by LORRAINE CARPENTER

Behind every good band is a good fanbase, and as a band’s fame spreads, so do its fans, and I’m not talking about hot groupie action. Glasgow’s Franz Ferdinand have earned critical and commercial success worldwide, and as with so many skinny, white British pop stars before them, there’s a hardcore contingent among the legions of Franz fans.

With a brand new fanclub, and plans for fan-only recordings and gigs, Alex, Bob, Nick and Paul are nothing if not grateful for the little people, but there are always a few who take it too far.

“We know a lot of them by name,” says drummer Paul Thomson. “They’re real nutters.” Thomson recalls the first time the band came face to face with fan madness, in line for a Strokes show in Glasgow just after the release of Franz Ferdinand’s debut single, “Darts of Pleasure,” in 2003.

“This kid recognized us and he was just hysterical, going, ‘Oh Christ, oh my God!’ and we were kind of looking over our shoulder going, ‘Who’s he looking at?’ It felt a bit silly, and to be honest it still does. I’m just Paul from the block.”

While girls and weaker-kneed boys tend to express idol worship by amassing huge amounts of photos and biographical data and screaming through gigs, in pre-masturbatory Beatlemania style, boys generally collect records, and Thomson knows that brand of fandom—his obsession was Mancunian cult favourites the Fall.

“They’ve such a huge, extensive back catalogue that you’ll never hear everything, so whenever I see some sort of shoddy tape recording of theirs from 1981, I still get excited about it,” says Thomson. But they say you should never meet your idols, and his recent run-in with Fall singer Mark E. Smith was less than ideal.

“He was being fairly mouthy, and he later mouthed off about us in the press. He said we’re like Wet Wet Wet, and we didn’t take that too well. But it’s like a Liam [Gallagher] thing, isn’t it? You’re doing something right if someone’s paying attention to you.”

There’s no shortage of attention for Franz Ferdinand in Chile, where the band had their most over-the-top experience yet. “I still can’t quite get to grips with it,” says Thomson. Chaos erupted as the band left a festival gig involving an audience clap-o-meter and the awarding of a series of silver and gold statuettes. It was also televised live all over the Spanish-speaking world, being the Chilean music industry’s highest honour.

“The whole country’s entertainment press was driving after us on motorcycles, and every time we’d stop at a light, a guy started battering at the window with a camera and a microphone. At the hotel, where all the fans were waiting, we had to go in back—it was like that tracking shot in Goodfellas where they take that table through the kitchen. Then we get up to the room and I could just hear, ‘Bob! Bob! Bob!’ There were all these people outside with banners, shouting his name.

“I’ve got a soft toy that I take with me, it’s a panda, and I dangled it off the balcony with a towel on its head, like Michael Jackson [did]. But I don’t think they got it.”

With Death Cab for Cutie and the Cribs at CEPSUM on Saturday, April 15, 8 p.m., sold out

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