THE ARCH COOK FRANZ FERDINAND Alex Kapranos reveals how working in a

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Nov 5, 2006 | by PETER ROSS

That was a couple of years before we had our first rehearsal. We'd talk about the emotional content of songs, and introduce each other to different things we liked.

"It was a good time. In the kitchen, like being in a band, you have these contrasts of activity. During the day, the preparation time is very easy and laid back. But the feeling that you have at the end of a gig and at the end of a busy Saturday night's service is really similar exhaustion and satisfaction. You are covered in cold sweat and feel pretty good 'cause you got through it." Writing in Sound Bites, Kapranos seems to revel in the disgusting details of cooking, describing, for instance, what it's like to yank fallopian tubes from a chicken. "If you are going to enjoy food properly then you have to be aware of the horror as well, " he says. "When I was up in Fort William, one of the first things I had to do was hack up carcasses to make the jus. It was extremely shocking at first a cleaver in your hand and hacking up great big cows' ribcages. But it makes you understand some of the complexity of food and hopefully appreciate it as well." He pauses to eat. "That duck's good, innit?"

KAPRANOS does a lot of cooking at home. It helps him clear his mind and order his thoughts.

I tell him I've heard that he grows his own vegetables in the garden of his home near Dumfries. "I do. Who told you that? That's what I've been doing the past couple of days. It's a very fertile part of the world down there, and it's been so mild that there's still beans on the vines.

The courgettes went pretty crazy.

Unstoppable." Sound Bites also functions as a partial portrait of Kapranos's childhood. He grew up in the northeast of England, moved to Edinburgh at the age of seven, and then to Glasgow in 1982 when he was 10. However, his father John, a law lecturer, is originally from Greece;

Kapranos spent a lot of time in Greece while growing up and the two cultures have shaped his personality he has his emotional Mediterranean side and his reserved Anglo-Saxon side. "I jump from one extreme to the other . . . I know I do a thing, like a defence mechanism for me with strangers I'm very, very polite.

There's a safety barrier which politeness creates." Yet Franz Ferdinand are a very passionate band. On stage Kapranos leaps around with abandon. He says the blood is pumping so hard in his body that he feels as if it will spurt from his fingertips.

"It's funny as well because a lot of the songs are about pent-up emotion.

Maybe that's more of a Scottish thing.

They have these great emotions which they keep within them. I don't know if that's necessarily a negative thing because by containing those emotions you make them extreme. So definitely songs like Darts Of Pleasure or Take Me Out or Come On Home are about that the pressure of pent-up emotions." His Greek roots are very important to him and we spend a lot of time talking about them. His family are from Mani, the isolated southern tip of the mainland. Eleanor Friedberger's family are from a village only 18 miles away from where Kapranos's grandmother Sophia grew up. He visited Mani recently and was moved to see his family name around the place.