Lose Yourself In Rock'N'Roll That Pumps At The Club

"We wanted to make music that you could dance to, but as a rock'n'roll band," says Paul Thomson. The 41-year-old Scot is talking about his band, Franz Ferdinand, and the founding goal laid down at their 2002 beginnings. The original members - frontman Alex Kapranos, guitarist Nick McCarthy, bassist Bob Hardy, Thomson on drums - all met in Glasgow, out on the tiles.

"We were all going out to this club called Optimo," recounts Thomson. "Before that, [the Glasgow music scene] was two camps: there were people who went out to gigs and played in bands, and there were people who went out to clubs, who DJ'd and made electronic music. At Optimo, the two crossed over; they'd play disco, The Cramps, The Birthday Party, Joy Division. It was the first place I heard LCD Soundsystem's Losing My Edge. Peaches played there. So, we were going to that club every Sunday when we started out. And it totally inspired us."

That inspiration still resonates in Franz Ferdinand's music, as heard on their new fifth LP, Always Ascending. "It's a rock'n'roll record, but it sounds pumping through a big club system. It's really fun to listen to, and I'm really eager for other people to lose themselves in it, like we did making it," Thomson says. Waiting for an album to come out is "a bit weird", he offers, the band essentially waiting for the moment when a record "ceases to be yours". As he puts it, pithily: "[Albums] are like children. They leave the family home, and they're gone. And hopefully never coming back."

Thomson is speaking from his home in Los Angeles, which is far from Edinburgh, where he grew up "part of a large Catholic family". He cut his teeth playing in the Glasgow scene; his break was getting the drumming gig in The Yummy Fur, '90s alt-rockers in whom Kapranos also played. "Glasgow always has an amazing scene, it has for the past 25 years," Thomson says. "And, then, every once in a while someone will blow up and become 'international'; like us, Belle & Sebastian, Chvrches. It's always interesting to see who [will]."

By this point, those memories ended long ago. "I've been in Paris more times this year than I've been to the South Side of Glasgow in the last ten years," Thomson admits. The band recorded Always Ascending with Philippe Zdar of Cassius - who's, notably, worked often with Phoenix - in his Motorbass studio in Paris. It marks the first record since the departure of McCarthy ("We knew he was leaving long before he did," Thomson offers, "he'd made that decision, we just didn't make it public."), and arrives five long years after 2013's Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action. "We only make records when we really want to make records," Thomson says. "Fortunately, we've got patient fans."

Franz Ferdinand did stay busy in the interim, releasing a collaborative LP with American electro-pop trailblazers Sparks - the band billed as FFS - in 2015. "Originally," Thomson explains, "we were going to write them a couple of songs, they were going to write us a couple of songs; sort of like a mutual-appreciation-society of each other's bands. Then, suddenly, it steamrolled, and we had 18 songs, and we weren't just finishing them by ourselves, but sending them off to each other, writing new parts, sending them back. Then we got in touch with Domino and said: 'Um, we've kind of made this whole album with Sparks; do you want to put it out?'"

After FFS, Kapranos, Hardy, and Thomson set out working Always Ascending as a three-piece. By the time the album was done, they'd added two new members to the band: guitarist Dino Bardot and keyboardist Julian Corrie (aka producer Miaoux Miaoux). Playing alongside these "enthusiastic, younger" musicians "it's an absolute joy to be on stage", Thomson says. "I appreciate it now, more than I ever have done."

Especially given that Thomson never thought he, nor his band, would make it. "I never thought it was a viable career option, at any point," he says. "[Not until] Franz Ferdinand kicked on, which was the last thing any of us expected. We'd been in bands for years. In the underground scene in Glasgow, the whole purpose of a band is that it's something that you do with your friends. If you put a record out, you'd put out 500 7"s, get everyone to bag them up at your house, and then 'distribution' would be you taking them around to indie record stores. You hoped you'd sell all 500, but you never ever did. So, that was what we were thinking we'd do as [Franz Ferdinand]. But, then our manager, who's still our manager, came up from London to see us play, and he thought he could see something in us. We thought he was a charlatan. But, here we are."