Alex Kapranos Bitten By Poisonous Spider

Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos wrote a book about eating on the road called Sound Bites, but he was recently the victim of a poisonous spider bite in Australia.

The band were down under playing a number of music festivals, and Kapranos encountered his eight-legged foe at one of them.

"I put my jacket on and thought I'd been stung by a wasp that had crawled into the sleeve," Kapranos told Scotland's Daily Record newspaper. "When I looked at my arm, there were two pinpricks at the centre of a swelling lump.

"It felt like an injection, a cold sensation was seeping along under the skin.

"I didn't think much about it until my arm started to stiffen, but a passing doctor was very reassuring: the last person who died from a spider bite in Western Australia was in 1955."

Kapranos wasn't too spooked by the incident. He went to his hotel room, had a beer and watched something scarier — especially considering the number of shark attacks reported off Australia's coast: the 1975 thriller, Jaws.

"By the time of the gig the following evening, it was fine," Kapranos said of the bite. "Jaws still terrifies me.

"It was perfect: seeing the great white bite made the white back spider trivial."

Kapranos can count Death Cab For Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard among his peers who've been bitten or stung by something poisonous. Gibbard was stung twice by a scorpion at a Death Cab show in San Diego in October.

Franz Ferdinand's third album, Tonight: Franz Ferdinand, is out on Jan. 27. Let's hope it has some bite. Y'know, the good kind.