Alex Kapranos Quotes

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

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

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.

There's a difference between expectations and aspirations.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Men behave very oddly in the company of attractive women.

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

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

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

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

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

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.'

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.'

I want to change and try new ideas - allowing your sonic identity to evolve in your music and not being afraid of that. You see musicians hit upon something that works, and then go, "Let's keep doing that for 10 years." And that idea kind of terrifies me a little bit. It becomes like a day job then.

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

Why play a chord when you can play one note?

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

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

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.

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

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!

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

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

For me upward social mobility is possible through talent and hard work and is a glowing endorsement of the benefits of living in a modern capitalist society. It's not so much evidence of a meritocracy, as evidence of healthy nepotism. Nepotism is at the core of a good group dynamic. A good group dynamic is at the core of rock'n'roll.

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

You can't write for the cultural environment - if you do that, by the time it comes out, that cultural environment has passed. You have to be aiming for something that's original - that's the only way you can have any kind of impact.

It's fine to indulge yourself so long as you don't try and foist it on the rest of the world.

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

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

Anyone can play an instrument if you show them how to move their limbs, lips or fingers the right way. It's irrelevant. What is relevant is personality, energy, creativity and disturbing sense of humour.

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

I find American football quite ridiculous generally. I don't understand it. It looks like a lot of guys dressed up as spacemen shouting at each other.

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

Music should be universal. My life perspective, my lifestyle - I'm not going to impose that on the people that listen to my music. That's kind of a perverse form of snobbery I like to reject.

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.

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

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.