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.

There's a difference between expectations and aspirations.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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!

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

It's very rare that a song falls from your mind complete.

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

Why play a chord when you can play one note?

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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