SCOTS rockers Franz Ferdinand turned down a lucrative role in a $50m (£29m) advertising campaign for fear it would compromise their artistic integrity.
The band's US record label wanted them to appear in a television advert to tie in with the release of their second album, You Could Have It So Much Better.
The deal would have netted them millions and increased sales of the CD several fold, but t
he foursome rejected the offer from a mystery corporation because it would have involved effectively handing over their identity.
The attempt to buy up Franz Ferdinand was revealed by lead singer Alex Kapranos, who said: "They wanted to do this huge thing that was gonna have $50m spent on it. It would have meant we sold four times as many copies of the album, just from the extra exposure it would have got.
"But the advert meant we had to completely surrender all of our identity and integrity to this product that was being advertised."
Although he declined to name the company concerned, Kapranos ruled out some obvious contenders. He said: "It wasn't... Coca Cola or anything like that. It was just a thing that needed some music associated with it. We just had to say no because of the gut reaction. It wasn't because we didn't want to sell more records. It was just because it didn't feel right."
Franz Ferdinand have not been averse to advertising campaigns before, having promoted Tennent's lager in Scotland, mobile phones in Italy and an MP3 player in Japan. But Kapranos said the US deal would have been a step too far.
"We'd have been completely surrendering if we had done that," he added. "We'd be lost. You can just tell with stuff like that - you can tell when you're doing something bad. We probably hacked off quite a few people by not doing it. But as ourselves we felt a lot better about it."
Franz Ferdinand's manager Steve Phillips refused to discuss the terms of the American advertising offer yesterday but confirmed that the band felt uneasy about losing "creative control".
He said: "It was not something that they wanted to be associated with but they don't want to offend the company concerned by naming them.
"It would leave a bad taste in the mouth. We turn down 90% of the offers that are made to us. They felt that if they surrender to a deal as big as that would have left them with no creative control and they would have been too closely associated with the product."
The endorsement of leading bands not only sells records but can boost a company's share price. U2's unprecedented joint marketing and licensing deal with Apple, the maker of the iPod, in 2004, added £1.1bn to the stock market value of the company. The Irish group's online music deal with Apple was the most lucrative signed by any rock band in history. However, some fans felt the band was getting too corporate. One fan called the $349 (£199) U2 iPod "the most expensive U2 album yet".
Music companies actively offer songs to advertising agencies, mobile telephone companies and television programmes. It has become an effective route by which to break new artists. Jack White, of rockers the White Stripes, wrote a song for Pepsi, which started the trend with Michael Jackson's endorsement in television adverts in the 1980s.
Sting, the advocate of Green issues and friend of the rainforests, nevertheless helped car manufacturers, by licensing his song Desert Rose for a Jaguar car advert in 2000.
Elsewhere in the interview, Kapranos spoke of
how, despite selling 5.5 million albums so far, the band is a minnow compared with U2, who they recently supported in Australia.
Kapranos said: "You come on, you've got your little drum kit in front of their big drum kit, your crappy backdrop in front of their big drum kit. I remember thinking: 'F***, we're so small. This band is so tiny in this place.'"
