Hall of Fame Looking back on Franz Ferdinand’s self-titled debut album

2004 and the indie tides were shifting. After a turn of the decade that had gifted us the beige MOR-my of Starsailor, Coldplay and the like, guitar music had finally grown a pair and started to get interesting again. The White Stripes’ raw, unhinged garage rock had fully broken through to the mainstream. The Strokes were the literal sound of effortless cool. On British shores, meanwhile, The Libertines had spearheaded a movement of ramshackle, be-trilbied oiks spinning drunken yarns of doomed romance. It was a good time for the indie disco, but it still didn’t prepare us for the sheer sassy, stomping monster that would be ‘Franz Ferdinand’.

From the start, the Glaswegian quartet were something of an anomaly. Birthed out of the city’s thriving underground art school scene, Franz committed the cardinal sin of being – gasp – over 30 when they first popped their heads above the wider world’s parapet. But when you crash land with a song as monumentally mighty as second single ‘Take Me Out’ (debut ‘Darts Of Pleasure’ wasn’t half bad either…), then age ain’t nothing but a number.

Swiftly becoming the anthemic, fist-pumping soundtrack to a thousand ill-advised late night snogs, it was the clarion call to a band who mixed huge, hook-laden earworms with a subversive, saucy undercurrent. In less deft hands, a song like ‘Take Me Out’ with its sing-along “dun dun dun dun dun dun dun”s could have become a heavy-handed, Fratellis-esque laddy nightmare, but Alex Kapranos and his sharply tailored cohorts’ natural oddness ensured that even the biggest banger never lost its smarts.