Franz, The Foodie Issue #30

Franz Ferdinand front man Alex Kapranos writes about his global eating experiences in his first book, Sound Bites

By Anastasia Masurat
Published: December 1st, 2006 | 9:18am

As a rule, musicians on tour do not dine. Successful performers might swill Cristal backstage — with less-than-famous ones relegated to microwaving gas-station burritos — but days on the road and nights onstage just aren’t friendly to foodies.

“Most of the food on tour is rotten,” Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos explained in a telephone interview. “If you eat before a show, you play horribly. You’re not concentrating on the food, just on trying not to burp into the microphone.” As a result, he and the band often find themselves driving around late at night looking for open restaurants.

Despite such occupational hazards, the Guardian tapped Kapranos last fall to write a weekly food column documenting his dining experiences while on a worldwide tour. The London newspaper knew that Kapranos could write — he’d been posting a travelogue to the band’s Web site while on tour — and that he was no stranger to the culinary arts. Before “making music girls could dance to” became his full-time job, Kapranos peeled, chopped, and boiled as a commis chef in restaurant kitchens.

Even so, Kapranos wasn’t entirely convinced. “My immediate reaction was absolutely not, no way,” he said. “I’m not a food critic and I have no desire to be one. But then, after thinking about it, I thought it could be good because I don’t pretend to be a food critic.” Avoiding the air of superiority he hated in food criticism, Kapranos decided to approach the column like his favorite food writers, Anthony Bourdain and Margaret Visser, who focus on food’s effect on people.

“I don’t like telling people how to eat; it’s more about the people and places,” Kapranos said of his weekly column, which ran from September 2005 to October 2006 as the band crisscrossed the world. Sound Bites: Eating on Tour with Franz Ferdinand is a new collection of the columns, along with some unpublished essays, for those who might not have caught his dispatches the first time around or for diehard fans eager to binge on all of Kapranos’ columns in one sitting.

Such an undertaking would be easily accomplished. The slender book is comprised of short entries — most less than two pages long — that read like entries in a friend’s diary: personal, a bit self-indulgent, and full of digressions. While describing an Indian restaurant in his hometown of Glasgow, Kapranos can’t help but recall the Fiat Panda he drove while working there. Later, he’s haunted by his ex-girlfriend’s assertion that oral sex tastes like “a bag of green pennies” when sampling bull testicles in Buenos Aires.

Many such feats of adventurous eating are captured by Kapranos, who tries blowfish in Osaka, chicken gizzards in Paris, and bacon ice cream in Madrid. “If you’re curious about other sensations, if you’re curious about music, you should be the same way with food,” he said, though sometimes the most anticipated exotic fare can be disappointingly boring, like the deep-fried insects he purchased in Bangkok that tasted like potato chips.

Kapranos’ tastes are surprisingly discriminating for a 34-year-old rock star, and his clear love of food drives the book. He appreciates a good Tajine d’agneau, waxes poetic about Nolans Road olive oil (“clear and drinkable as cold water, but with wheatgrass freshness”), and delights in identifying the subtle differences between Croatian prsut ham and Serrano and prosciutto varieties.

Still, don’t get the wrong idea. “The food is almost incidental,” he said, clarifying that whether bland or breathtaking, a meal is a window to the place it was made. “Las Manitas in Austin and Peter Pan donut shop in Brooklyn are very ordinary places, but both say a lot about the places where they are. When you live in an area, you don’t think about its food. It’s the same as breathing or the color of your front door. As an outsider, you get to taste something that people taste every day. The sensation is vivid because it’s new to you.”

This version of gastronomic tourism might sound a bit intense, but it’s a good fit for Kapranos. The busy musician squeezes songwriting and side projects into his packed touring schedule, and he has no regrets about adding “food writing” to his to-do list. “It’s good to have stimulation and discipline while you’re on tour,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s easy to slip into just playing video games and drinking beer.”