We caught up with bassist Bob Hardy (centre left)…
You’re playing the Future Music festivals this time, which are more dancey… Yeah, when we were talking about doing the festivals we knew it was a dance kind of thing. It’s quite exciting really. Prodigy I think are there. We’ve played with them before in Switzerland and it was a great show. They’re an awesome live band and I think they’ve got a bit of a crossover.
So we might see Franz Ferdinand out on the town with the Prodigy? Ha, yeah maybe. Yeah you hang out together at festivals, you know, especially the touring ones. It’s just fun.
You guys got very big, very quick. How did it feel? It was amazing. I guess you didn’t really appreciate it at the time because it was happening to you. It’s afterwards that you appreciate what it was, when you see it happen to other bands. It was amazing. It all happened so quickly and we were so busy the whole time. The whole time was non-stop. You didn’t really get a chance to sit and think about it, it was just doing it.
Are you an artist or a musician? I guess I’m not like a career musician, you know what I mean. I’m not going to be in any other bands. It’s just something I happened to do while I was at art school.
On Wikipedia your personal heroes are listed as Will Smith, Kate Winslet and Missy Elliott… Haha, oh really? That’s funny. Ha, er, I like Will Smith. I think he’s really funny. I met him once in Australia actually. I think he’s really nice. I don’t think of him as a personal hero but I do enjoy his films. Kate Winslet… I, er, don’t really think about her on a day-to-day basis I have to say. And I don’t know an awful lot about Missy Elliot. Yeah, I think someone might have got at that page.
Do your fans often do weird stuff? I dunno. We have quite dedicated fans who follow us around the world sometimes. Like, you know, you bump into them in LA and then the next week they’re there in Rome. I guess that’s quite weird, but they all seem like nice people. They’re quite a creative bunch I think.
Do audiences differ around the world? In places like South America, where they’re not so used to western bands, they’ll go particularly crazy and that’s quite amazing. And I guess Mediterranean countries, like Spain and Italy and stuff, they’re very vocal and have a great party atmosphere.
Do you escape the cities on tour? Not in Australia, no, I’ve never left the cities. I’d like to, it’s just difficult to find the energy if you’ve played a show the night before. You tend to just wander around town and go to a bar rather than organise a trip into the Outback!
Constantly touring must be tough on friendships? Ah, not your real friends. The only strain would be that you go away for like 18 months or whatever and you miss out on a lot. You come back and people have had three girlfriends and you haven’t met any of them. But it’s fine. Franz Ferdinand are one of the headline acts at this year’s Future Music Festival, which tours Brisbane (Feb 27), Perth (Feb 28), Sydney (Mar 6), Melbourne (Mar 7) and Adelaide (Mar 8).
