When I speak to Paul Thomson, drummer with Scottish art-poppers Franz Ferdinand, it is just over 36 hours since James Blake's second album, "Overgrown," was announced as the surprise winner of this year's Mercury Prize, the award for the best record to come out of the U.K. and Ireland in the past year. It seemed like an apt moment to assess the well-being of the Glasgow four-piece: Nine years previously, Franz Ferdinand itself had walked away with the accolade for its self-titled debut, a record that reinvigorated the British guitar music scene with charismatic, intelligent and downright brilliant tunes, making good on the band's promise to create "music for girls to dance to."
Yet the band that swept all before it in 2004 — the debut shifted over 3.6 million copies and in "Take Me Out" produced a worldwide crossover smash — has had an uncertain recent past. A decade on from its debut single, Franz Ferdinand has just released its fourth album, "Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action," its first full-length collection of new material for 4½ years. Reading between the lines, we are perhaps fortunate that Franz is still with us: Frontman Alex Kapranos has intimated as much over recent months, and there seems to have been a period of time in the aftermath of third album "Tonight" — generally perceived to be a disappointing set (more of that later) — that the band ceased to function.
Yet Thomson is in the mood to debunk what we thought we knew. In fact, Thomson is in the mood to contest most things: Still in bed when we chat, hungover after a particularly "heavy one" in Glasgow the previous night where he had been to watch excellent New York garage rockers Parquet Courts, it is perhaps fair to say he isn't at his conversational best. It certainly explains why there are times during the exchange that it sounds like he probably wishes he wasn't on the other end of the phone — "12 random people in the country get to decide what the best album of the year is. So f-cking what? It doesn't f-cking matter" was his take on the Mercury Prize.
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