by LORRAINE CARPENTER

Over acts like Basement Jaxx, the Streets and Glasgow homies Belle and Sebastian, Franz Ferdinand picked up this year's Mercury Music Prize, one of the few major music awards that favours artistic merit and "relevance" over records sales. Either criteria would have worked in their case, but the band is especially flattered to be the first winning rock band, albeit a dancefloor-friendly rock band, in three years.

Almost exactly one year prior to the prize, singer Alex Kapranos, guitarist/keyboardist Nick McCarthy, bassist Bob Hardy and drummer Paul Thomson released their debut single "Darts of Pleasure." For a band named after a very unfortunate archduke, fame came fast and furiously - first the U.K., then the world. A string of unusual day jobs and sales of ass fat to science (true story) were swiftly replaced by tours, interviews, photo shoots and the imposition of a strict "groupie ban" - you heard it here, ladies.

In the midst of an ongoing worldwide trek, Kapranos spoke to the Mirror about music festivals, Christmas lights and the saccharine splendour of arena sing-alongs.

Mirror: Tell me about your football anthem.

Alex Kapranos: Last time we were down at the Top of the Pops studio, we wrote this ludicrously catchy riff during the soundcheck and we decided it would make a really good football anthem, and since Scotland didn't seem to have an anthem for the World Cup in 2006, we thought we'd like to write it.

M: What are the odds that it'll be used in an official capacity?

AK: Who knows? But I'd like it to be used in an unofficial capacity as well, like all the best football songs. They're just sung on the terraces, aren't they? Usually the official World Cup song is terrible. There was a New Order one, and I'm a huge New Order fan, but their football song was bloody awful. The last Scottish one was absolutely abysmal. The band was called Del Amitri, who are an okay kinda band from Glasgow, but they did this song called "Don't Come Back Too Soon" and it was so doom-laden! I mean, come on, you're supposed to inspire people, not make them feel like shit! It's a shame because the fantastic thing about songs that get sung at sporting events in arenas is they're really simple tunes that everybody can sing along with. It's one of the most amazing sounds in the world. You can't tell where it starts, but this song builds up and swells across all these hundreds of thousands of people. I love it!

Pop Glasgow

M: I see you're planning a music festival in Glasgow next summer. Will it be mainly Glasgow bands?

AK: No. There will be strong Glasgow content but it's basically just the bands that we would like to see at a festival, as near to our ideal line-up as we can manage. It'll be a mixture of bands that we've seen and really enjoyed and bands that we would like to see, Glasgow bands and bands from elsewhere.

M: And I hear you guys will turn on the Christmas lights in town this year.

AK: Oh, really? Em, yeah, if they want us to, I'd love to. What a laugh. I don't know who they usually get to do it.

M: I was wondering about that. The mayor? Robert Carlyle?

AK: Maybe, maybe it's those kind of guys, maybe we could stand there between Billy Connolly and Sean Connery and turn on the Christmas lights? That'd be funny, wouldn't it? That's the thing about all the crazy stuff that's happened to us over the last year. Most of the time we just sit back and go, "This is really funny." Situations like that are quite ridiculous.

M: I heard that David Bowie, Robert Plant and Jarvis Cocker were at a recent show of yours in New York.

AK: Yeah, that's particularly bizarre. There used to be a program in the U.K. called Jim'll Fix It, where kids used to write in to this guy called Jimmy Saville who would arrange for them to do things like eat dinner on a rollercoaster going upside down or blow up a chimney or ride on a hang-glider and this sort of stuff. It's felt like that for us. We got to edit an issue of The Guardian, we got to DJ on Radio 1, we got to fly in a helicopter in New Zealand, all these really daft things, just 'cause we wrote some catchy songs!

All-ages show with the Delays and the Evaporators at Metropolis on Saturday, Oct. 2, 8:30 p.m., sold out

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