Alex Kapranos Quotations

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

I really want it to have an impact on the world. I want to be in a town on the other side of the world, and somebody walks up and says, 'That music you made in Glasgow, I listened to it every day, and it moved me.

Men behave very oddly in the company of attractive women.

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

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

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.

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

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

Why play a chord when you can play one note?

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.

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

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

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

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.

I think a lot of bands are creatively knackered when they come off tour.

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

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

I'm not a food critic, and I'm not really an authority to write anything on food.

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.

If success had come along when I was 17 it would either have killed me or sent me completely mad.

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

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

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

There's a character that I play onstage, and I can't let him loose in the supermarket when I'm buying my beans on toast.

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

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

You really only understand whether a song's good or not when you properly play it out in public for the first time.

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.

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.

until we read about them in all our reviews. Then when we checked them out we thought, 'What a great band. What a radical approach to playing.'

Many people have this perception of us being this arty band,

I got recognized around the pool the other night. They were filming a party for the E! channel. It was really distressing because there were all these wanna-be celebrities. I was trying to get out of there before the Steven Seagal look-alike shook my hand, and I thought, 'Please, God, tell me I'm not of this world'.

For years, I felt miserable about being an outsider, but then I suddenly embraced it, ... I saw the value of being an outsider. It was liberating. You didn't have to worry about trying to fit in or losing your insider status. It also encouraged you to challenge and provoke the status quo.

We swap around instruments from time to time and try other variations. The real trick to making a good record is finding out the things that aren't good and getting rid of them.

I suppose, ... but that's why they get it wrong. That's why they wouldn't play Take Me Out on the radio at first, because according to pop theory, it isn't a hit. It starts with one song and changes into another. In theory, it's all wrong. The same with Do You Want To.

Outsiders. He had this weird contraption of a drum kit where he was playing half with a tambourine in one hand and the floor tom between his legs -- just to experiment with different ways of setting up.

We're all big Roxy fans and always have been, ... They were rock 'n' roll avant garde and sounded like nothing anyone had ever heard before, but also perfect pop music as well.

When I first started in a band, I wasn't very good; I was thinking too much about being on stage rather than just being on stage. It's completely primal. Intuitive. Instinctive. You don't consider your moves, you just do them. There are very few things in life when you're just doing that thing and not thinking about anything else. Performing is one of them.

You can always have it better. If you try... [This is the right attitude:] Never to feel [completely] satisfied, always to want to do something better!

You're letting such a fragile side of yourself out when you're creating or writing music. To do that with people who are almost strangers would seem very strange to me. I think that we're very lucky that we're quite close. To us, it's almost like the band is the grandest possible adventure you can go on with your friends. It's really really exciting.

The Beatles were huge for me, ... I used to jump around the room to the red album, the one with all the early hits on it. It made you feel euphoric. It was a sensation I couldn't get from anything else, whether it was playing football, swimming or even seeing 'Star Wars.'

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

There's a difference between expectations and aspirations.

We didn't get our band together because we wanted to sound like any other bands,

We seem to be collecting a big pile of these songs that we really like but don't quite get together, but we were talking about doing them as singles in their own right.

We find ourselves in a much better position than we did last year touring because then we had only a certain amount of songs to draw upon, ... When we played for an hour, we had to play almost everything we knew.

We're very much a rhythm-driven band. We still want to make people dance, but we didn't want to repeat the same beats. We did experiment with a lot of different rhythms.

Fare thee well, fare thee well / I am leaving, yes I'll leave it all to you

Do you remember the last time we were here? ... Nightmare... At least the weather's better.

A lot of being creative means going and doing it, putting in eight hours a day.

It's based on a number of different characters who are pretty enigmatic in their own right,

It's not a case of reinventing yourself, it's a case of trying to be adventurous,

I don't think that really works, does it?

He put his arm around me. I look very, very small.