News : Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos on his first ever Glastonbury experience

Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos has spoken to NME about his first ever Glastonbury experience, and opened up about what it was like to take to the stage with two special guests in 2025. Check it out below.

The interview took place last weekend, shortly after the iconic indie band drew a huge crowd to The Other Stage despite competing with a secret set from Lewis Capaldi over on the main Pyramid Stage. For their set, they broke out classics like ‘Take Me Out’, and also invited out Peter Capaldi and rising indie rapper Master Peace as special guests.

The former is best known for his time in Doctor Who, and joined them on vocals for the aforementioned hit single, and Master Peace took to the stage with them for a collaborative version of ‘Hooked’ from Franz’s new album ‘The Human Fear’.

Speaking to NME backstage after the gig, Kapranos opened up about his first Glastonbury experience, which happened when he was a teenager.

“I remember it so well,” he began. “I was 18, I was in Aberdeen, and about a week before Glastonbury, my pal Nick gave us a shout and said, ‘Do you want to go to Glastonbury? There’s some tickets left in the record shop’. That’s crazy when you think about it now.”

“I had a little Lada at the time. For those of you born after 1990, it was a car made in the Soviet Union, it was very unreliable,” he added. “Mine had a broken alternator, which means the battery would run out every two hours, and we’d have to stop in a service station. It took us four days to get down here, but we had an amazing time. It totally blew my mind.”

He went on to share how experiencing the Worthy Farm event for the first time was something that stook with him even as he took to the stage in 2025, adding: “I was thinking earlier about today, if the me then at 18 in 1990 could see the me now, on stage with this character and this character, playing to all those people, they’d probably think to themselves, ‘Fuck me! That microdot I got from that crusty was stronger than I thought!’”

Peter Capaldi went on to share how they got a massive response from the crowd with their 2025 slot. “It’s amazing to hear the band. It’s just so exciting to see a band that plays so well, with such energy and attack and don’t stop playing for the audience,” he said.

“The whole vibe is about making the audience have a good time and taking their music and pushing it out there. It doesn’t happen by itself. It’s not without effort, and these guys do it so brilliantly. They really work the audience.”

Check back here to find all of NME’s news, reviews, interviews, photos and more from Glastonbury 2025. You can read the Franz Ferdinand interview in full here, and check out a snippet of it in the video above.

Earlier this year, the band’s latest album was given a glowing four-star review from NME with Andrew Trendell writing: “It’s a love letter to the idea of this band. Still shamelessly livin’ it up, with an eyebrow cocked and high kicks galore, ‘The Human Fear’ is – as promised – Franz-y as fuck. You do you, hun; you do it so well.”