A Call From Northern Britain

Rip It Up, Issue 244, 1 December 1997, Page 16

A Call From Northern Britain

An Interview with

teenage fanolvb s Norman Blake A

Band rehearsals and a recent tour of the States with Radiohead had cancelled this scheduled phone call on at least two other occasions. Now, back home in Glasgow, Norman Blake has time to take stock of the steady rise of his band of quintessential pop craftsmen, Teenage Fanclub, and to rave over Thom Yorke’s sceptics of future life, Radiohead. “I think they’re amazing,” he enthuses in Glaswegian. “To be honest, before we played with

them I’d never really heard them. I’d only heard a couple of their singles, but since we’ve played live with them I’ve really been converted. They’re a really great live band and we got on well with them too.”

And the word is that Teenage Fanclub don’t ndulge in the excesses of the road. “We pace ourselves. We’ve been together .ince 1989 so you get used to it. We always try to )lay well and do good shows, and the way to do hat is to look after yourself. When I go on tour I ry to get off the bus as much as possible and lave a look around the place. We’re not elf indulgent in the sense that ve’U go out and get drunk ■very night. We do that vhen we’re at

lome,” he aughs.

I Club History Unassuming, unaffected nice guys — that’s the way the press have reported the Fanclub off and on the road And there’s no reason to doubt that assessment; even over a 12,000 mile phone connection you can tell that Blake is an affable, natural character. A moderate Celtic supporter in his spare time, he’s surrounded in the band by what he calls ■ “Celtic fanatics” like Gerry Love and Paul Quinn. Remember their first album was christened A Catholic Education, an obvious signpost to their religious and football affiliations. The band are also great Glasgow fans, remaining in the city when other natives like the Jesus and Mary Chain and Primal Scream have moved to London. Blake believes that in rock *n’

roll terms Glasgow has never been better. “There are a lot of bands in the city at the moment. There’s more bands, record labels and clubs than I can ever remember. There’s great bands from Mogwai to Belle and Sebastian who’re definitely worth checking out. They’re a bit like Nick Drake, but Stuart’s [Murdoch] lyrics are quirky, pretty funny.” The current crop of stunning Glasgow bands is a continuation of a rock ancestry that’s been passed on since 1980, when the Postcard label was founded and released the likes of Josef K and Orange Juice. “Before Postcard, bands went to London to

become successful,” continues Blake. “But Postcard bands stayed here and the label refused to move to London. A lot of bands started up like the Pastels, and that developed into the Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream, and ourselves. A few years after Postcard there was a club that was called Splash One that was run by Bobby Gillespie and Alan McGhee. They had some great bands, and all the new Creation bands played there so things developed and it gave people confidence to

stay here and make music.” Listening to the Teenage Fanclub, you can tell that they’re the fans of the best in pop music, and whether it’s the Byrds,

Beatles and Beach Boys and the roughedU P

guitars of the best garage, their tastes are impeccable

“We’ve listened to all sorts of things but most of the things I listen to have melodies. Whei

it comes to writing, I try to write melodies and for me that’s what a great song is. But we’ll have a go at anything, for example our second album The King, was just a collection of songs that we jammed together in the studio when we were drunk. It was good fun. If Carnival of Light was Paul McCartney’s experimental record, then The King was ours. Ultimately it’s not difficult to make difficult music, it’s easy and we’d rather write great melodies that are timeless, it’s much harder to do that. “Listening to great records whether they’re by the Beatles, 18 Wheeler, or Stereolab, or whoever, that inspires me to go and write.”

And speaking of 18 Wheeler. This was Sean Jackson’s band from just outside Aberdeen, and they had a second album, Formanka, that was a crackling piece of pop inspiration. They released a third album last year that got panned for its dance influences.

“They’re a band that have been overlooked, Sean is really talented,” Blake agrees. “With that last album they’d been listening to a lot of dance music but there were still some great songs there

Sometimes people just accept received wisdom about certain records and the received wisdom

about the last i» Wheeler was that it was crap. And everybody decided that it was crap without even listening to it. “Sadly, most critics are afraid to be honest. I’m sure a lot of critics were scared to give it a good review as everyone else hated it. People should stick their necks out if they like something and a lot of people don’t in this country.” This received wisdom theory has also worked against the Teenage Fanclub. Their fourth album, Thirteen, the follow up to the universally adored Bandwagonesque, received a general backlash that ignored many of the album’s sublime songs.

“What happened with that album was, we’d been on tour for a long time and it took us eight months to make the album, and there was a really bad atmosphere in the

group at the time as it was just

just do it.” Songs From Northern Britain is another excellent example of the intuitive pop muses of McGinley/Love/Blake at work. Right from the stark beauty of the Cairngorms on the sleeve (the result of travelling around the highlands with Face photographer Donald Milne) to the vague generality of the title, this is a setting designed to let the songs speak for themselves. And they do. “We’re happy with the album,” Blake explains. “We spent a lot more time embellishing it and we thought a bit more about the instrumentation. We’ve got all sorts of stuff in there — mandalas, Rolf Harris, stylophones, or whatever. Maybe the album takes a bit longer to get intae than Grand Prix but once you get in and hear all the nuances then maybe it’s more satisfying. It’s definitely more satisfying for me, I prefer it to the last one.” There are more harmonies on it than on your previous albums and this gives the album a more unified feel.

before we parted company with Brendan our old drummer. And me and Gerry did a few interviews where we said we didn’t like the album because we were sick of the songs. We weren’t saying we didn’t like the songs but we panned the album ourselves and we got a lot of bad reviews after that.

“We spent a lot of time on the harmonies and it’s something that we do quite well that a lot of bands don’t bother doing. Maybe that’s made the sound more uniform, and we’ve been playing together for so long and as songwriters you influence each other. But we still write independently although often our songs aren’t finished, they may just be melodies without lyrics and we’ll work on the arrangements a bit more in the rehearsal room. We tend to leave the harmony stuff until we’re in the studio and we try to be spontaneous when we’re doing that, it’s more exciting that way. “And having three songwriters makes it much easier, so there isn’t the pressure on one person, as nowadays you have to write about 25 songs for an album, as you have to write the album, then the B-sides, and then tracks to give away on NME tapes or whatever.”

To specific songs, and Gerry Love does another Neil Young pastiche in ‘Mt. Everest’. “He’s done a couple in the ‘Down By the River’ tempo, like ‘Gene Clark’ from Thirteen. He likes Neil Young but most of his songs are quite uptempo actually, and it’s only every three years that he’ll write a Neil Young.” And he wrote the irresistible ‘Speed of Light’, one of the best songs and it’s left to conclude the album.

‘We’ve done that twice — Thirteen wasn’t well received and then Grand Prix got amazing reviews, and now Northern Britain, which has had some good reviews but a lot of bad ones too. Everytime you make an album people think is brilliant, whether they’re right or wrong, it’s difficult to follow it as people get so used to a record. If I buy a record by a group and really get intae it, I always find it harder to get intae their next one as I’m so used to the one before.”

“We think a lot about pacing albums. Record companies like you to put singles at the start and they don’t care what comes after that. We try to sequence albums, we see an album as a body of work, we don’t see it as a vehicle for singles. We tried a few variations but we liked ‘Speed of Light’ to close the album because it starts with a drum thing and ends with a single piano note, which is kind of like a joke on the Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’.”

Only A Northern Song

It’s always amusing to see so many bands contorting themselves to be different. Rock ‘n’ roll has long been full of sub-genres of people searching for originality in style when songs are still the real substance of talent. For the three songwriters in Teenage Fanclub this is a truism, something innate that doesn’t need to be explained. “It’s something we don’t think about much,” Blake said about their songwriting, “we

Songs From Northern Britain reached Number Three in the British charts. It’s good to see nice guys almost getting first for a change. “We’re really pleased at that, and it still leaves us somewhere to go as well,” Blake laughs. “Hopefully we’ll get the next one to Number One. It’s great that we can still have a reasonable amount of success at this point of our careers.”

GEORGE KAY