Alex Kapranos

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

“Just because you can leap off a drum kit doing a scissors kick while hitting a chord, people expect you to be an extrovert socially. But I'm not always comfortable with the idea of small talk at a party.”

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

“There's a difference between expectations and aspirations.”

“Ideally, musicians belong outside the Establishment. When they cross that line, it's like something in them has died.”

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

“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.”

“It doesn't matter how adventurous you want to be, you've still got to contain your identity.”

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

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

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

“Of course, there's a certain type of person who feels that anything which becomes mainstream has to be rejected immediately. And that's part of the indie-alternative snobbery and hierarchy and elitism.”

“Why play a chord when you can play one note?”

“Traditionally, lots of vagrants and unemployable characters wind up working in kitchens.”

“People's musical tastes are fickle, and music can be a fashion.”

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

“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.”

“Arty. To me the word's got as much venom associated with it as 'wacky'.”

“Boho to me is a first-year student who's just discovered the tie-dye shop.”

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