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![]() Kapranos: “We had such love and respect for their music. ![]() But they got swept up by everything, and it didn’t happen.” We put forward a couple demos, one was ‘Piss Off’. “We met and decided then it would be great to do something. “We thought ‘Take Me Out’ was pretty cool, and wouldn’t it be nice to say hello when they came to Los Angeles?” recalls Russell. When Franz’ single ‘Take Me Out’ and self-titled album were Top Three UK hits, word got back to the Maels that this new sensation were big Sparks fans. “So Sparks were quite a formative influence on us.” “A lot of bands find their sound by learning how to play other people’s songs,” he says. When Kapranos joined forces with guitarist Nick McCarthy, bassist Bob Hardy and drummer Paul Thomson as Franz Ferdinand, they attempted two covers, one being ‘Achoo’ from Sparks’ 1974 album ‘Propaganda’. “What kind of universe had I discovered? I hunted down Sparks’ back catalogue and found I really liked their contemporary music too.” The seed of FFS was unwittingly kindled at the start of the Nineties, when Kapranos discovered Sparks’ triumphant 1974 single ‘Amateur Hour’, the second single taken from their epochal ‘Kimono My House’ album. We were all willing to let our guard down.” “I think each band unconsciously relinquished a little of who they were in order to enter new territory, to accept your sensibility might be changed in some way. “You can’t chart what is Sparks and what is Franz Ferdinand,” Russell’s keyboard-pounding brother Ron suggests. ![]() That gave everyone something new to work with.” “As we started sending songs back and forth, I noticed I was writing from my idea of a Sparks perspective, and what they sent struck us as how they think Franz Ferdinand sounds. “The real motivation was to make something new, not ‘Franz featuring Russell Mael’, or ‘Sparks with Franz Ferdinand backing them’,” declares FF frontman Alex Kapranos, whose intertwining lead vocals with Russell is another of the record’s principal thrills, like a male version of the Abba approach. Moreover, there might be recognisable sonic devices that identify the provenance of these works (for starters, there are few more recognisable instruments than Sparks vocalist Russell Mael), FFS’ happy marriage doesn’t truly sound like either band, but a striking and fascinating mutation. This dynamic thrill is countered by the subtler charms of ‘Dictator’s Son’ and ‘Little Guy From The Suburbs’, the haughtier ‘The Power Couple’ and ‘Collaborations Don’t Work’ itself, a multi-tiered quasi-musical that shows off the compositional ambition and savvy humour that defines ‘FFS’. The love of artful corkscrew pop that created a mutual appreciation society kicks off with the lead single ‘Johnny Delusional’ and its soon-come successor ‘Call Girl’, though the hooks driving ‘Police Encounters’, ‘So Desu Ne’ and ‘Piss Off’ are no less fabulous and merciless. ![]() So when Los Angeles duo Sparks and Glasgow-based quartet Franz Ferdinand decided to record together, it was a flawed and potentially disastrous idea, right?įFS, you couldn’t be more wrong! Not only is ‘Collaborations Don’t Work’ one of the star attractions of the self-titled record that sprang from their collective loins but ‘FFS’ is also one of the strongest albums of either bands’ career. You start off deferential, and strangely reverential – and eventually, you’ll need the Dalai Lama to mediate, between all the patronising, agonising, navel-gazing and differences in work ethic. Collaborations, as FFS would have us believe on their debut album, don’t work.
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