Franz Ferdinand

“Ready…Set…Go!”

The rock photographer announces the shoot’s beginning, but he doesn’t really have to. His subjects—the four Scottish scamps known by the quirky moniker Franz Ferdinand (the archduke whose Sarajevo assassination launched WWI)—are already in position in their folding lawn chairs, preening and posing. Parisian runway models couldn’t hit their marks with more self-aware savvy. Decked out in kitschy ’50s style, with their Arrow-sleek dress shirts tucked neatly into their creased Hager-stiff slacks, these guys know the lens and how to work it. And their well-chiseled cheekbones and swooping New Wave haircuts aid them immensely in this endeavor.

The camera especially seems to love frontman Alex Kapranos, who crosses his legs, kicks out his Italian-shoed feet, drops his hands on the armrests and stares with steel-blue eyes from beneath long brown bangs. “Great! Excellent!” purrs the photogrpaher as Kapranos vamps, even though the scene occurs in a grimy lube-job garage in San Francisco’s SoMa district. Grease monkeys scratch their heads in bewilderment; just who are these four delicate lads, anyway? Have they stopped by for an oil change or something?

No, the Franz Ferdinand foursome are slick enough already, thank you very much—any criticism leveled at them or their eponymous Domino debut rolls right off. On the strength of a few singles, Britain’s NME recently put them on the cover under the headline “This Band Will Change Your Life!” Their pop-punky bow soon shot to the top of the U.K. charts, sold 100,000 copies in its first week and landed the quartet a big-bucks Stateside deal with Epic Records. And thanks to the erudite lyrics of Kapranos—who earned his college degree in English literature—Franz Ferdinand has become a fast-breaking phenomenon that is, in the words of yet another NME cover this April, as “big” as “it is clever.”

Later, post-shoot, Kapranos unties his oxfords, curls up on the couch of a nightclub dressing room and begins telling his band’s Horatio Alger tale—which naturally zigzags from pop straight into prose and passion. “I certainly didn’t go to university to plan out a musical career,” he confesses. “I went because I really liked studying. … And recently, I’ve been really into Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, just an amazing book. And we’ve already got a song about it called “Love and Destroy,” which is not on the album but on a [limited edition] live CD …