Teenage Fanclub
BIOGRAPHY
The C86 rejuvenation is seemingly very hot right now – UK bands like Yuck, The Crookes and Veronica Falls appear to be (sometimes quite unwittingly) digging their musical toes into the most Indie of ‘Indie’ historical periods in the evolution of British music. For those of you who, like me, may have been bandying the term about without having a Blues Clue what it referred to, C86 was a cassette tape compilation put out by the NME in 1986. The idea was to put together a collection of artists from independent labels – which it certainly did: Primal Scream, The Wedding Present, The Mighty Lemon Drops and a load of others very much confined to the footnotes of Rock (The Close Lobsters anybody?). The problem was that, in this period the musical press was such an incredibly competitive business, with 4 weekly papers being put out, that the temptation for these “taste-setters” was to “discover” or create new musical sub-genres so as to seem ahead of the curve, fictionalising and fabricating a sensationalistic movement where only absence was before. Good to see that nothing changes.
So, funnily enough, in a time where the mode of “consuming” music (ugh, what a horrible phrase) is diversifying and gobbling greedily away at the empty air, the cyclical nature of social evolution has twisted round to bite it’s own future mouth and, predictably, though ironically the worlds united “taste makers” have re-grasped upon an old, forcibly created genre which semantically had no real anchor to any signified term, and moved it anachronistically to a space where it is further untethered from it’s original lack of meaning. Eh? I should probably stop reading Slavoj Žižek. Essentially I find it ridiculous that a new glut of bands have been so forcibly chucked together under a title that never really meant anything in the first place.
Even the most cynical of songwriters don’t set out with the intent of writing themselves into a form, and those that do are rarely successful. Whilst Teenage Fanclub (jeez, I knew I was meant to be writing about something else, all this new genre stuff just gets me angry) weren’t included on the C86 tape itself, they soon became so synonymous with the subsequently forced genre that it made a mockery of how contrived the movements conception was.
Though they were often compared to the West Coast bands like the Beach Boys and The Byrds for their “Jangling guitars” and three part harmonies, the band initially came to light with debut album A Catholic Education, a chaotic, noisy and densely melodic album which to an extent pre-supposed the later arrival of grunge in the 90’s. Their later career was spent bearing the torch for the power-pop revival (not in the Spandau Ballet vein of things though, mind), a strange task to give to a bunch of young men from Glasgow – the last time anyone gave a torch to someone from Glasgow that whole Great Fire of London thing pretty much hit the fan. The band is composed of Norman Blake (vocals, guitar), Raymond McGinley (vocals, lead guitar), Gerard Love (vocals, bass) and Francis Macdonald (drums), with songwriting duties shared equally between Blake, McGinley and Love. Strangely for a group with multiple singer/songwriters the band’s musical output has become one of the most coherent and consistent in it’s adherence to (or reinvention of, depending on how generous you’re feeling) the classic guitar pop approach of vintage acts like Big Star and Badfinger.
Though never groundbreaking, and certainly never “hip”, (although we all know it is hip to be square now don't we? - Ed) the band’s consistent output of great pop is undisputed. The band's 1991 Geffen released album "Bandwagonesque", with its brash guitar sound and gorgeous harmonies, was a massive critical success, and although mainstream pop radio failed to bite, the group found a warm welcome on collegiate airwaves. The album even topped Spin magazine’s ‘best of 1991’ list, beating Nirvana’s Nevermind, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and R.E.M’s Out of Time.
Though the band were later dropped from Geffen they continued to record albums, picking up and losing members etc., but that’s the kind of background stuff you can read somewhere else.
The band have a new album out on their own label PeMa called Shadows which definitely still sounds like Teenage Fanclub. Why change something when it ain’t broke ay. We welcome them back with open arms, and thus they are our this week's band of the week.
TOUR DATES
June 1st - The Warehouse, Aberdeen
June 2nd - Glasgow O2 ABC, Glasgow
June 3rd - The Picture House, Edinburgh
June 4th - The Cockpit, Leeds
June 6th - Bristol O2 Academy, Bristol
June 7th - Birmingham O2 Academy 2, Birmingham
June 8th - O2 Shepherds Bush Empire, London
LINKS
http://www.myspace.com/theteenagefanclub
http://www.teenagefanclub.com/
http://www.last.fm/music/Teenage+Fanclub
VIDEOS
Teenage Fanclub – Playing Radio on Jools Holland
Teenage Fanclub on Rapido
Teenage Fanclub – Everything Flows
words and thoughts by Samuel Smith