Back online at last!…I’ve never met the blokes in Teenage Fanclub, yet they understand me better than some people who’ve known me all my life. They love all the things I love: Tuneful, romantic songs; hooks that send the imagination soaring; guitars deployed as elemental building blocks; ethereal West Coast-style harmonies; and reverence for the West Coast sound more generally. Their music is quite simply joy, joy and more joy. And their story is inspirational. They were the wrong band at the wrong time, arriving on the scene during the first wave of Nirvanamania. Remember that bleak period in music? The cheerless, flannel-clad Aryans from places where the sun never shines, playing their grim music, heavier and blacker than the sludge at the bottom of your coffee cup. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time… Bandwagonesque, Teenage Fanclub’s breakthrough third album, got lumped in with all those unhappy purveyors of the grunge. And since grunge was the type of corporate ‘alternative’ music charting at that moment, the record company asked them to make follow-up records that sounded like Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains, as if there wasn’t already more than enough of that shit to go around! But the band didn’t want to make those types of records and refused, so the record company didn’t promote them and relegated them to several years in commercial limbo. But during this lost period, Teenage Fanclub made two really great power pop records. It’s too bad only hardcore members of the Fanclub’s fan club bought Thirteen and Grand Prix because both records sparkle and shine. What comes across when you listen to them as much as anything is that the guys absolutely love what they’re doing and want nothing more than to stay true to their vision of the pop life. And everything they’ve put out since then has been terrific as well, especially Songs From Northern Britain, a record that finds them at their unrelentingly mid-tempo, Byrds and Beach Boys and Neil Young worshipping peak, with lots of tambourines and shakers thrown in for just the right amount of additional adornment. My only quibble with them is that they have a fair number of songs that are too long by at least a minute, sometimes two. This is where their Neil Young fetish perhaps does them a disservice. I mean, I love a great rusty guitar solo as much as the next guy, but a song doesn’t need more than one of them, and the one solo per song needn’t go on ad infinitum. Remember that there are many sides to Neil Young, one of which is the amazingly intuitive melodic sense he has, and the way he can make a guitar’s sound count for more than technical skill. I would call this Neil’s ‘feel’, and it’s certainly something that can and should be emulated by pop bands, to the extent that emulating feel is even possible. But then there’s also the side of Neil that’s given to stretched out jamming, the Like a Hurricane and Cowgirl in the Sand side, which can also be thought of as the hescher side and the anti-pop side. Teenage Fanclub sometimes sound like they’re attracted to both these aspects of Young’s musical personality, and I think their songs would be even stronger if the jettisoned the latter. But this is really a minor complaint, and if you’ve been reading me with any regularity at all then you know that it’s very much my cross to bear. I just don’t have the time or attention span for songs that go on foreeeeeeverrrrrr. They reach a certain windy threshold where they’re not really songs anymore, they’re just zzzzzzzzz, if that makes sense. Ironically, there’s a track on Thirteen called Gene Clark that is, if anything, the opposite of its namesake, with five minutes of Cortez the Killer-ish jamming before they even get to the first verse, by which time I’m bored to tears and ready for a bathroom break. But these lapses take very little away from the love I have for Teenage Fanclub, those Scotsmen who hold a deep and abiding attachment to California as an aural concept. They’ve never lost faith in the notion that guitars and harmonies will set you free. They didn’t become the cash registers the suits initially thought they might be, but I saw them live once and I can attest to the amazingly warm and mutually devoted connection they have with their fans. Maybe it’s the repressed hippie in me coming out, but I’ll take that reciprocal human connection over a Platinum selling record any day of the week. It’s a beautiful thing when a band carries the pop life torch as lovingly as Teenage Fanclub. My life is so much better for having their music in it…
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