Berlin Festival 2012 boasts an awesome line-up

Here are two questions that you will, without doubt, answer 'yes' to. 1. Do you like Berlin? 2. Do you like music festivals? See, told you. Double affirmatives all round. Well, combine the two and what have got? A pretty frickin' sweet way to spend a couple of days, that's what.

The Berlin Festival takes place at the historic Tempelhof Airport on September 7th and 8th and there are so many amazing acts to feast your eyes and ears upon. Like (deep breath): Grimes, Django Django, Dada Life, Sigur Rós, Franz Ferdinand, Orbital, Little Dragon, Friendly Fires, The Killers, Metronomy, SBTRKT, Daughter, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, Clock Opera, Of Monsters And Men, Friends, Kate Nash, First Aid Kit, Nicolas Jaar, Miike Snow, Crocodiles, When Saints Go Machine ... the list goes on and on.

This years edition will also play host to the world’s biggest Silent Arena Aftershow Party. With 10,000+ headphones, ticket holders will be able continue partying like silent mentalists after the final main stage performance from midnight till 4am. There will also be an Art Village showcasing over 60 national and international artists. Urban art, murals, performances, sculptures and more will all be on show plus an art bazaar, bars, booths, and the Design & Record Label Market as well as the art prize and a costume competition.

A day ticket is stupidly cheap, at EUR 49 + bf, while a two-day ticket is EUR 74 + bf. A Berlin Festival + Club Xberg Kombiticket will set you back EUR 89 + bf. Score your tickets today and we'll see you there kiddos!

Keep an eye on the Facebook page for further announcements, and see the full line-up at www.berlinfestival.de

The xx win Mercury Prize

London's xx picked up the Barclaycard Mercury Prize for their album xx last night. They held off strong competition from Laura Marling's beautiful I Speak Because I Can and records from the likes of Foals, Mumford & Sons, Dizzee Rascal and Wild Beasts.

In scooping the £20,000 award, singer/bassist Oliver Sim said the band was very grateful and that they'd, "Had the most incredible year."

Previous winners include Pulp, Primal Scream, Klaxons, Arctic Monkeys, Elbow and Franz Ferdinand.

Future Music Festival, Sydney

The Future Music Festival took place last weekend at Sydney's Randwick Racecourse. The festival is predominantly dance-based and combined DJs with bands like Does It Offend You, Yeah? and was headlined by a typically barnstorming set by The Prodigy. It wasn't just for the danceheads though, and any rogue indie kids could escape the doofdoof with Franz Ferdinand, Empire of the Sun and Operator Please.

An innovative addition to the festival was the Cirque De Surreal-themed Smirnoff Precinct. Located next to the Pink Flamingo Stage, the two storey precinct featured live streams of the onstage action and had the appearance of a mad hatter's party, with a massive table in the middle where performers put on an hourly show while punters drank Mojitos and Mules. Upstairs, festival-goers escaped the carnage of the festival at a chilled out club with heaps of comfy seats and table service, while others took advantage of the elevated dance podium which overlooked the main stage.

In a time when promoters can be lazy enough to just stick a load of bands on a stage and get away with charging stupid amounts for tickets, it is pleasing that there are still some nice touches like this at festivals. As anyone who has been to the likes of Lattitide or Glastonbury will tell you, a festival experience should be as much about what is happening off the stage as on it. It seemed that, with the death of the wonderful, relaxed and diverse Great Escape Festival, Sydney had given up on the idea of a festival that offered more than just the bands on the bill. However, with Playground Weekender being all about the FUN and with thinking outside the box like the Mad Hatter's crazy precinct at Future Music, maybe there is hope for us who want more for our festival dollar than watching Dizzy Rascal turn up for the zillionth time.

Super Furry Animals - Dark Days/Light Years

SUPER FURRY ANIMALS
Dark Days/Light Years

One guesses that, if they wanted to, Super Furry Animals could fill stadiums. For 13 years they have effortlessly penned the kind of rock/pop melodies that most bands would kill for, yet have always had an edgier, playful side that sees them do what the fuck they want with flagrant disregard for commercial success. Three-minute ballads invariably have five-minute techno freakouts bolted on the end of them, some of their songs are sung exclusively in Welsh and, when Paul McCartney appeared on one of their previous albums, they chose not to have him singing, but simply crunching celery into a microphone.

And so it is no surprise that their 9th studio album, Dark Days/Light Years, is another slice of unhinged genius. Crazy Naked Girls, a six-minute pysch-jam with dance sensibilities, opens the record and Pric, a similarly sprawling effort, ends it. Twixt the two, Inaugural Trams features Nick McCarthy from Franz Ferdinand rapping in German. Like many of SFA’s ideas, it sounds ridiculous, and shouldn’t work, yet it does, brilliantly. Elsewhere, the record bursts with straightforward pop gems, like the Jim Noir-esque Where Do You Wanna Go? and the massive chorus of Helium Hearts, during which front man Gruff-Rhys’ vocal soars alongside strings.

Bouncing between beautiful, melodic pop and delightful insanity, Dark Days/Light Years is SFA’s best record since 2001’s Rings Around The World and is perfectly representative of a prolific body of work that makes them one of the most inventive and intriguing bands that Britain has ever produced.

Franz Ferdinand interview

My Franz Ferdinand interview is this week's Drum Media cover story (live photos by the handsome Daniel Boud: ON THE EVE OF THE RELEASE OF THE NEW FRANZ FERDINAND ALBUM, GUITARIST NICK MCCARTHY EXPLAINS TO ROB TOWNSEND WHY IT WAS TIME FOR A CHANGE

“In the beginning we didn’t know what the hell we were going to do. We knew what we didn’t want to do. We didn’t want to play all that angular guitar shit that is everywhere these days. It’s kinda boring.”

Franz Ferdinand guitarist Nick McCarthy sits in Sydney’s Intercontinental Hotel. Sipping orange juice and gazing out of the window at a majestic view of the Harbour Bridge and Opera House, he looks weary after the previous night’s gig at the Enmore Theatre. However, when we begin to discuss his band’s new record, Tonight: Franz Ferdinand, his demeanour instantly becomes one of excitement. “About halfway through we realised we really wanted to do a dance record,” he beams. “We were trying things out and we realised we wanted to make a dirty dancehall record and get a really massive bass-end. The bass has come to the foreground and is doing a lot of the rhythm.” It’s true, while Franz Ferdinand’s angular pop was always nicely dancey, their third release sees them take it one step further. “That old way worked but we couldn’t do that anymore. I hardly play guitar at all on this record. There are a lot of synths and a clavinet [the instrument Stevie Wonder uses on Superstition]. It’s cool. You don’t have to play it like Superstition. It’s got a great rhythm to it. That helped us to get a new dancey side. We had to find a new way of playing dance music for ourselves.”

The result of such a desire to branch out creatively is an eclectic mix of songs, from the synth-heavy opener Ulysses, through the R&B of What She Came For and the acid-house freak-out of Lucid Dreams to acoustic album-closer Katherine Kiss Me. “I think each song has got a specific theme to it. We always joke that that our favourite record is something like The Best Of Queen or whatever. So that’s kinda the record we wanted to do, like a collection of singles, with each one having a different feel to it. Send Him Away has a very Afro-Caribbean rhythm and then Turn It On is just raucous. At the other end, Dream Again is one for lying in bed.”

While this third outing is recognisably a Franz Ferdinand record – the big, infectious choruses are still there as is the moderately smutty subject-matter – one wonders whether at any stage during its creation they thought they might be pushing the envelope just that bit too far. After all, the barmy Lucid Dreams, at eight minutes long, is a different beast entirely to 2004’s accessible mega-hit Take Me Out. Did McCarthy ever worry that fans simply wouldn’t get it? He sips his drink again and looks thoughtfully into the mid-distance. After pondering for an age, he defiantly says: “Nah!” He bursts into uproarious laughter before adding: “Of course we write music for people to listen to, but we have to be excited by it ourselves. I think it’s a big mistake to write things because you think people might like it.”

Considering how the Brits have forged a comfortable career with their familiar brand of jaunty guitar pop, I suggest that pushing themselves creatively on their third album is an admirable thing to do. McCarthy shrugs. “All my favourite bands do that. You just get bored of stuff don’t you? That’s natural isn’t it?” It goes deeper than a whim to try something different though. The truth is that the quartet simply had to tread in this slightly different direction if they wanted to rediscover the spring in their steps. A couple of years ago, life was not fun for Franz Ferdinand. “At the end of our 2006 tour, we were fucked emotionally. We were just standing onstage, tired of playing the same songs and not feeling anything from the audience. They were giving it all to us but we were just empty shells. Anything you do too much stops being good. We just overdid it and we needed a bit of a break. So we took a few months off and then came back and started writing.”

Shunning the home-comforts of a conventional studio, and in keeping with their desire to do something different, they holed up in a crumbling Victorian town hall in the rough part of Glasgow. “There were three rooms and this massive theatre which had been empty for 30 years. It looked great and felt great,” McCarthy says of the old building which was last used as a drug rehabilitation centre. “We recorded a lot of the vocals on the stage of this theatre. Late at night we’d turn off all of the lights and you could imagine all the ghosts coming out of the cracks and listening to the music.” While the guitarist admits to liking “total pop slickness,” and jokes about how the band weren’t totally slumming it as they would drive to the makeshift studio in their Porsches, recording in the dilapidated building agreed with their preferred way of working. “I just like being in control and doing my own thing rather than asking someone: ‘Is it alright if I put that microphone there?’ In a studio I always feel a bit intimidated. In our place you could do whatever you wanted. It felt relaxed.”The fun that the band had in their new HQ shines through on the long-player, but McCarthy suggests that, while it was a blast to record in such an interesting environment, it’s still all about the strength of the songs. “We put a lot of effort into the sound but the recording side is secondary really to what the song is. If you record a great song badly, it’s still great.”

They took embryonic versions of their new songs on tour to try them out in front of a live audience. Rather than filling big venues, they road-tested them at secret gigs in sweaty little pubs and social clubs around Scotland. “We played them live and changed them again if we didn’t think they were working. Some of the gigs were the size of this [average sized hotel] room. Even if there were only ten people in the room, it was exciting to play new songs. We’d come back from the gigs and think: ‘That one’s not really working.’ Then we did a tour of the UK, and after that we changed them again.”

With a new repertoire of tunes at their disposal, being on stage is fun again for the Brits and, with the new album about to be unleashed, McCarthy can’t wait for fans to get to know the new offerings. “I’m really looking forward to what people are going to say about it, and how they are going to react when they actually know the songs. Big fans will have listened to them online and you can see the odd person singing along, but the full impact of an album is when people know it when we play it live. We want to get that reaction.”

Franz Ferdinand - Tonight: Franz Ferdinand

FRANZ FERDINAND
Tonight: Franz Ferdinand

Feeling a little creatively stunted by the angular pop of their first two albums, Britain’s Franz Ferdinand decided it was time for something slightly different. So, avoiding the sheen of a conventional studio, they holed up in the unlikely setting of a crumbling former drug rehabilitation centre in Scotland. Superslinkies hung from the ceiling to act as primitive spring reverb, the windows were soundproofed and the band set about attempting to make a full-on disco record.

From the squelchy synths of opening track Ulysses, the shift in direction is obvious. “C’mon, let’s get high,” frontman Alex Kapranos suggests before a massive chorus shows that, though this is a departure, it is still recognisably Franz Ferdinand. No You Girls plays like a chemically-enhanced The Dark Of The Matinee and uses the rattling of a human skeleton for percussion. Similarly experimentally, Send Him Away was recorded to one mic in the cellar under the makeshift studio’s stage. While seventies synths give the record a distinctly electro feel, its sound is also an eclectic mix of African influences, funk, R&B and disco-glam.

If ever there was an indication of the vivacity and boldness of Tonight: Franz Ferdinand and producer Dan Carey’s chaotic, experimental vision it is Lucid Dreams. With the now familiar squidgy techno bass, the song races through a dizzying barrage of ideas threaded together by a galloping drumbeat. Then, at the five minute mark when you might expect it to start winding down, it moves into three minutes of acid-house madness in a Super Furry Animals kind of way. It’s a daring move which could have backfired, yet somehow it works wonderfully and is the album’s strongest moment. Katherine Kiss Me then draws things to a close in an incongruously acoustic manner. Like a comedown, but a gentle one.

Although the leering lyrics and smutty wink with which they do their thing becomes less appealing the longer in the tooth they get, their joyousness is infectious and such keenness to stretch beyond their well-established pop brand should be applauded. Okay, so it’s typically throwaway, but Tonight: Franz Ferdinand succeeds as a hedonistic dance-floor filler. When they first burst onto the scene in 2004, Franz Ferdinand stated that they aimed to create “music to make girls dance.” Five years on, they are adhering to that manifesto more so than ever.

Franz Ferdinand at The Enmore Theatre

Franz Ferdinand played at the Enmore Theatre last week. Here is my review (pictures by the delicious Daniel Boud and Cybele Malinowski):
FRANZ FERDINAND
THE TEMPER TRAP
RED RIDERS
The Enmore Theatre, Enmore
06/01/09

Local lads, Red Riders, were first on the bill when Franz Ferdinand played Sydney back in 2004. Playing the same slot more than four years on perhaps says something about their career trajectory and, while their performance was solid enough, it felt hackneyed and lacked vitality.

In complete contrast, The Temper Trap’s star is ascending at pace. The Melbourne five-piece (whose numbers have been temporarily boosted by a supplementary guitarist due to frontman Dougy’s hand injury) put on a thrilling display that had so much going on it was hard to take it all in. Their songs were anthemic and ambitious, as Dougy’s (below), nuanced, soulful voice soared over keys, guitar, bass, percussion, handclaps and three backing-vocals. Their instrumental set closer wasn’t only the highlight of the set, but the standout moment of the whole evening, as three drummers led a mesmerising tribal jam freakout which filled the room with imposing noise. On this display, 2009 may very well be The Temper Trap’s year."What a brilliant idea to wear a leather jacket to a gig in Sydney in January,” sweaty Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos joked about his attire, before launching into poptastic singles Do You Want To? and The Dark Of The Matinee. This high-tempo start to the sold-out, all-ages gig was maintained throughout. Come On Home and The Fallen followed, with guitarist Nick McCarthy leading the songs with infectious riffs galore, all the while bopping around with a jolty guitar action, like a robotic Marty McFly.

Take Me Out was discarded early, which suggests the Brits are (understandably) bored of playing it. Though the years have tired it a little, it is still fun slice of pop. With its squishy synths, Ulysses displayed the dancier nature of their upcoming album, and even made their older, angular guitar tracks sound slightly flimsy in comparison. Meanwhile, potential future single No You Girls bridged the gap in sound between their older and newer material.

Michael and This Fire ended the jaunty set with a bang. However, while the well-known songs were enjoyable in a singalong kind of way and had the crowd jumping, it was the new tunes that really stood out and showed, three albums in, that Franz Ferdinand aren’t afraid to branch out in interesting new directions.