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This year marks the 21st anniversary of the first recording sessions of one of the UK’s most dependable indie bands. Cue retrospective boxset, BBC4 special, fan-mugging tour, so on and so forth? Not so, it would seem.
On the contrary, there has been little in the way of fanfare for Teenage Fanclub’s evergreen career. Perhaps, though, they prefer it this way. Raymond McGinley, Norman Blake and Gerard Love have steered Teenage Fanclub through largely untroubled waters since they first stepped into a Glaswegian studio in 1989, rarely troubling the mainstream but always pulling away from the rocks.
I caught up with Raymond following the release of the group’s latest album Shadows, eager to find out what keeps the desire aflame in these three songwriters as they enter the third decade of an acclaimed yet under-rewarded musical marriage. His answers reveal little in the way of grand schemes or golden formulae, but much about the magic of music that is often missed amid the hype and bluster of these impatient times.
It’s amazing, for example, to learn that Teenage Fanclub still operate almost completely without design, their only concession in creativity being to the democratic songwriting process that has served them throughout. “We’ll meet up in rehearsals and say ‘OK, so we’re making this record. Who wants to go first?’” Raymond explains by phone from Glasgow, where he and Gerry are separated from bandmate Norman these days by the Atlantic Ocean. “We start with nothing, then build it up until we’ve got enough for a record. As we go along, that defines what it is, and you have to accept that process.”
The writing of Shadows was guided by that same reliable gut feeling. We get, therefore, the vocals-and-piano lullaby of Dark Clouds, a delicate piece that was originally to feature guitars, Today Never Ends, bolstered by the late addition of pedal steel (courtesy of newest addition Dave McGowan), and a host of songs caressed by flighty bursts of strings as the band “decided to just go with our instinct”. Varied in its palette yet instantly recognisable in its lines and curves, Shadows exudes the same leafy warmth as the Norfolk summer that helped it ferment.
“Shadows was recorded in Norfolk, kind of late summer. When we recorded our previous album Man-Made, we were in Chicago during the winter, which was great. In a big city, going out every night – it has an effect on how you feel when recording. But in Norfolk, we could go outside and eat fruit from the trees. We couldn’t really do that in Chicago,” laughs Raymond.
Shadows is the band’s second release on their own label, PeMa, a development that they saw as necessary (“there aren’t that many labels left,” Raymond notes, half-jokingly), but it hasn’t changed how they operate as a collective. According to Raymond, the only difference to working for themselves and not, say, their old label Creation, is “not having anyone to blame if something goes wrong”.
Their defiance in the face of a changing industry is also evident in their belief in the organic creation of music. I ask Raymond whether, now that Norman lives in Canada, he could see the day that Teenage Fanclub would have to abandon their trusted methods and turn instead to the less immediate but more economic method of emailing sound files to each other. This isn’t going to happen any time soon, it appears. “The idea of working with people in the same room, breathing the same air, is a hard thing to replace,” he replies. “Being in the same place, you make a decision, you do something that day and at the end, you’ve achieved something. That’s a really valuable thing.”
Sticking to one’s guns is an admirable trait, particularly in the face of an ever-more-desperate landscape for recording artists looking to sustain a career. But what of those who may accuse Teenage Fanclub of a lack of adventurism? This is a group that wears its influences comfortably, but it can be squirm-inducing to see the same old references being used, album after album, to describe their sun-bleached folk-rock.
“We always joke that it’s the ‘B’ bands,” acknowledges Raymond. “The Beach Boys, The Beatles, The Byrds, Big Star, Badfinger – we always get these comparisons. But we like to think we do the rest of the alphabet too! The thing is, we do all listen to lots of different things – which could be classical music, or soul, or jazz. But just because you’re listening to something different doesn’t mean you’re suddenly going to be like: ‘Yeah… I think I’m gonna go jazz.’ It’d probably be a disaster!”
Speaking to Raymond, you get the impression that Teenage Fanclub have reached a level of contentment in what they do and are past being bothered by any rehashed jibes that come their way. In any case, such hostility could prove to be short-sighted: Britain has a habit of rewarding longevity, and it’s not beyond the realms of imagination that Glasgow’s finest could one day finally claim the success promised to them during their peak eras, notably around the releases of Bandwagonesque and Grand Prix. Not that Raymond is thinking so far ahead.
“If you have a plan, you come to the end of that plan. We’ve never had one, so it’s never ended,” he ponders. “We enjoy the nature of what we do; not knowing when – or if – we’ll make another record, or whether people will still like us.
“We certainly didn’t have a plan to still be doing this when we first went into a studio in 1989.”
Neil Condron TAGS: Teenage Fanclub Words by: Neil Condron
Links:
Teenage Fanclub - Myspace
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