Alex Kapranos has been a regular at Le Pantruche since he made Paris his most regular home two or three years ago, following his marriage to French singer-songwriter Clara Luciani. The bistro is a 1930s fantasy of a neighbourhood restaurant in Pigalle, set among the guitar shops of the city’s equivalent of Tin Pan Alley or Denmark Street: a dozen tables and a well-stocked bar crowded into a tiny shopfront room; today’s wines by the glass chalked on a board (nothing over €10); a menu that changes according to what seasonal flavours chef Franck Baranger is excited about cooking; casually stylish regulars who all seem to know Martin, waiter and maitre d’, by name.
Kapranos was introduced to the restaurant by the producer of Franz Ferdinand’s new album, who has a studio round the corner. He loves it here for many reasons, he says, but specifically for the everyday miracle of its Grand Marnier souffle. Before he was a rock star, Kapranos was a chef himself, most notably at Glasgow’s outpost of London’s Groucho Club, Saint Judes, so he knows what’s involved. “At Saint Judes, we used to do this thing called an inside-out chocolate pudding,” he says. “When it was perfectly executed, you had this wonderful light crust a bit like a cannoli. And then you would just tap it gently, and the whole thing would collapse in on itself and this gooey, delicious chocolate would ooze out. But to get it right was literally a margin of about 10 seconds of cooking. And if you fucked it up, that meant you had to start again. We didn’t even try souffles – but when they do them perfectly each time here, I’m still just awestruck.”
When they weren’t making chocolate puddings, Kapranos and eventual Franz Ferdinand bass player Bob Hardy, who did shifts alongside him in the kitchen at Saint Judes, would talk about their plans for the band, which was always as much a kind of conceptual art project – Hardy was also an artist – as a pop group. Twenty-four years later, happily, they are still having those same conversations, Kapranos says.
Food and music have been inseparable pleasures in his life. For a year or two when Franz Ferdinand first threatened to become the number-one indie band in the world (after their eponymous debut album won the Mercury prize and a Grammy nomination) Kapranos wrote a fabulous food diary in the Guardian, detailing the band’s search for a decent dinner while on tour in Osaka or Buenos Aires or Austin, Texas. He hasn’t given up that quest. The band have just returned from Mexico where they have been playing gigs alongside the Killers, who are old mates. Kapranos took the advantage of days off to spend time in local food markets, sampling 50 different types of chilli – “regional Mexican food is just as complex as French or Italian cooking”.
In Mexico the band’s set included tracks from their new album, The Human Fear. As with Franz Ferdinand’s previous five albums, it has their trademark sharp guitar edges and lyrical surprise, but is also full of adventurous musical experiment. One such excursion is the song Black Eyelashes, which is Kapranos’s homage to the Greek roots of his paternal family – “I finally get to play bouzouki on a record”. In some ways, that song represents a return to first principles: in the early days of the band, Kapranos shared his passion for rebetiko – the traditional Greek street music of the urban poor – with Nick McCarthy, the band’s former guitarist. One scheme had been to create a rebetiko band that ran in parallel with Franz Ferdinand.
“Just before the pandemic,” Kapranos says, “I’d come out of a very long relationship, had a bit of time on my own, and went over to Greece just to kind of find my Greekness. I was going record shopping and just walking the streets and eating in the restaurants and talking to people, and that song, Black Eyelashes – a rebetiko motif – came from that.” The song toys with the idea of identity, with the questions Kapranos gets asked – “you’re not really Greek” – when trying to explain his inheritance of his Geordie mother’s blond hair.
“It’s that experience a lot of children of immigrants have when they return to the place their grandparents live,” he says, “of never truly belonging anywhere.” He sent the song to a friend who is a rebetiko expert for her opinion. “She liked it,” he says, with a laugh, “but said it didn’t sound Greek at all – which I guess articulated exactly what the song was about.” He had brief qualms – “Oh, fuck am I being like Ed Sheeran doing that Irish song” – but reminded himself that purist authenticity, when it comes to music – or food, or life – is overrated. “I remember when I was a kid in Edinburgh,” he says, “one of my best friend’s big brothers was a mod, and was always giving me these big lectures on what made a real mod, and criticising you for wearing the wrong type of Sta Prest trousers, or whatever.”
Franz Ferdinand took influences from everywhere – Britpop, 1980s post-punk, Russian constructivism, Talking Heads, Raymond Carver, Kapranos’s dad’s history of playing Buddy Holly tunes in South Shields working men’s clubs, his uncle’s bouzouki playing. He still loves the mystery of songwriting that mines that subconscious jukebox. Watching Paul McCartney find the chords to Get Back in Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary was a perfect demonstration of that, he says. “Writing a song reminds me of, like, how I imagine a mole navigates underground. You can’t see anything, but you’re poking your nose in different places till you find, OK, that’s a direction it can go. So much of it is accidental. You think about it for ages and suddenly a bassline you wrote in 1996 pops into your head: ‘Yeah, I can use that thing there.’”
Because he came to fame quite late – he was 30 before Franz Ferdinand released a single – I’m guessing Kapranos was a bit more level-headed about the craziness that came their way than he might have been – and can cope with it better now?
“Probably. I think if that kind of fame happens to you when you’re young, it’s very tempting to just presume that you were always somehow special and chosen. Whereas if, like me, you had spent the previous 10 years working as a chef, a dishwasher, a welder, delivery driver, barman, then you kind of know how fragile all that shit is.” He laughs. “But that’s not to say I didn’t try to drink everything that was suddenly available to me. It really is very much in the Glasgow psyche. It took me quite a few years to realise that I didn’t actually have to drink everything on the rider before anyone else could.”
He’s been reminded of those wilder nights on the road in the last sleepless year, since his son was born. He and Luciani had been moving between Scotland and London, but now they are based pretty much full-time here – trying to get some kip. When he is not escaping for a few hours to the studio, Kapranos can often be found in the kitchen.
Is he an ambitious cook?
“Occasionally I’ll get it into my head that I need to master a particular thing,” he says. “One year, we were having Christmas in Paris, and Clara liked the idea of a beef wellington. I read everything I could online trying to understand what the principle of the perfect beef wellington is, and then thought maybe what I would add to it. I practised two or three times. And then on Christmas, they kind of go, wow. But once I feel I can do something like that well, I never really want to do it again.”
The exceptions, he says, are the foods he had when he visited family in Piraeus as a child. Meals there were very loud, very communal and very unlike what you had in the UK. “My grandfather used to make amazing gemista, stuffed peppers, or kofte lamb meatballs. In Greek cooking, they use a lot of cinnamon and mint and lemon, flavours you can spend a lifetime getting right.”
What about Paris – he must love its markets? “Absolutely,” he says. “And there are other things. As someone who didn’t grow up in London, I’m always fascinated by the way that people will never make eye contact on the tube. In Paris, it’s the opposite. You walk on to the metro and everyone looks you up and down immediately. You can see people thinking, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a good pair of shoes,’ or ‘Fuck, I wouldn’t wear a jacket like that.’ I love that kind of stuff.”
And then, of course, there is also the souffle …
“Yes!” he says, “will you just look at that!”
Franz Ferdinand’s The Human Fear is out now (Domino)
