MUSIC | Manuela
FAMILY GUY
Meet Manuela: that’s Manuela Gernedel and her husband, ex-Franz Ferdinand guitarist Nick McCarthy. David Pollock spoke to them about
their new project together
I t’s been three months since Franz Ferdinand announced possibly the most polite departure of a founding member that popular music has experienced. ‘We’d love to say this is a result of personal or musical differences, but it’s not,’ said the band in a statement at the start of June, which laid out guitarist Nick McCarthy’s reasons for leaving. ‘Those differences are what we formed the band around in the i rst place.’
Following the release of Franz’s excellent collaboration with Sparks last year, FFS, the recording of the follow-up to their 2013 fourth album Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action is imminent. Yet McCarthy now won’t be a part of it. ‘I’m going to concentrate on production and writing some completely different things for a bit,’ he said in the same statement, ‘and we can all look forward to hearing the new Franz Ferdinand album.’ Most pressing of all, one of the things he has to concentrate on is his young family; he and his wife Manuela Gernedel live in London now, and his main reason for leaving the band is to avoid being away from their young children for months at a time.
Handily combining child-raising with writing those completely different things, then, McCarthy’s i rst post-Franz project is Manuela: a collaboration with Gernedel that takes her i rst name. A debut album is due but currently unscheduled for release on Johnny ‘Pictish Trail’ Lynch’s Eigg-based Lost Map label (see feature, page 68). It’s a suitable home, given the imprint’s track record of releasing interesting and off- beam indie-pop. One track from the collaboration has so far been made public through Lost Map’s site, the irresistible ‘Cracks in the Concrete’. A louche post-punk groove, it’s immediately apparent what Franz Ferdinand will miss – McCarthy’s steely, dramatic guitar-rifi ng – and
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yet Gernedel’s vocal steals the show. It’s warm but reserved, arch but involving, as she sings ‘a baby was born in my house last night / and I dreamt of money and success’, calling to mind Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier in her open-hearted cool. The album, when it arrives, will feature collaborations with Django Django’s Jim Dixon, Mystery Jets’ William Reese, Veronica Falls’ Roxanne Clifford (herself another Glasgow émigré) and Franz drummer Paul Thomson. Of course, to those who know their music, Gernedel and McCarthy’s new venture has stronger roots in the pair’s Box Codax project (alongside Alex Ragnew) than it does Franz Ferdinand. Responsible for the albums Only An Orchard Away in 2006 and Hellabuster in 2011, this was another outing with a strong collaborative element, with both Metronomy and the artist / musician Martin Creed involved in the latter album. The partnership goes back further than that; Gernedel and McCarthy were both brought up in Bavaria, Germany (she’s from Austria originally, while he was born in Blackpool) and it’s there they started dating and collaborating in 1999.
‘We i rst met at a summer party in the local youth club in Rosenheim,’ says Gernedel, of the town where they lived. ‘Nick was playing free jazz with his band. I’d played guitar when I was a child but didn’t keep it up, then as a teenager I played bass in a band. I’ve been singing with people on and off, and I’m a visual artist. I mainly make paintings and sculpture.’ She is, in fact, the reason McCarthy was in Glasgow to form Franz Ferdinand in the i rst place. Although they were often described as an ‘art school’ band, only bassist Bob Hardy went to Glasgow School of Art. As did Gernedel, to study painting, which is why McCarthy moved to Scotland with her.