Teenage Fanclub have got a new lease of life. With their own record label and
an album of new work — their first in five years — Glasgow’s much-loved
indie veterans have remained intact while other, bigger bands, various
musical fashions and several of their own members have come and gone.
Since their debut, A Catholic Education, recorded on a set of vintage amps in
a small Maryhill studio in 1989, to such revered and acclaimed albums as
Bandwagonesque and Grand Prix, Teenage Fanclub have won many admirers —
including Kurt Cobain — but never in sufficient numbers to make the band
particularly rich or famous.
On the website of their label PeMa, through which they’re about to release
Man-Made, Teenage Fanclub introduce themselves as a group who “undertake a
process whereby we interact with man-made music instruments at loud volumes
and make noises with our tongues and throats”. A tongue-in-cheek mission
statement, perhaps, but one that adequately flags up their intentions.
“The only reason we’re in a band is to be in a studio making new songs,” says
Raymond McGinley, in a Glasgow bar. “That process is how we define
ourselves.”
“Yeah,” says Norman Blake. “That’s our gig, ha ha.”
Blake, McGinley and Gerard Love each write separate songs for Teenage Fanclub.
Each plays guitar, and each tends to sing the lead vocals on their own
compositions.
“What we do,” says Love, “is in the traditional line of songwriting. It’s not
trend-based, it’s not faddy. It’s been going on for centuries, and it will
go on for centuries to come.”
Man-Made will be their first new album in half a decade — not including the
“best of” compilation released in 2003. And therein lies another story. In
1999, Teenage Fanclub were represented by Columbia Records (“by default,” as
McGinley puts it) after the dissolution of Alan McGee’s Creation label,
where they had been working with a certain degree of artistic freedom for
most of their careers.
As an arm of the Sony corporate empire, Columbia was unable to empathise with
a band who are more concerned with making music than selling it, whose only
real sense of obligation is to verses and choruses, who once sang about how
much they hate verisimilitude.
“A company like that is set up to look after the Mariah Careys and Robbie
Williamses of this world,” says Blake. “We were just a kind of afterthought
to them.”
“There were a few sincere people at Columbia,” adds McGinley, “but the whole
culture made it difficult for them to do anything in a sympathetic way. It
wasn’t a business model that could work for the likes of us.”
Having fought their new paymasters over every decision, right down to the
smallest details of the artwork on their last album Howdy!, Teenage Fanclub
agreed to put together the compilation as a way of fulfilling and
terminating their contract at the end of 2002. It wasn’t what they wanted to
do.
“There was a real creative dissatisfaction in being associated with some
glossy retrospective package,” says McGinley. But because they’re
“experienced and professional”, they put two years into designing and
promoting the album, titled Four Thousand Seven Hundred and Sixty-Six
Seconds: A Short Cut to Teenage Fanclub. “We’ve always taken the view that
if you do any record, you should do it well, make it something of value,”
says McGinley.
As a cross-section through their body of work, the compilation is a priceless
taster of the band’s most magic melodic moments — The Concept, About You,
Everything Flows and Ain’t that Enough. Their early releases alone had
enough sparkle for Cobain to famously, and perhaps wistfully, declare
Teenage Fanclub the best band in the world. Liam Gallagher, moved by their
later, gentler songs, could only bring himself to proclaim them “second
best”.
“I guess, in looking back, there may have been some sense of achievement, or
whatever,” admits Blake. “But maybe the circumstances behind the compilation
sort of tainted it a little.”
It was only worthwhile, as far as the band was concerned, because it finally
returned them to independence. They bought their freedom with their old
songs, and got back to making new ones.
“It’s great being responsible for our own mistakes again,” says Love. He
explains how easy it was to set up the PeMa label: “All you need to create a
record label is to give it a name. Then it exists.” But he won’t explain
what the name actually means. “It doesn’t mean anything,” says Love. “It’s
sort of a joke. Just an abstract.”
“It’s an acronym,” says Blake, “but if we revealed what it stood for it would
be embarrassing.”
“The only really significant thing a record label is or does,” says McGinley,
“is that it helps musicians create a record. And that’s what we do anyway.
We’re happy to take the risk on ourselves, and fall on our own arses.”
PeMa has emerged into a Glasgow music community that didn’t really exist when
Teenage Fanclub started out. “It sounds strange,” says McGinley, “but there
was no music business infrastructure in Glasgow back then. All that stuff
happened somewhere else, mostly London.”
And as respected as Teenage Fanclub are in Scotland, the more recent products
of Glasgow’s rock music circles are capable enough not to need their advice.
“Bands like Franz Ferdinand are savvier much earlier in their careers,” says
Blake. “They know about making videos, they’ve got management companies and
people doing their websites, they’ve thought about the whole thing. We
didn’t have a clue, we were making it up as we went along.”
“It makes you think of the older jazz musicians like Chet Baker,” says
McGinley. “A mad guy, a junkie, but he was also a band leader, he paid his
people, he kept the books. Maybe we’re getting back to that realisation,
that if you can take care of the whole business side, you’re not going to
have to compromise yourself as an artist.”
Man-Made, in this context, sounds like the purest, clearest album Teenage
Fanclub have recorded — stripped of everything but the essential
combinations of sounds and voices.
“It’s a new technique we’ve developed called ‘under-dubbing’,” says Blake. And
lyrically, on songs such as Cells and Fallen Leaves, there is a sense of
passing time and ageing that makes it a wintry companion to the spring
romance and summer contentment of earlier albums.
“Well, we did record it in Chicago, in the snow,” says Blake. “But yeah, maybe
that’s how we were feeling at the time. And personally I can’t write another
song about how much I love my wife. She loves it, but I can’t keep doing
it.”
Teenage Fanclub can’t do much more to guarantee their own success than
Creation or even Columbia ever did. They want the new record to sell, but if
it does, Love will as always be “pleasantly surprised”.
“Lots of great records have been seen as failures because they didn’t sell,”
he says. “But they can still be fantastic works of art. The success is in
making it, recording it, expressing something. For us, we just want to be
part of the same thing that’s been going on for 300 or 400 years. You hear
it in folk music and classical music, where the song reaches a kind of
tension, and there’s a release with the change of a chord, and it moves
you.”
Man-Made is released on May 2, Teenage Fanclub play the Mitchell theatre,
Glasgow, on March 29
