Alex Kapranos Quotes

Maybe ‘Can’t Stop Feeling’ and ‘Turn It On’ we’ll just release as singles. It’s a thing The Beatles used to do which I really loved, the idea of releasing something as a single completely on its own.

It’s very rare that a song falls from your mind complete.

Being in a band didn’t buy me my beans on toast!

Boho to me is a first-year student who’s just discovered the tie-dye shop.

No matter what you do, if you’re trying to create something new, your environment has a massive impact on you.

Glasgow’s not a media center. When you’re there, when you’re hanging about, you feel quite detached from musical movements or fashions or anything like that. You do feel quite alone, in a good way.

Why play a chord when you can play one note?

I find American football quite ridiculous generally. I don’t understand it. It looks like a lot of guys dressed up as spacemen shouting at each other.

Traditionally, lots of vagrants and unemployable characters wind up working in kitchens.

I have always been fascinated by the concept of the villain and the hero being in one person.

Men behave very oddly in the company of attractive women.

A lot of bands have the enthusiasm kicked out of them by playing really dreary pub venues that just churn bands through.

The internet is like a gossipy girls’ locker room after school, isn’t it?

You can only begin to be great when you embrace a sense of your own ridiculousness.

It’s fine to indulge yourself so long as you don’t try and foist it on the rest of the world.

You can’t write for the cultural environment – if you do that, by the time it comes out, that cultural environment has passed. You have to be aiming for something that’s original – that’s the only way you can have any kind of impact.

Just because you can leap off a drum kit doing a scissors kick while hitting a chord, people expect you to be an extrovert socially. But I’m not always comfortable with the idea of small talk at a party.

Ideally, musicians belong outside the Establishment. When they cross that line, it’s like something in them has died.

Music should be universal. My life perspective, my lifestyle – I’m not going to impose that on the people that listen to my music. That’s kind of a perverse form of snobbery I like to reject.

There are loads of bands I’d love to produce.

I think in the world of indie music there’s this sort of false modesty.

Surely every band wants to be a pivotal point in history.

The best songwriting comes from being as creative as you can and editing it down to the good bits, essentially.

It doesn’t matter how adventurous you want to be, you’ve still got to contain your identity.

There’s a difference between expectations and aspirations.

I want to make music that will make the blood surge in your veins, music that will get people up and dance.

I’d rather eat a cow-pat on a bun than a bloody McDonalds.

If I was a fan of someone as a teenager, then it’s OK for me to feel completely in awe when I meet them.

Cinema, which is influenced by every single part of life, is direct and reaches you immediately. And writing – the best writing is complex ideas communicated concisely. And music – if it’s a good tune, make sure people can bloody hear it.

A lot of food criticism has a similar flavor to it, and I’m probably going to write about it in a different way.

Boredom or being sick of what you’ve done before is a big part of being in a band.

I didn’t grasp the basic principle of being a promoter, which was: Put on music but also generate an income. I was on the dole most of the time.

Arty. To me the word’s got as much venom associated with it as ‘wacky’.

It’s easy to be lazy when there’s food lying around backstage or there’s a fast-food joint a couple blocks away. But if you walk a little further, ask around a bit, of course there are exciting things to discover.

People’s musical tastes are fickle, and music can be a fashion.

Although they might not admit it, I think girls are very aware of the impact that they’re having. But they never feel it themselves, and it’s impossible to explain. It’s like trying to tell a blind person what yellow is.

Of course, there’s a certain type of person who feels that anything which becomes mainstream has to be rejected immediately. And that’s part of the indie-alternative snobbery and hierarchy and elitism.

Ambition is sneered at by some bands. It seems like a pretty good thing to me.