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Interview one: Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand

Can you describe the process you go through when you write songs?

There are two very different stages. There is an initial creative stage where it all comes out, and then there’s a stage of chopping it about, arranging it and turning it into something that can be heard by the rest of the world. The best songs come straight out. It feels a bit like the first time you ride a bicycle or drive a car. You’re trying to control something but you’re not quite sure which direction it’s going. You end up with this big sprawling mess of an idea.

Then you have that other process which is a lot more controlled, where you discard all the parts that are irrelevant or that obscure the good stuff at the heart. During the first process you’re not really considering what you’re doing, you’re just doing it. The actual writing of a song is fairly easy. But the second process is very ruthless and quite cold because you have to cut away things that you’re attached to.

Do you write better in certain environments?

I tend to write in all sorts of places. For our new record I’ve written songs in hotel rooms, on the back of tour buses, in corridors, wherever I’ve had an opportunity to sit down and pick up a guitar. Environment isn’t particularly important. I usually just feel like doing it and do it. It’s usually either when you feel there’s no pressure to be doing other things, or when you feel almost selfishly unaware of other things. That’s essential: having a disregard for anything happening around you. Whether it’s somebody shouting about something they want you to do or you’re desperately hungry or thirsty, you can just turn it off.

Are you a different person when you’re writing?

I find myself being rude to people when I’m trying to get past the distractions. I used to have big arguments with my mother. It’s funny because I’m generally not rude at all, I’m generally very polite, probably too polite. The only time I’m really rude is when I’m writing things.

What does it feel like when you’re writing?

If it’s good, it feels really exciting. It’s like listening to a story you’ve never heard before. You lose your sense of where you are. All the everyday stuff – conversation, where you left your keys – it all seems to belong to a different brain, almost like a brain in somebody else’s head. That’s why the distractions are so infuriating, because it’s like being reminded that this other brain exists. Most of the stuff I write about is from experiences I’ve had in everyday life when you use the trivial part of your brain, but the other part is always absorbing things it can use later.

Interview by Eleanor Case.

Franz Ferdinand’s new album is You Could Have It So Much Better

Interview two: David Gray

How do you write your songs?

I begin with little ideas that aren’t fully formed and I have to either excavate further or enlarge a small idea and turn it into a song – perhaps join it to some other ideas that I have hanging around. So a lot of the time it’s more like being a mechanic.

But occasionally a song just seems to come out of nowhere. I pick up my guitar and within half an hour I’ve written one. It’s an instinctive process, a shutting down of conscious thought. It’s about opening a door in your brain that is normally closed. It’s about dredging up things that surprise you: images that you had stored and didn’t know you had remembered. One image will unlock a chain of images, and that becomes a song.

What kind of images?

For example, an image of a tree I once saw came to me and helped resolve the calm of the song Ain’t No Love. The tree had drops of water hanging on it, glistening in the sun, and it looked like a tree of diamonds: a beautiful image that is lodged in me rather like a splinter. It comes from way back in your life and you don’t even know it’s there.

How do you know if a song is any good?

You shouldn’t always trust inspiration. Just because it came out of thin air doesn’t mean it’s any good. But sometimes you can tell, because all your emotions are stirred. The emotion, the purity of the germ of the song – it’s all so vivid and wondrous. It feels so shockingly fresh. But a song that comes from nowhere is usually much better than anything you consciously think up.

What’s your state of mind when you’re writing?

It’s an extremely intense period. I find myself storming around the room, biting my nails, scratching my head to the point that it bleeds. It’s like having an itch you can’t scratch until the process is completed. It takes hold of you. That’s how you make records. You start off by tinkering around, making a few sounds and having a really good time, but when you get deeper into it and your demands get greater and more ambitious, something rears its ugly head. You become possessed. I’m not a particularly easy person to live with during these times. I find it really hard to get back into normal life.

What puts you in the mood to create?

An openness of heart. You either have it or you don’t. It’s an upwelling of feeling – and I will suddenly want an instrument to see if I can express it.

Interview by Lucy Middleton.

David Gray’s new album is Life in Slow Motion

Interview three: Alison Goldfrapp & Will Gregory of Goldfrapp

You think a lot about the theatrical side of your performances as well as the music. Where do you find your ideas?

Alison: The inspirations are quite often outside music. We keep pictures, cut things out, write random things in notebooks, record things on Dictaphones, write up dreams. There are things that have been in your mind since you were a child. It’s a matter of extracting them and regurgitating them in a different shape.

Will: There’s something quite childlike about it because you almost go back to just playing and being in the sandpit and making things. The ideas haven’t got any verbal reasoning behind them and that’s quite fun, quite liberating. At its best, it’s like playing with a box of dressing-up clothes and trying them on and seeing how you look in them.

Do you throw away a lot of ideas?

Will: It’s like you’ve got a map. You just don’t know which are the blind alleys. When you start something, you don’t know what it is or what it’s going to be. Living with that perpetual sense of doubt can be pretty stressful. Each time you start to build, there’s a part of you saying, this is rubbish, you can’t do this, and there’s another part that’s saying this is quite fun, let’s see where it goes.

Do things ever arrive fully born?

Alison: Yes, though sometimes when you have the whole picture it doesn’t make it easy, because you can never achieve the whole thing. Or there’s not much point in realising it because it’s already formed. You’ve thought it, you’ve done it! Things that are half-done are safer.

What’s the difference between people who do what you’re doing and those who just aspire to it?

Will: It’s to do with self-confidence – that grey state of the unknown is terrifying and some people find it harder to deal with. If you have a certain amount of self-belief you can say, I don’t know what I’m doing but it’s fine.

Alison: I think people look at things differently. They don’t see connections that penetrate beyond the thing itself. Like looking at a tree in a pot, some might say that’s just a tree in a pot. Then someone else might say, it’s a tree in a pot, it has those colours and it could be this and it might go into that. Or you might be looking at brickwork and think it looks like someone’s skin.

Will: It’s like that Picasso sculpture of a bicycle. He turned it at a certain angle and suddenly the seat and handlebars look like a bull’s head.

Do you do any other creative things?

Alison: I started knitting. I like it because it’s very repetitive and really immediate.

Interview by Liz Else.

Goldfrapp’s latest album is Supernature.