Logo of band Franz Ferdinand

Review: Franz Ferdinand and the Pop Renaissance

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Franz Ferdinand and the Pop Renaissance, by Hamilton Harvey (London: Reynolds & Hearn, 2005)

Tapping in again to the contemporary history of Scotland’s popular music, this post reviews a book on a Glasgow-based band when that band was at the height of their popularity and Brit-Award/Grammy-nominated fame. Franz Ferdinand, named after the Austro-Hungarian Archduke whose assassination sparked the First World War, are still going strong 18 years on, albeit with a somewhat changed lineup, although like many other bands they have been impacted first by Brexit and then Covid (their website site currently has an optimistic button marked ‘request a show’). They probably deserve a rather better book than this one, but still, reading it filled a couple of hours.

There is little online about the author, Hamilton Harvey.  Internet searches bring up some odd stuff about folk with similar names which is probably less than useful. Whoever they are (and maybe this isn’t their real name), their book includes interviews with lots of people who are named and thanked, so I assume this is a labour of love, although the publisher specialises in books on popular musicians, so it may have been a commercial project striking while this particular iron was hot(ter). Maybe the author has gone on to pen award-winning novels … who knows. They did a professional enough job here, so hopefully they are still working around music somewhere. (Someone can perhaps tell me if Hamilton is in fact hugely famous and I’m missing some obvious source).

The book is both about the band and about Glasgow, although it makes the point that none of the original members were native to the city. Lead vocalist and guitarist Alex Kaprano (Greek by way of England) came to Glasgow to study; keyboard player Nicholas McCarthy (English by way of Munich) came to Glasgow as a jazz musician. Drummer Paul Thomson had a shorter journey west from his birthplace of Edinburgh, travelling a short way across the central belt to study art (in this, he followed the model of ‘art college’ bands that is a marker of the post-punk scene). Robert Hardy on bass guitar completed the original lineup. An Englishman, he was again a student at the Glasgow School of Art.  These personal biographies illustrate one aspect of ‘post punk’ music that features in all recent histories; its strong connections with the world of the Scottish art colleges.

The book’s structure is a rather choppy back-and-forward of short chapters relating, respectively, the band’s story (thread A), the social history of Glasgow (thread B), and interviews with individuals picked to demonstrate a range of Glasgow cultural perspectives (thread C). Ethnographic  interviews (thread C) are now a fairly common format in academic journals, but in this book, this methodology is more connected with the format of music journalism than academic writing (think NME rather than Ethnomusicology Forum). The author has tracked down a good sample of band musicians (although oddly not the founder members of the band themselves), DJs, artists, venue managers, producers and promoters: Robert Johnson, Andy Miller, Natasha Noramly, Amanda Mackinnon, Andy Miller, Colin Hardie, Sorcha Dallas, Keith McIvor and Brendon O’Hare. Not all interviewees seem to actually like Franz Ferdinand: space is given to wee moments of what can only be called bitchiness, but which might, I suppose, be the peculiarly dry Scottish way of acknowledging Franz Ferdinand’s relatively huge success. The general aim is probably to give an impression of rooted working-class authenticity, placing the band in a background of music performed in working class dancehalls, pubs and clubs from the 1950s onwards, although the infrastructure articulated by the ‘voices’ sounds like it also has educated middle-class aspirations and a fair amount of inter-personal professional rivalry (its hard when upwardly mobile bands become, err, upwardly mobile).  It’s a clear mechanical structure; ideologically, it’s a little bit less coherent.

To a reader who is not a hard-core fan of Franz Ferdinand, the minutia of tours, rehearsals and studio sessions that comprise thread A are somewhat less than fascinating, although you do get a sense of how hard-working a band needs to be to make its way, and how thick-skinned they need to be to ignore their own contemporaries’ occasional lack of collegial warmth. There is little in the book on the actual songs (music and lyrics), which is a shame, because that surely is core to why many readers might come to this book.

Thread B sketches what amounts to a condensed history of contemporary Scottish pop music, highlighting the importance of entrepreneurial musicians such as Alex Harvey’s Soul Band in the 1970s in showing Glasgow’s musicians what could be done on tight budgets and in unusual venues. Robert Johnson, guitarist in the band Life Without Buildings (1999-2002), suggests that Glasgow had an “mythical” (who knew!) international kudos: “Glasgow is in a way a selling point for a lot of bands”, which made it a good place from which to launch bands (p.64). The slick PR work that accompanied the city being the European City of Culture in 2000 might have contributed to this international image (discussed briefly in chapter 32). However, some of the Gotham-city like charisma comes from Glasgow’s post-industrial situation: unlike Edinburgh, it was full of generously-sized post-industrial empty spaces into which live music could be transplanted as the city adjusted to changed economic realities. Artistic grassroots infrastructures associated with the School of Art, such as the artist-run Transmission Gallery, were also clearly important to the Glasgow narrative historically, although how many of these are healthy live-music venues post-Covid is outside this books timeline and scope.

Thread C (“Glasgow Voices”) in the tartan rug does its best to help us understand the kind of personalities that drove the music scene in the decades that closed the 20th century and opened the 21st. The interviews in these chapter foreground the moments of serendipity that bring people together in a particular place and time who share an interest in music and some kind of performative chemistry; failing which, a shared age demographic and overlapping circles of friendship and rivalry. The infrastructure is both fragile and dynamic, rather like the bands themselves, reflecting projects that rise and fall on the personalities who generate the start-up ideas, and which bounce off other creative presences in their local environment. The idea here might have been to suggest a creative synergy matrix, although at times, it also evoked a rough-and-tumble world of sharp elbows that possibly you might need a larger-than-average ego to push through.

Soundyngs is a blog that covers everything from prehistoric caves to, well, this kind of stuff, so bearing in mind that diversity of readers and coverage, here are some take-aways from the book illustrating how contemporary ‘post-punk’ music transformed Scottish popular music, and questions arising in my head as I read.

  • Digital technology has transformed the world of popular music. By the early 2000s, bands could record and produce their own studio albums and use the new technology of the internet to promote these alongside live performances to fans. This is an obvious point, but explains why the churn of art-school bands from Glasgow are able to be both local and global. The hard economics of music mean that Franz Ferdinant from its outset has pursued links with the USA – both collaborations with other musicians and studios, and by searching for hit success in the charts on both sides of the Atlantic – in ways that make their music mid-Atlantic as much as just ‘Scottish’ but that has long been a wider pattern in European popular music. Their relative success in this endeavour leaves them open to some easy hits from people whose careers have stayed closer to home. In this global music practice, are ‘Scottish’ bands perhaps seen as less ‘Scottish’ as their careers become more successful?
  • The tension between ‘indie’ music and ‘the industry’ is to some extent a construct where all players of the game share a desire to sell volumes of records and to get slots to play in high-viewer-figure radio and TV programmes. Formulaically, the book sets up the early-years narrative of Franz Ferdinand’s music competing against the ‘conveyor belt’ (p.33) of TV-show promoted fabricated acts. Although Glasgow lacked the big infrastructure of the south, it did acquire some core businesses – affordable recording studios, and small-scale labels such as Domino Recording and the famous Postcard Records – which were the critical late 20th century enabling platforms for new bands. Other recent book reviews on Soundyngs have also noticed a pattern of bands moving from Scottish companies to those with offices in London and New York as their success outgrows local infrastructure; see my first rhetorical question, to what extent do these moves make successful Scottish bands less “Scottish”?
  • “Post punk” is thoughtful and reconstructive. If punk, with its DIY aesthetic and anarchic politics, set out to challenge and break commercial pop music in the 1970s, “post punk” was an attempt by serious musicians to rethink the basis for making music; players had evident musical skills and long-term career aspirations (this is what is flagged by the book’s “renaissance” subtitle) outside of the ‘factory’ approach of industry fixers. Bands like Franz Ferdinand had (have) a thoughtful seriousness to their work that continues to feature in the world of popular music in Scotland, making possible, occasionally, performances that connect with political and/or social ideological messages.  A signficant criticism of this book is that it doesn’t look carefully enough at the actual songs this band sang, which (despite some side sweeps from the “voices”) made serious and musically skilled claims for the value of popular culture, and generated music that might sit in art galleries as well as in pubs, blending at its edges into contemporary ‘art music’ composition. Is there anything in the wider culture of Scottish audience expectation that might have made it harder to celebrate and acknowledge this kind of highly articulate cleverness? (I’ve written elsewhere about hip-hop, which is also clever and articulate but it occurs to me now, that hip hop may have adopted different strategies to make these more acceptable.  Maybe it’s a class thing.  Thinking more…)
  • Glasgow matters … but is there more to say? The book gives us some sense of the also-ran status of Edinburgh, but its general thrust is that the Glasgow scene sets the pace for the rest of Scotland. This is possibly true for this kind of music, but clearly not so true for the kind of rock-folk fusion bands that emerged from outside of the central belt (and there are some). More could be said about the “Highland” pop / rock band ‘renaissance’; see books on Runrig, for example, and possibly, on newer bands emerging from rurally-based production sheds.

This is not an academic book, and not a particularly elegantly written one; although rich in facts, it is disappointingly slight on music.  There is no citation apparatus, and not much evidence of theoretically-informed method.  If you want a short history of Scottish pop, with a developed case study of an exemplary band, it is an easy 2-hour read. If you want a more serious book on serious Scottish post-punk pop, the goal is still wide open for a more extended history of late 20th / early 21st century Scottish popular music.

Further Reading / Listening

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