Franz Ferdinand put secret message on album

Franz Ferdinand have admitted their music contains secret messages embedded within their songs.

The band confessed that like on many rock records, they placed a hidden phrase within their debut album, and plan to do it again on the follow-up.

"On the last record, we had messages in the music," Alex Kapranos told MTV News. "There was that trend in the 70s and 80s of back-masking, where you'd put the most terrible satanic messages on songs, and we wanted to do the exact opposite, put the most positive thing we could think of as a backwards message. There's one on the first record, at the beginning of the second verse in 'Michael', and we're going to do that on this album, too."

Speaking about their second album, which the band are currently mixing in New York, Franz Ferdinand explained that they've had plenty of material to work with.

"We're always writing songs," the said Kapranos of the recording process. "It's a continuous and nebulous process. A song like 'I'm Your Villain' we started writing eight months ago. 'This Boy' started off like four years ago. We've reworked it, but I'm fairly sure it'll end up on the album. And there are others we were writing until two days before we left Scotland. If we all don't get to sit around and write with each other, we tend to get very upset."

Other tracks expected to be included on the album, which is pencilled in for late September release, include ‘You Can Have It', 'Evil And A Heathen', 'Your Diary' and 'Robert Anderson Is Christ' which Kapranos said was about “a friend of mine in Glasgow”.

"On one song, Nick (McCarthy) had this fantastically exciting chord progression â€" something like 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'. He was playing it to me on the guitar, and it had me really excited," added the singer of the album's feel. "You have to pounce on something when you get those feelings, so I ran upstairs, wrote a bunch of words, got Bob (Hardy) and Paul (Thompson) down into the room and bashed it out in a couple of hours. And now we have a song called 'You Can Have It So Much Better'.document.write(unescape("