After 20 years, Teenage Fanclub inspire a huge level of affection
It’s early evening in Leeds, in the north of England, and a group of men in their 40s is heading towards the stage of the Cockpit club, a journey that involves leaving a cramped dressing room, trudging outside into the pouring rain and re-entering the venue through a different door. In the audience that awaits them there’s a man wearing a polo-neck shirt that reads “Gerry Love sings like an angel”, a reference to one of the men who is picking up his instrument and approaching the microphone. For another member of the crowd, the appearance of Teenage Fanclub is almost too much to bear. We are witnessing, he tells us in no uncertain terms, “the best band in the fuckin’ world”.
After 21 years people know what to expect from Teenage Fanclub.
Although their guitars aren’t quite as noisy as they once were and their hair is shorter and greyer, their ninth album of California-by-way-of-Glasgow guitar pop, Shadows, is recognisable as the work of the band who made Bandwagonesque in 1991, causing Kurt Cobain to offer the same rating of their abilities as the man in the crowd at Leeds.
As Norman Blake — one of three singer-songwriters, alongside Love and Raymond McGinley — puts it: “We realised we’re a group of people who write songs. People know roughly what they’re going to get from each album and I think that’s a good thing.”
That familiarity, and the sense that they have grown older with their audience, may explain why the Fanclub now attract a level of affection almost unparalleled in pop — you can feel the love radiating from the crowd at their shows. “Because of the internet I’ve met many of them over the years,” says Blake, smiling. “Most are about our age, not remotely young. But now there’s this whole generation of people about 20.”
He sounds baffled. “I’ve realised that they’re actually the children of the people who bought our records and they’ve grown up listening to us.”
The passage of time has been a favourite theme of Fanclub songs since their debut single in 1990, Everything Flows. But now, as they sing about growing older to an audience experiencing it with them, it’s hard not to be moved by songs such as The Fall, in which McGinley sings: “I light a fire underneath what I was/ I won’t feel sad, only warmed by the loss.”
It’s not easy to explain what the Fanclub themselves get out of being in a band. They aren’t a gang of inseparable mates: Blake lives in Canada with his Canadian wife and although Love and McGinley remain in Glasgow they rarely socialise with each other. Blake never stops smiling during the gig, but Love and McGinley tend to look more pensive than happy while they are playing. Neither are they prolific. Every five years each of the three comes up with four songs (if one member’s track isn’t good enough, the others encourage him until he gets it right) that appear on an album. Then they seem to vanish.
“It looks like that,” says Blake, “but before this album, we disappeared from one another’s lives for only about a year.” They’re always doing something, he says, and in the past three years they’ve played in Spain and Japan and played Bandwagonesque in its entirety at assorted gigs. When they’re not being Teenage Fanclub, they also play with other people, such as Daniel Johnston or the Pastels. But there’s never been a long-term plan.
“The only goal has ever been to make another record and that — not the gang — is the sole focus. We get together only when it feels right.”
The softly spoken McGinley observes that the delay between albums allows time for reflection, the dominant mood of the songs.
“I don’t think we ever saw it as a career,” says Love. Although Bandwagonesque and 1995’s Grand Prix (both on Creation) sold healthily, the band don’t seem to have ever been in it for the cash. McGinley refers to always managing their finances carefully since the years of success, of “eking out a living” and earning “little bursts of money now and then”, whereas Love says being in a position to travel the world is worth more than life’s luxuries. When I meet them, Blake and Love have made their way to the gig in a tiny van crammed with gear — and they’re not staying in a hotel. “I got to take the train,” McGinley says with a smile. “I was looking out of the window and there were two little lambs with their mother in a field. I love that about what we do.”
They started out with almost nothing in the Eighties, taking advantage of the British government’s Enterprise Allowance Scheme to get people off the dole by giving them £40 to start a business — any business. “So you could have a business idea to teach budgies to play a banjo,” says McGinley, “and that was fine.” Government money is still not refused: Blake says their last single, Baby Lee, was the “result of me trying to get £800 out of Dumfries council” for conducting songwriting classes, during which the song was penned.
Blake’s initiative isn’t surprising. “We weren’t one of those bands who waited for the right thing,” says Love. “We just got in the van and did it.” They played an Indian restaurant in Philadelphia and toured the United States in a car with fake plates and a hole in the floor. Their early gigs were riotous, before a policy of greater sobriety led to the exit of the youngest member, drummer Brendan O’Hare, in 1994. They decided it wasn’t really something they wanted to pursue, having seen what it did to former tourmates Nirvana.
A word that peppers their conversation is “legacy”. “We’re putting together things that will last longer than we will and that’s a strange feeling,” says Blake. They are aware of how much they are respected and are careful in their dealings with the business — from which they have more or less removed themselves by self-releasing their albums in the United Kingdom, and only licensing them in the US, so they are not beholden to any label bosses. As McGinley says: “We’re in a position where if people try to fuck with us, they can’t.”
Love’s haunting song, Shock and Awe, has a line that sums up what people love about the Fanclub: “I favour a peaceful life.”
“As a group we’ve never thrived on conflict,” says Love. “We make harmonic music. We’ve always tried to be decent.” —