It’s questionable whether – when Raymond McGinley sold his fridge and Norman Blake cadged £200 from his parents back in 1989 – Teenage Fanclub knew quite what they were on to as they convened in Pet Sounds, Glasgow, to record their debut single. Blake and McGinley, formerly of the Boy Hairdressers, had recruited bassist Gerard Love only a fortnight earlier at a Dinosaur Jr gig, and Everything Flows mimics that band’s appealingly slack guitar squall. Yet this plaintive ode to the passing of time (“See you get older every year / But you don’t change, I don’t notice you changing”) seems to mature like a fine wine. It even survived a colourless drum‘n’bass interpretation by Saint Etienne in 1993.

After the debut A Catholic Education – instrumentals and vocal songs mixed up winningly – and the instantly deleted and tossed-out The King, 1991 was the year things started to come together for Teenage Fanclub. Rather miraculously, over 12 months that included Nevermind, Loveless and Screamadelica, Bandwagonesque – their first album on Geffen in the States, with a bag of cash on its sardonic cover – made No 1 in Spin magazine’s albums of the year list. (Years later, the band confessed that a fellow Scot, former Orange Juice drummer Steven Daly, was Spin’s senior writer, which might have been a factor.) But it wasn’t just the critics who loved them. Kurt Cobain called Teenage Fanclub “the best band in the world”; a couple of years later, Liam Gallagher was more measured, calling them the “second best band in the world” (after Oasis, of course). The playful lurch of The Concept embodied their newfound focus: equal parts bubblegum and Big Star, and with an extended guitar coda for anyone pining for the grungy sound of A Catholic Education.



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Hard to imagine, now that they’re greying at the temples and invariably decked out onstage in sensible pullovers, but there was once a time when the Fanclub were an altogether messier proposition. No song evokes those distant days of fans pelting them with Buckfast labels and – for some reason – bacon like Alcoholiday’s hungover slouch. It should jangle but instead it has a fuzzy head, with more than a touch of Alex Chilton’s weary fatalism (“What I’ve done I’ll leave behind me / I don’t want a soul to find me”). There’s a recording on YouTube of the Big Star man singing Alcoholiday with the Fannies. While you might think it would make our boys giddy, it’s Chilton who sounds in his element.

How far the band had come since The Concept, when they were writing in-jokingly about their friends going to shows (and buying records by “the Status Quo”), can be measured by this, the centrepiece of 1995’s Grand Prix. Now the self-same muckers who used to tread on their winklepickers at Glasgow’s Splash One indie night had, like them, achieved a modicum of fame and notoriety. So while Blake’s Tears riffs touchingly on Alan McGee’s breakdown (he was fond of saying that great records were “tears, man”), Neil Jung turns its cod-psychological eye on another old mate, Duglas T Stewart of BMX Bandits (“You were changing, didn’t want to stay the same / Rearranging, dropped a letter from your name”). The roots of the song lie in an unfortunate incident between Stewart and an ex-girlfriend (though Blake spares us most of the details), and while it lurches along with the same Zuma-era Neil Young gait established on The Concept, there’s further maturity in producer David Bianco’s snappy stop-starts and that joyous wall of McGinley guitars.

McGinley was something of an iceberg onstage at Teenage Fanclub shows. He could be smiling sweetly in his crew-neck and at the same time summon a maelstrom of controlled noise, all while barely moving his fingers along the frets. It’s a paradox present in his songs, too, most notably Can’t Feel My Soul, which keeps straining at its leash with sclerotic bursts of guitar. Also on Songs from Northern Britain (1997), McGinley – clearly enjoying a songwriting moment around this time – served up a love song for the ages. Blake’s harmonies on the chorus – “My cares slip away when I see your face … When I’m on my own I’m lost in space” – could melt the coldest heart, while those five glockenspiel notes have provided the band with their one enduring piece of stagecraft over the years, as Blake struggles to play them in the right order (clearly harder than it looks).

Of course, McGinley’s great love song is something of an anomaly; his stock in trade is surly melancholy with deftly deployed sweary bits. But Blake? He could knock them off in his sleep, and none better than this sparkly charmer from Northern Britain. Opening with birdsong and a jaunty banjo, it turns into a whole celestial choir of Blakes offering the affirmation that “The very heart and soul of you / Are places I want to see”. And who wouldn’t want to be told “Every day I look in a different face / The feeling’s getting stronger with every embrace”? He even throws in an exultant key change at the end, the soppy old sod. Sorry, there’s something in my eye.

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Despite boasting three fine songwriters, it sometimes seems like each of Blake, Love and McGinley’s creations is somewhat self contained. So the structure here – a typically glum McGinley verse leavened by a breezy counterpoint from Blake – is a hugely pleasant surprise. From 2000’s Howdy!, that album’s key stylistic innovation, the keyboard remains prominent, played by Finlay McDonald. They even tried to play a show without guitars around this point (at Camden Underworld – they gave up after one song). The keys offer an extra layer to be peeled away when we get to the song’s coda, which sees McGinley reduce everything to the whispered mantra: “All my life I felt so uptight now it’s all all right.” It’s a similar trick to the one pulled on the fan-favourite B-side Broken, from 1997 (which fails to make the cut only on account of comprising just six words). Both are tailor-made to be the last track on your mixtapes, indie softies.

Whether it was the realisation that there had been another Norman Blake (from Chattanooga), knocking out bluegrass since 1954, or the unexpectedly poignant rustic repurposing of Everything Flows on 1995’s Teenage Fanclub Have Lost It EP, there’s no question that Blake (the Glasgow one) has spent much of the last 20 years feeling the need to get it together in the country. Songs From Northern Britain’s Planets had another distinct whiff of log cabin (“We’re moving out to the country / Into the Highlands / To look for a home,” he enthused, though still residing in Glasgow at the time), but Did I Say goes the full Maggie May. The pick of three new songs on the band’s 2003 best-of, it has a slippery melody, a lyric that hints at loss (“Are you waiting for me?”), and a plaintive fiddle where the guitars might once have been. It’s a polished nugget of Celtic cosmopolitan, the sort of thing Elliott Smith got an Oscar nomination for, and further proof that – if age-appropriate indie was the destination – Teenage Fanclub never lost it at all.

For 2005’s Man-Made, the band travelled to Chicago to record with John McEntire of Tortoise. As on Howdy!, this resulted in some meticulous arrangements, although Cells is anomalously simple. Over a folky acoustic guitar lick quite unlike anything else in the Fanclub canon, Blake returns to the subject of mortality, this time with a wry biologist’s eye, casting us a collection of cells, decaying and breaking down “ever onwards to the grave”. The multi-tracked guitars in the break are reminiscent of Bandwagonesque’s much-loved shoegaze pastiche Is This Music?, used as Match of the Day’s Goal of the Month music for the 1996/97 season (though it’s not just the sight of Attilio Lombardo in a Crystal Palace shirt that suddenly makes that seem a very long time ago).

Fittingly for a chap with a degree in urban and regional planning, Gerry Love has been writing impressionistic odes to the city since 1994’s Discolite. Fallen Leaves on Man-Made is another beauty. But none are quite so sprightly as this, from 2010’s Shadows, which sees him “taking a ride on subway train / Do you feel more alive when you get back out again?” Packed with references to mist, blossom and, um, cooling towers, its minimal verses are abruptly gatecrashed by a lush orchestral chorus that’s akin to stepping from that carriage into blinding late-summer sunshine. With gossamer light harmonies over Francis McDonald’s drum fills, it could almost be the Carpenters jamming with the Who. Outlandish, but then not many bands can say they have collaborated with both Jad Fair and De La Soul. Clearly, the Fanclub have a lot more going for them than a nice line in knitwear.