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Franz Ferdinand.
With my sinuses heavily blocked up, I was desperately trying to sound comprehensible to Franz Ferdinand's drummer Paul Thomson, who had just woken up in his tour bus and was waiting for a cup of tea. "I hear a cold's certainly got about over here but I didn't think it had got that far!" Thomson laughs.
Currently touring Europe through their winter in leg numbing
-10°C conditions, it's a wonder all the Ferdinand lads aren't
sick. "We just have to knock back a lot of vitamins," he explains.
"Just recently, while touring the UK, everybody had a cold and
being on the tour bus with the air conditioning it just sort
of pumps the germs around the bus. We just have to take a few
days in a hotel with our own rooms and treat it as quarantine."
Apart from the recycled air business, Thompson is generally impressed with the tour bus. "I would say the bunks are the best part because you sleep in them. That's what tour buses are good for, really. When you're traveling at night you're not sort of conscious of the ground that you're covering, which is good I think. It's fairly claustrophobic but the hum of the motor sort of puts you to sleep. But when you're just in a van you travel during the day and arrive just before soundcheck completely knackered."
It seems strange to think that it is now two years since Franz Ferdinand's debut album sent music critics into an, ahem, "frenzy". Even stranger though is the fact that, having toured the world over, this BDO will be their first ever national Australian tour.
"We're like veterans now!" Thomson quips. "We're still enjoying ourselves and still writing new stuff. Maybe we'll record while we're traveling to get off that tedious treadmill where you stop touring, you record your record, you promote your record, you bring it out, you start touring again. We're trying to combine the two so hopefully by the end of the tour we can have the third record written and maybe parts of it recorded. You can write songs wherever really," Thomson continues. "You don't need to be in some sort of room with incense and candles, you can do it in the back of a tour bus. The bare bones of [songwriting] is generally Alex [Kapranos] and Nick [McCarthy] then we structure and arrange the songs as a four piece and that's when we put a mark on things, when the songs get branded, when all four of us are bouncing ideas off each other."
It seems Thomson will have plenty of time on his hands to write songs while traveling around Australia in order to protect his fair Scottish skin from the heat. "I don't take too well to the heat, I just peel and burn and pass out and blister, in that order. I just might stay indoors. I'm going to go a bit earlier to New Zealand to acclimatise to the time difference and weather. What struck me when we went to Auckland last time was that all the bus shelters and all the cash machines and the lamp posts looked like Britain. It looked like a town in Yorkshire! I guess there is a large British element to NZ and apparently Christchurch is very Anglo-centric. I suppose it's like Britain, but with a summer."
Like apparently everyone else on the BDO line up, Thomson is more excited about seeing The Stooges than anything else. Which begs the question, what are The Stooges looking forward to? "I think they're hanging out for the cheque at the end of the show," Thomson laughs. "We actually played with them at a festival in Brittany, in France, and Iggy was staying at the same hotel as us. He was wandering about in this sort of bright neon pink suit. He's amazing, I'd like to look like that when I get to his age."
But for now Thomson is content with his cup of tea and plans to get a coffee and have a look around Vienna while they wait for the stage and PA buses to arrive, a plan that would be much easier if Thomson spoke German. "Well, Nick grew up in Germany so he's pretty much bilingual. I think he even thinks in German even if he's speaking English. I can do the whole 'yes, no, thank you' and I can order a beer in most languages, so I've got the basics covered."
Cassie Hilditch
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Franz Ferdinand play the Big Day Out Blue Stage at 7.15pm on Fri 3 Feb.
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