It’s tea time. That’s right. Back at it again for the ‘T’ section on a random Saturday evening (where I am, it could be morning for you somewhere or late night somewhere else). And it starts off strongly, I’d say. ‘Take Me Out’, I think, was the first song I ever heard by Franz Ferdinand. I think that might be the same for a lot of people. I have a memory of being slumped in a chair, guess I must have been either eight or nine, watching MTV2, and the “I know I won’t be leaving here’ section of the song was playing alongside the repeating visuals of the music video near its end. It left an impression. The band name showed up, ‘Franz Ferdinand’. Thought it sounded pretty cool. ‘Matinée’, the next single, was where I really became interested in them. ‘Darts of Pleasure’ was the band’s first single officially. But with ‘Take Me Out’, the band became a household name in that British post-punk revival scene in the ’00s and the track became one of the biggest indie dancefloor anthems.

And, I think again like many others, when I heard the song in full for the first time, I was wondering how its beginning worked its way into sounding like it did at the end. Because the track begins in a totally different direction. Well, according to singer Alex Kapranos, he and fellow guitarist/bandmember/songwriter Nick McCarthy, who isn’t in the band anymore, were working on the song for sometime. They were trying to work out the structure and found that the verse/chorus/verse type structure wasn’t working. They would have to change tempos when going from one section to the next, which just didn’t sound right. Eventually they decided to lump all the faster verses at the beginning and put the slower choruses at the end, transitioning them together with that gradual slowing down in tempo around 50 seconds in. Or rallentando for you music theorists out there. That’s probably the best part of the song there. That tempo decrease marks that build in anticipation for what comes next.

What comes next is hook after hook after hook, as I sort of said earlier, usually accompanied by that widely recognisable guitar riff. They play it live, everyone sings the riff. It’s just how it goes. As to the lyrics and what it’s about, well, there’s a nice little podcast where Kapranos and bass guitarist Bob Hardy discuss these topics. I listened to it a while back, so I can’t remember exactly what was said. But I seem to remember Kapranos saying he took inspiration from a film of some kind, or a certain type of film made by a certain director. You’d better listen to the thing yourself. But just on the surface, without going too deep, you hear the words ‘Take Me Out’, I’d say you’d either there’s a romantic sentiment or a violent one. Like an assassination or something. And that would be neat with the band being called Franz Ferdinand and everything. I think it’s a little bit of both.