Alex Kapranos spots DB in the crowd at The Roseland Ballroom.
Gimme your Franz...
David has made no secret of his appreciation for the music of the Mercury Music Prize winning Franz Ferdinand, his most recent journal entry being an example of that. But, according to singer Alex Kapranos, it seems the feelings are quite mutual.
The frontman of the Glaswegian four piece got to chat with our man backstage at a Roseland Ballroom show in NY last month. Alex explained in a recent interview that he was completely in awe of David Bowie because DB had been such a huge influence on him.
Already the band, which has sold more than two million copies of its debut album, has won a number of high profile fans including Elton John, Brad Pitt and Elijah Wood. But Alex said it was a dream come true to meet Bowie as he used to listen to him endlessly when he was still dreaming of rock stardom.
Of the evening he met DB, Alex said: "It was a bit of a Madame Tussauds situation with the amount of celebrities there. Bowie came along. David bloody Bowie!" Adding, somewhat enigmatically: "No one is famous any more. Those icons, remote and untouchable, have been touched."
Alex went on to explain how important David had been to his musical development: "I remember sitting with the sleeves of Ziggy Stardust, Heroes and Low, staring as I sucked in the music, perched on the end of my bed, head between the speakers. If that?s going to be topped someone?s going to have to exhume Freddie Mercury or John Lennon."
The skinny Scot went on to give advice about where to look when talking to David: "It?s very strange to talk to someone who is so familiar but whom you?ve never met. I found myself dithering over which eye I should focus on as I talked to him. I decided on the one with the little pupil. It felt like the one he was looking out of."
The two stars spent much of their chat talking about music, as Alex explains: "We chatted about music. He was disappointed that he had missed the Futureheads as he wanted to see them. It?s great to think that someone like him is still a music fan. The last couple of days have been intense but wonderfully so."
You may be wondering about the relevance of the record sleeve above. Well, the Bowie link goes back even further for some of the members of Franz Ferdinand. Both Alex Kapranos (nee Huntley) and drummer Paul Thomson (No relation to the Roxy Music skin basher) were members of lo-fi art rockers, The Yummy Fur.
As you may have already noticed from the evidence above, The Yummys released an interesting cover of DB's Always Crashing In The Same Car as a limited 7" 45 single back in 1997, during one of the band's many incarnations.
Drummer Paul was a member of the band at this point, but sadly Alex didn't join until the following year. Nevertheless, copies of the record are now changing hands for a fair bit more than when I first bought the thing seven years ago.
