more than a couple of years, you think, “What will I do next? How will I go on?” And I think working with Ron and Russell and seeing how they could still stay true to their artistic aspirations has definitely stayed with me and made it easier to be starting my third decade in a band. I saw people up close who were doing that very well. That’s a cool thing to experience.

And the amazing thing is they’re more popular than ever now.

KAPRANOS: They really had a renaissance. That, for me, was one of the driving motivations for making the FFS record. I’d felt that up until then, they were an unforgivably overlooked band, both commercially and especially critically. There were definitely always people who were in the know and knew that they were cool, but I just felt on a wider level, they didn’t have the appreciation that they deserved. I remember just before we made that record they were doing this Two Hands, One Mouth tour, playing these small theaters to half empty rooms and just thinking, “God, this is so not right. They deserve a lot more than that, and more people should know who they are.” And I think the FFS record really did go a long way to making people reassess them as a band, and I’m very, very happy that they have finally found the recognition.

Joining The Supergroup BNQT With Members Of Midlake, Band Of Horses, Grandaddy, And Travis (2015)

Let’s talk about another supergroup you did that happened to have all consonants in its name. I get the sense that, compared to the close collaborative nature of FFS, BNQT was more of a long-distance affair…

KAPRANOS: It was more of a remote kind of thing. But we did a couple of gigs together and it was fun, and I liked what they did. I love working with different musicians. It’s kind of a bit like us doing a cover in reverse — if we cover Chappell Roan, it ends up sounding like Franz Ferdinand, so it’s very cool to write a song and give it to somebody else and see how they turn it into something that you hadn’t imagined it would be. And I really felt that with the two songs I did on the BNQT record, especially “Hey Banana” — it was like, “Oh, I wouldn’t have done it that way.” The demo I had made was much more dissonant, but they made it into a much sweeter song.

BNQT featured fellow Glaswegian Fran Healy from Travis, who became massively successful in the late-’90s but weren’t really part of the Glasgow indie scene that you came out of. I’m curious about your personal history with them.

KAPRANOS: When I did those gigs with BNQT, Fran was there as well, and he’s such a genial good guy. He’s just good company and, obviously, an incredible talent as a songwriter. Fran had come up at vaguely the same time that I was doing gigs at the 13th Note, but him and Dougie [Payne] and the guys decided to move to London. And for them, it was the right decision — they obviously had such huge success. It’s funny because their personalities are still very Glasgow, even though they removed themselves from the Glasgow environment. Edwyn Collins, another guy I’ve collaborated with, did the same thing: After Orange Juice, he moved out to London quite quickly and all his solo stuff was done there. But you can’t take the Glasgow out of that DNA. The Scottish DNA is definitely there and has never ever left him.

Playing On Edwyn Collins’ Single “Do It Again” (2010)

Well, you’ve just provided the perfect segue for talking about your work with Edwyn!

KAPRANOS: That was a cool session, with [the Sex Pistols’] Paul Cook on the drums. That was fucking amazing. Edwyn was a total hero of mine. The way he wrote songs and the way that Postcard put those records out into the world — that was a huge inspiration for me and a lot of my contemporaries as well, particularly those of us who had a strong sense of place in Glasgow, but also a very strong DIY motivation and aesthetic. So much of what we were doing was inspired by Postcard and Orange Juice and Josef K and the Fire Engines and all that sort of stuff happening a decade and a half before we started. Edwyn is another super-presence to be with in the studio: very welcoming but massive voice, massive personality, massive talent. It was a brilliant experience.

This collaboration is also notable because it provides perhaps the only official documented video evidence of your brief mustache phase.

KAPRANOS: Yes! I think it might be the only place you can see it, aside from the odd bit of live footage as well. I’m always quite surprised by how grand it is. That mustache — now that’s evidence of my Greek DNA. It’s as Greek as a mustache as you are ever gonna see. I need to grow it back one day. It would go very well with a fustanella.

The Unwavering Pop-Cultural Staying Power Of “Take Me Out” And The Franz/Rap Connection (2004)

So this little single you put out 20 years ago is now closing in on one billion Spotify streams…

KAPRANOS:Oh, is it? Fucking hell, I didn’t know that. That seems like an awful lot.

As of this conversation, it’s at the 997-million mark. It’s also been featured in at least nine video games, and I’m wondering if you feel like those placements have been integral to the song’s ongoing success.

KAPRANOS: I don’t really know how that world works, to be honest! I do like video games, but when I play video games, I always download the kind of platform games from my childhood—like Jet Set Willy, Manic Miner, and Atic Atac. That’s about as far as I go. Another thing that had a big impact was I remember people coming up and saying they had heard “This Fire” in a skate video really early on, and there seemed to be a whole generation of skaters using our songs to soundtrack the new tricks that they were doing, and that was pretty cool as well. Who cares about the medium you discover the music — if it gets you going, then that’s wonderful, isn’t it?

Did you ever hear the Lil Wayne track “Burn This City,” where he’s rapping over a sample of “This Fire”? It’s an outtake from Tha Carter III sessions.

KAPRANOS: No! Wow, I’ve never heard that. After this interview, I will have to listen to it! I didn’t know that existed. That’s crazy.

Well, it’s also a reminder of an era when Kanye famously called Franz Ferdinand “white crunk.” Any theories as to why you were getting these cosigns from these big rappers?

KAPRANOS: It’s funny, because I was into hip-hop and you can actually hear a lot of it in what we do, but in the same way that “Black Eyelashes” will never sound like rembetiko, we’re never going to sound like Dr. Dre or Cypress Hill or Public Enemy or the things that were kind of pushing us to do certain things. Like, if you listen to “40′” on our first record, that song to me is just Cypress Hill. In my head, that’s what I wanted to do, but obviously I was incapable of getting it right. And that’s usually how you get the good stuff, that’s how you get the new stuff: When you try to do something you’re incapable of doing and accidentally make that new thing instead.

But then in 2005, you were officially welcomed into the pop/rap establishment when you’re put on the Grammy Award stage with Black Eyed Peas, Gwen Stefani, and Maroon 5 to perform a live mash-up. Was that experience as chaotic for you as it appeared on TV?

KAPRANOS: That was a bizarre experience. Not just that one, I remember the MTV Awards were just before that as well in Rome. I think that was my first taste of the absurdity of a rapper’s afterparty. We had been invited to Usher’s party, and all it consisted of was Usher standing on a podium with some pretty rough-looking glamor girls holding two tiger cubs while everybody marched in single file, passed around the room, and then out the exit. That’s a party? That’s not how we do parties in Glasgow!

And then the whole thing at the Grammys was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. It’s the audience that really freaked me out, not so much who I was on stage with, because everybody in the audience is super-famous. While you’re playing the song, you’d be like, “Fuck me, that’s Robert Plant over there! Oh bloody hell, that’s Kris Kristofferson sitting over there!” I remember walking up… it wasn’t a red carpet, it was a green carpet, and we went up between James Brown and Hulk Hogan. That’s an experience that’s going to stick with you.

The Name “Franz Ferdinand” Trending On Twitter Alongside “World War III” (2020)

After Iran’s military commander, General Qasem Soleimani, was killed by American drones in January 2020, a lot of people took to Twitter to speculate if this was the Franz Ferdinand moment that would trigger the start of World War III. In recent years, we’ve seen some bands and artists change their names in response to the changing social and political climate—did that thought ever cross your mind in that moment?

KAPRANOS: Absolutely not. When we started out, we played about five or six gigs just in squats and in people’s flats in Glasgow. And then we had a gig at an actual real venue, and they were putting a poster together, so we had to come up with a name. And I think the only name that had been floating about was named after a pack of toothpicks that we had called Party Sticks. So that was the first name. And then I was watching the horse-racing and there was a horse called the Archduke, and I thought, “Oh yeah — Franz Ferdinand.”

It’s different in the States, but in the UK and pretty much all over Europe, everybody does the class in history where you learn about the start of World War I and the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, and it’s one of those names that everybody knows and kind of almost doesn’t think about. Yeah, everybody knows the significance of it, but it’s become so familiar that you kind of almost disassociate it from the person. It felt good, but also felt like it had a poignancy to it as well, which was appealing for naming a band. When he was assassinated, it felt that in many ways, the 20th century really began—the whole world completely changed. And every band should aspire to have one of those moments where you feel like nothing’s going to be quite the same after you make this thing, after you make this statement.

But the name was originally going to be Franz Ferdinand 2000. in the late ’90s, there had been this huge anticipation for the millennium. And there had been lots of cafes calling themselves, like, Barry’s Burger Joint 2000—everything 2000. And then suddenly, on the 1st of January 2000, it became the least fashionable thing you could be associated with. So when we started in late 2001/early 2002, it seemed like a funny thing to put at the end of your name. Maybe on the first gig poster we were Franz Ferdinand 2000, but the joke quickly ran out of humor.

His Food Book Sound Bites (2006)

In the mid-2000s, you enjoyed a side hustle as a traveling food writer for The Guardian, and you compiled those columns into a book. What’s your level of engagement in foodie culture today?

KAPRANOS: Well, I still eat pretty much every day and enjoy it! [laughs] I guess in that book, what I was really doing was using food as a device to talk about where I was at that particular moment. When you’re touring, one of the things that remains constant is you eat every day, even though the people around you and the surroundings and the geography changes. When you travel the world, the food says so much about the place where you are, the people there, how they socialize, and I still find that fascinating and I love seeking out the places that you won’t find back in Glasgow, or in Paris, where I live now. And that’s usually the little local joints — it might be a diner in Chicago where I get some meatballs, or an amazing taqueria in Mexico City, or eating ceviche in Chile. I’m very, very fortunate that I still get to experience that. I love it. I’m not sure I want to write about it anymore, but I still very much appreciate the opportunity that I have.

Covering Serge Gainsbourg’s “A Song For Sorry Angel” With Jane Birkin (2006)

What did Jane make of you turning this Serge tune into a punk-rock ripper?

KAPRANOS: She loved it. I mean, she had a pretty punk-rock attitude as well. Living in Paris, I’d see her now and again — I bumped into her about a year before she died [in 2023]. She was a very, very cool woman. And when we did the song together, we’d worked out an arrangement musically as a band, but we hadn’t worked out a translation at all. And she said, “We’ll do it on the date, we’ll just do it in the dressing room,” because we were doing it for this TV show, Taratata, and so that morning it was just me and Jane and her flatulent dog — who was absolutely adorable — sitting on the floor of the dressing room and Jane saying like, “Oh, yes, I remember saying to Serge when he was writing this song, ‘You can’t say, “Sorry, sir,” you say, “I’m so sorry,” and he said, “No, I want to make it this way,” and then I said, “But you’re so silly.”‘” For somebody who’s a fan of both of those characters, it was an intensely magical moment. The thing that kind of defines her is an untouchable elegance, twinned with this unshakable strength, but also married to a delicate vulnerability. To have those things simultaneously is rare and very powerful. I’m very lucky to have worked with her.

Fresh Touch’s “Latest Style” (2013)

You participated in this project with Damon Albarn, Flea, and Nick Zinner for an Oxfam charity initiative called Vinyl For Syria. This is an instrumental track — do you remember what you actually contributed to it?

KAPRANOS: We had all gone down to Ethiopia together. There’s a lot of African music that I really love, but I particularly love a lot of music from Ethiopia. This was an opportunity to visit the country and appreciate the culture, but also to learn a little bit about the music and to hang out with some of those musicians. The night that Fresh Touch thing was recorded, we were all just playing together. I have very vague memories of how it was. I remember there was a guitar, an MS-20, a bass, and a drum kit, and everybody was wandering between them. I can’t remember who was playing what, but it was a good night with good people. Ethiopia is an astonishing country, a really inspiring place. And the music from Ethiopia sounds like nothing else from Africa or anywhere else in the world. It’s a bit like Ethiopian food, which has its own completely distinct flavor that’s different from anywhere else.

Performing “Feel The Love Go” On Colbert With James Chance (2020)

James was known for being an irascible, confrontational character — were you worried he might fly off the handle and skronk all over your song?

KAPRANOS: Yes! He was kind of cool [in demeanor], but he was up for it. I’d seen him play a couple of times. He’d come through to Glasgow, and I remember seeing him in New York a couple times, and I’d always liked what he did. He came on and played a semitone apart from the key of the rest of the band, which is a pretty big statement! [laughs] But he definitely had an energy that was very cool.

Covering Lee Hazlewood And Nancy Sinatra’s “Summer Wine” With His Now-Wife Clara Luciani (2020)

This was recorded in the earlier stages of your relationship with Clara, who’s a renowned singer/songwriter in her native France. Was it inevitable that your personal and creative lives would overlap?

KAPRANOS: This was recorded during the first lockdown. We were at my place in Scotland, and my lockdown project was rebuilding my studio. That was my physical labor for the time when I couldn’t go anywhere. But she was writing what was to become her second album, and I was writing songs that ended up on The Human Fear. And so I said, “Let’s do a song together, just for fun.” We talked about duets that we really liked and we both loved Lee and Nancy. And so we did it and Clara played it to her label and they said, “Oh, we should put this out!” It was a nice thing to do.

Clara and I both have a respect for what the other does, but also know to keep our distance from each other as well. Clara is a phenomenal artist, an incredible songwriter, and I feel very sad for the majority of people in the Anglophone world that they don’t really get to appreciate so many artists that don’t sing in English. There’s so much good stuff in France and in Spanish-speaking countries and Japan. Clara is an incredible songwriter, and we do the odd little thing on each other’s records occasionally, but we generally leave each other to do what we want to do. So to do this song together, it was just us enjoying ourselves during lockdown. It was a really lovely time for us, because while there was the general anxiety that we were all experiencing and that sensation of, “Oh, fuck, where is this thing actually going to go?” we all looked for ways to lift our spirits out of that, and that’s how we did it — we made some music together.

Are you fluent in French yet?

KAPRANOS: Pas mal!

The Human Fear is out 1/10 on Domino.