IHAD a dream about the new Franz Ferdinand album. Well, a nightmare actually. It was this: I ripped open the Jiffy bag (special 9am delivery to my desk on Friday), flipped the box of the watermarked CD branding it as "uniquely traceable" and me as the "end user", popped the disc into the office sound-system and heard this: "Well here we are on the endless highway/Oh baby can't you see things my way."
This "end user" imagined lyrics about life on the road as far as the ear could hear. Jaded stuff from a bored band about the ennui of touring: the bus, the soundcheck, the hotel, the infernal chocolates on the turned-down bed, the infernal groupies..
.
In one way this wouldn't be surprising: Franz Ferdinand spent all of 2004 touring their debut album. Result: worldwide sales of 3.2 million and a fistful of awards. Knock-on effect - the band turn into bloated rock pigs, eclipses of their former selves, the skinny-tied, skinny-belted, skinny boys who sang songs about being anxious in cities and made their city - Glasgow - glisten.
But in another way this would be very surprising indeed. For it ignored a crucial fact: Franz Ferdinand are the coolest, most knowing Scottish band there's ever been, and all of the aforementioned would have been just so much cliche.
The most eagerly awaited second album by a Scottish group since Hey, Hey We're The Bay City Rollers And We're Going to Blow It All And The Bickering Over The Missing Millions Will Drag On For 30 Years - but for very different reasons - You Could Have It So Much Better... With Franz Ferdinand opens with 'The Fallen' and a guitar duel between the band's love machine, Alex Kapranos, and the huggin', kissin' dream, Nick McCarthy.
It's a heavy start... then comes the first of many 'Take Me Out'-style time changes... then they settle for a fascist groove thing: a mad, marching riff with Kapranos sneering: "Just because you like to destroy/All the things that bring the idiots joy."
The first Frannies album brought joy to many. The kids got new heroes, the Roxy Music generation got confirmation that Bryan Ferry's combo were the most influential band after the Beatles, the New Musical Express was saved for another year and the charity shops sold out of skinny ties and skinny belts.
So... follow that. What if "Sit on skinny hands, nothing to say, nothing at all" turned out to be the actual state of affairs, rather than just a line in track six? Were Kapranos, McCarthy, Paul Thomson and Bob Hardy in any way daunted by difficult second album syndrome? "That's crazy, how can you be scared?" says Kapranos of the follow-up. "If anything, we were really impatient, we couldn't wait to get into the studio."
That confidence is evident in the lyrics ("Now I know that I'm a leader"... "Oh yes I am spectacular"... "We've been bright enough to climb"... "Everything's easy") and also the music, with the group sounding as tight as their Farrah slacks after all that touring, and unable to resist at least one cossack stomp per song.
"This album has a lot more of the energy we have as a live band," says Kapranos. "The playing is intuitive, natural, easy. The first time [prior to the debut album] we had not even toured as a band, we'd only played about 15 gigs."
Franz Ferdinand began work on the new record's 13 songs at what the tartan tabloids like to call Kapranos's "Dumfriesshire mansion" in the spring, moving in the early summer to New York and the famous Avatar Studios where, under producer Rich Costey, the band doubtless had their ears pricked for distant echoes of old Roxy and David Bowie sessions.
"We're all big Roxy fans and always have been," says Kapranos. "They were rock 'n' roll avant garde and sounded like nothing anyone had ever heard before, but also perfect pop music as well."
If Bryan Ferry had a pound for every time he's been reverentially referenced recently, he'd almost be able to afford a new suit. But the Frannies are keen to spread the credit and the influences around this time.
Kapranos again: "Some of the things we listened to before [recording the album] were Neil Young, Giorgio Moroder, a bit of... what's his name?... Joe Meek [sonic innovator of space-agey hits such as 'Telstar', Margaret Thatcher's favourite record]. We got really into his early 1960s productions - there's a really crude strength in them.
"Other things as well, like George Harrison's All Things Must Pass. That is such a brilliant record and it had an impact on our album. The song 'Walk Away' probably has a feel that came from listening to that Spectory sound. And then there are some things that Rich Costey introduced us to that we would never have brought to the table ourselves, such as Pink Floyd, who we always regarded as the enemy."
'TAKE ME OUT' was the single of 2004. The single of 2005 will probably be the exuberant hip hop of Amerie's 'One Thing' and this, too, influenced the making of You Could Have It So Much Better ... You guess Paul Thomson shouted loudest for it. His disco drumming powered 'Take Me Out' and, on the new album, he drives 'Do You Want To', 'I'm Your Villain' and 'Outsiders' with the same stated aim: music to make girls dance. In Avatar Studios, Thomson would have been searching for the ghosts of Chic.
Thomson is probably the grooviest drummer in rock. He insisted on a high seat and a low-slung drum-kit so he could share in fame's glow. But now he's reportedly joining Kapranos and McCarthy centre-stage on guitar for this week's Scottish comeback gigs in Edinburgh's Princes Street Gardens.
Will this spoil the band dynamic? Is Thomson being indulgently rock-starry? Or is he seeming to be no more indulgently rock-starry than Kapranos in naming a song after a girlfriend, and will his move up front in fact turn out to be a triumph, just like 'Eleanor Put Your Boots On'?
There are three tracks which could broadly be called ballads and this one ("Eleanor put those boots back on/Kick the heels into the Brooklyn dirt"; about Eleanor Freidberger of Fiery Furnaces) is the most affecting.
But if you have any quibble about its American references, then 'Do You Want To' - the first single from the album - takes us straight back to the Glasgow of the band's art-school genesis. "Here we are at the Transmission party/I love your friends they're all so arty, oh yeah," croons Kapranos. Apparently the lyrics to this one were sewn together from snatches of excitable and salacious chat the frontman overheard at an opening at the King Street gallery. ("Your famous friend/Well I blew him before.")
Everyone wants a piece of Franz Ferdinand. A report in the Newcastle Evening Chronicle this month described them as "North-East rockers" by dint of the fact that Kapranos was born in Washington, Tyne & Wear, and his granny still lives in the area.
But even with two Englishmen in the band, McCarthy and Hardy, they remain loyal to Glasgow. "We definitely see ourselves as a Glasgow band above anything else," says Kapranos. "It's not a massive place, but one of the great and inspiring things about Glasgow is you have all these characters who did things and they did them their own way, and they're still there and they kind of like say: 'You know, if we did it this way, you can probably do it as well.'"
His band's way was obviously inspired by other bands. Kapranos does everything but step through the smoky archway and say: "Tonight Matthew I'm going to be Bryan Ferry/David Bowie/Russ Mael of Sparks." But more and more these days, Franz Ferdinand sound like Franz Ferdinand.
There's some Bob Dylan on this album, and also Blondie and a lot more Beatles than I'd been expecting, although not as much Brian Eno as I'd been led to believe. (In an interview with Scotland on Sunday in June, the great electronica wizard offered them his services).
But there are no songs about endless highways, or how crap it is being rich and famous, or bland, generic stuff aimed squarely at stadium audiences.
Good luck to the band's American fans with the references to Radio 4 and Winston Churchill... and who else but Franz Ferdinand could sing about "I watched you clean the filth off your phone-dial" and get away with it?
Franz Ferdinand play Princes Street Gardens on Tuesday and Wednesday as part of T on the Fringe, then Aberdeen Exhibition Centre (Nov 21) and Glasgow SECC (Nov 22) on their autumn tour. The single, Do You Want To, is out on Sep 19. You Could Have It So Much Better ... With Franz Ferdinand (Domino) is out on Oct 3.
