In the words of our reviewer, much of Franz Ferdinand’s most recent studio effort Tonight: Franz Ferdinand “is dominated by more disco-influenced sounds and synthesisers”.

It makes sense, then, that the Glaswegian superstars can hold their own on the 2010 Future Music Festival bill, alongside the likes of The Prodigy and Empire of the Sun. Late last year, FasterLouder caught up with the band to talk about the brave new world of music and the “insane festival line-ups” they find themselves on.

At Future Music Festival in March, you’re the sole rock headliner amongst the likes of The Prodigy, David Guetta and Empire of the Sun. How do you feel about being classed with such company?
It’s good, y’know. We’re personally big fans of electronic music and big fans of bands like the Prodigy. We’ve got an electro part of the set now. Our song Lucid Dreams, which was on our last album, which has quite an electro coda to it. I think we’ll fit in quite well. We have quite a dance-y element to us, overall. We’re not just a straight-ahead guitars and rock music band.

You’ve also had a bit of an electronic crossover in the recent past with the album Blood, a dubstep interpolation of your most recent recorded material. How did it eventuate?
Well, it all came about because our producer, Dan Carey, who’s done a lot of mixes in the past and is quite big in the dub world, would be in the studio with us. And he’d start doing these mixes just for fun. And then we told him to go and release it, because it was just really enjoyable.

So he kind of mixed the whole record of nine songs and we put it out. And it’s a great way for us to listen to the record as well. Because it’s like it’s not your music anymore, the way that he took certain elements and brought it to the fore. It’s completely different to how we play it live or how it was recorded or how it sounds mastered on the record.

The past decade has been subject to many a ‘best of’ list, and your self-titled debut has been popping up. What sentiments arise when you are named amongst the defining acts of the decade?
It’s not the sort of thing I sort of dwell on. But, we just finished this decade? Ask me in another ten years and I’ll probably have a better idea of what it felt like, or feels like. When you’re living it, it’s not really something you wake up every morning, punch the air and go “Yes!” I don’t know; ask me after the whole event. Ask me in 2019.

Do you think these publications may have jumped the gun a bit then? We do still have a few months left till the end of the decade.
Yeah, maybe in the next few months the most amazing band that ever existed will appear.

That would screw with Pitchfork.
Ha, they’d be screwed completely! But it’s good for them that they’re a website. They can simply go into the code and change it whenever they like. If it was print, it’d be a real stuff-up.

Just on magazines, it’s fair to say you are one of a few bands left that really owe your early exposure to print. Being in the unique position of seeing the way music journalism has moved from print onto sites like Pitchfork from the very beginning, what do you think of this shift?
I’m a big fan of the internet. I read a lot of music websites and probably buy a lot less magazines than I did at the beginning of the decade. What I find most interesting is the way information on music is now so freely available. I remember being a fan of these American indie bands in the ‘90s and nothing being written in the [British] press about them. And finding information about them was just absolutely impossible. You’d just have to trawl record shops and randomly buy an LP that you didn’t even know had come out.

These days, someone mentions a new band to you in a pub or something. You go home and you Google them and you find their MySpace and their songs on iTunes and you listen to as many songs of theirs as you want. There’s tons of information. It can only be a good thing.

Your last visit to Australia saw the band previewing material that would eventually be released onto Tonight. How important is it for yourself and the band to present your material to the audience before it’s released or even before you set foot in a studio?
Well, with this album – no, correction: with our first record – we had to play our songs before we recorded them. Because when you start a band you obviously have no idea you’ll record so songs solely exist on the stage. But this time around we did a lot of little gigs in Glasgow and stuff. And as we played the songs, changing it and trying it again.

To me it’s one of the most real barometers, playing a song live. Because it’s a real, human reaction, right in front of you. And also ‘cause we tour so much playing the song live may well be the biggest thing for us. We don’t just stay at home and listen to our own records. We play it every night.

Aside from your music, Franz Ferdinand has become quite well known for the visual aesthetic present from album to album. How have the images and artwork associated with each period in your career been established?
The first kind of Russian stuff that we were using, we were all kind of interesting in at the time. It all fit well with the music, we found, as well. It was all very poppy, very bold. It wasn’t anything that we specifically sought out and went, “This is our album cover”. It was just interspersed amongst other things and happened to come up at the right time.

None of it is really that planned. It’s all really ad-hoc. Something comes up in the moment during recording and we choose it. It’s usually something we leave to the week before the deadline, usually.

Being a young band that has risen quite quickly, have there been any specific moments where you’ve looked back and been astounded at the levels you’ve achieved in the music world?
Well, we played in Madrid last year or the year before with Bob Dylan of all people. And he was on before us, strangely enough. But that was just amazing. Even playing with Iggy and The Stooges in Australia [for the 2006 Big Day Out] and playing with the Prodigy twice now was quite special. I don’t think people notice just how insane festival line-ups are these days.

Catch Franz Ferdinand at Future Music Festival around the country, as well a pair of sideshows in Melbourne and Sydney.

Sat 27 Feb – Brisbane FMF
Sun 28 Feb – Perth FMF
Wednesday 3 March -The Forum Theatre, Melbourne
Thursday 4 March -Big Top, Luna Park, Sydney
Sat 6 March – Sydney FMF
Sun 7 March – Melbourne FMF
Mon 8 March – Adelaide FMF