The bands Sparks and Franz Ferdinand seem to belong in opposite worlds in so many ways. The LA-based Sparks — brothers Ron and Russell Mael — have been making idiosyncratic art-rock since the early-‘70s, while their Glaswegian indie-rock counterparts are relative newcomers to the world scene. Indeed it was Franz Ferdinand’s smash hit single Take Me Out, from their eponymous 2004 debut that ultimately brought these two acts together, the result a brand new entity, FFS.
“We’d heard Take Me Out and we knew nothing about Franz Ferdinand but we really loved that song,” Russell Mael recalls of the collaboration’s genesis. “It was one of those kinda songs that’s incredibly special. Then we read in the British press that they were Sparks fans, so they were in Los Angeles and we got together with them and just had a chat, and in the end there was that usual thing, ‘We should do something together some time!’
"We started writing trans-atlantically — they were in London and we were in LA and we were sending things back and forth."
“Then eleven years later we just happened to bump into [Franz Ferdinand frontman] Alex [Kapranos] in San Francisco and said, ‘Whatever happened to that collaboration we were going to do?’ and from that point on it kicked into high gear. We started writing trans-atlantically — they were in London and we were in LA and we were sending things back and forth — so it took a long time for it to get together.”
This new mashed entity, FFS, now sports its own self-titled long-player and is even getting prepared to hit the road.
“Both bands have a very particular sound, but we weren’t sure how it would go when it came to merging the writing performance,” Mael admits. “It was fortunate just due to the way the bands are set up that instrumentally there wasn’t a lot of overlap: they have a drummer, a bass player and the two guitars — although Nick [McCarthy] plays keyboards sometimes — while I’m just a keyboard player, so when the two bands came together instrumentally it was almost pre-made. Only the vocals and how they would go remained unknown — Russell and Alex’s vocals are both really distinctive but they’re both really distinctive from each other. So the fact that they would work so well together was something we didn’t foresee; we wanted it to be a real merging of the two voices.”
And the tyranny of distance ultimately worked as a safety blanket rather than an impediment for the fledgling outfit.
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“That 6000 miles distance was also a really big help, because no one was really worried about looking into somebody else’s eyes and thinking, ‘Oh God, I wonder what they’re thinking about?’ You were more secure in trying things and sending them away and hoping for the best.”
