AT LADBROKES, Franz Ferdinand are 9-4 favourites to win the Mercury Music Prize tonight.
But the Mercury has a genuine dilemma here. On the one hand, to justify its existence, it cannot be a people’s prize. That’s what the Brit Awards do. The Mercury must be more challenging, more discerning, cleverer. It should shape the zeitgeist, not
run to catch up with it. Otherwise what’s the point? So Franz Ferdinand can’t win. Imagine chairman Simon Frith up there on the podium. Now imagine my 71-year-old dad watching him and thinking, "I’d heard of Franz Ferdinand months ago, and not, since you asked, because my son writes about pop music for a living and mentioned them. I’m more on the pulse than Simon Frith, and I’m 71."
On the other hand, Franz Ferdinand are different from most bands that people’s parents have heard of. They are that rare thing: a pop band adored equally by critics and public. They are, to people who endlessly obsess about pop music, what it is and what it means, absolutely fascinating. Yes, they write tunes that you can’t get out of your head. But they are more than just a pop band. They deconstruct pop, reinvent it, move it forward.
"Pop" is the key word here. Franz Ferdinand are very consciously a pop band, not a rock band. Bands who make "rock", in general, are deliberately distancing themselves from "pop", which they see as trivial and ephemeral, and nothing to do with the timeless, "classic" albums which they are attempting to make.
Franz, by contrast, go out of their way to embrace pop. Their original manifesto was to "make music for girls to dance to" ("rock" fans are, by and large, male). They betray a childlike excitement about being on Radio One, playing on Top of the Pops and meeting famous people. Unusually for a Scottish band - we are reticent creatures, in the main, who sneer at the celebrity-obsessed London industry - Franz Ferdinand dress up, wear make-up, and strike glamorous, pop star poses for photographers (compare their photo sessions with those of fellow Mercury-nominated Scots, Belle and Sebastian and Snow Patrol, who seem to go out of their way to avoid looking like handsome or exciting people). And yet their aspirations, ultimately, are not about money or glamour or celebrity. They are about using the platform of pop music to communicate interesting, intelligent ideas - or, to use another word, art.
IF ANYTHING, each of their singles has issued a bigger challenge to the listener than the one before. The breakthrough single Take Me Out, for all its catchiness, is surprisingly dark, comparing the ritual of flirting at a party to a duel between snipers. The follow up, The Dark of the Matinee, is one of the wordiest British pop singles since Pulp’s Common People. A song about teenagers furtively fleeing to the cinema, it has the opening line, "Take your white finger, slide the nail under the top and bottom buttons of my blazer." Its video was a homage to Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills.
Their new single, Michael, is their most intriguing and commercially risky song. On one level, it’s about boys falling in love with each other on the dance floor - which is, even now, not obvious pop-single material - but it can also be read as a wry comment on pop stars who cynically flirt with homo-eroticism, and the people who get a vicarious thrill from listening to the results.
Michael, like so many pop songs, is not about sex but about selling the promise of sex. But what’s being promised here? Are the two boys in the song really going to sleep with each other, or are they straight boys turned on by what they see as the danger of the idea? The song, you will notice, sounds a lot like 1970s, androgynous Bowie, which I suspect is not a coincidence. The fact that Franz Ferdinand, at a key point in their career, have decided that releasing Michael as a single is a good idea, is daring, admirable and fascinating. The fact that it coincides with a Mercury nomination just turns up the heat. But Michael is also typical of Franz Ferdinand. They are a band who seem completely uninterested in what it is appropriate or inappropriate for a pop group to do.
They started out, famously, by creating illicit art happenings in an abandoned warehouse in Glasgow, working with - amongst many others - a theatre company, Highway Diner, and two art curators, Sorcha Dallas and Marianne Greated. Conspicuously, they neither boast about this in order to make them look more "arty" or clever, or play it down to avoid alienating people. If the subject comes up, they talk about it. If it doesn’t, they don’t. This might be the key to their appeal. They are at home in lots of different kinds of homes, simply by being themselves. By liking Franz Ferdinand, you are neither showing off nor dumbing yourself down. You can dance and think at the same time. Or, if you don’t feel like it, you can just do one, since Franz Ferdinand are smart enough, and populist enough, to write songs where the cleverness doesn’t distract from the catchiness, and the catchiness doesn’t distract from the cleverness.
THERE IS, of course, nothing very new about all this. Franz Ferdinand are simply emulating bands from the past that they grew up loving. "I love bands who push boundaries but who aren’t scared of taking it to a lot of people," singer Alex Kapranos told me when I interviewed him just before Take Me Out was released. "If you look at Roxy Music in the 1970s, the stuff they were doing was drastically experimental, but it was pop music."
He could add many more bands to that list. The Beatles, Talking Heads, Blondie, Pet Shop Boys, Blur, Pulp. It is almost always the case that the best pop bands are also the most daring and experimental, and the most intelligent. The trick - and it’s a very difficult trick, otherwise there would be more bands like Franz Ferdinand - is to find the balance between pop and art. Too self-consciously clever and you can look haughty and smug. Dumb yourself down and it looks condescending. Try to write the perfect pop song as a cynical exercise and you will look cynical.
Somehow, so far at least, Franz Ferdinand have found the perfect balance between art and pop, perhaps completely by accident, and they are loved by both the pop world and the art world as a result. It is unlikely there will be anyone else like them for some time, which is why all those London A&R people currently trawling Scotland for "the next Franz Ferdinand" are both insulting us as a nation and completely wasting their time. (Gentlemen, we welcome your presence here, please do visit more often, but sign us on our own merits or not at all, please.)
Which is why the Mercury, an arty pop prize, has such a problem. I suspect it would dearly love to give due credit for an almost perfect marriage of art and pop. It would be a very Mercury Prize thing to do. But it would involve much swallowing of pride.
Can Simon Frith bear to go on TV tonight and wax lyrical about Franz Ferdinand to, amongst millions of others, my justifiably smug dad? Or will they cop out and give it to someone less interesting, like Keane (8-1) or, God help us, Joss Stone (12-1)? My money’s on The Streets (2-1) a choice somewhere in between edgy and popular. But I’d prefer it if Franz Ferdinand got the gong.
