Bandwagonesque at 30

My battered and worn 30-year copy of Bandwagonesque

30-years ago I was a 15-year old developing a healthy obsession for music. Raiding my parents record collection, buying the NME and Melody Maker every week, listening to Peel occasionally, the Evening Session a lot and making trips to Missing Records in Glasgow or Impulse Records in Hamilton. 

But arguably my biggest musical education stemmed from conversations and mixtapes at school. I distinctly remember a tape my friend Grant Mitchell made me containing Everything Flows and Don’t Need A Drum by Teenage Fanclub.

Living in the Lanarkshire backwater of Carluke, I was intrigued that this band from Bellshill, a 20-minute car/train ride away, were generating such a buzz. Then all of a sudden there were new singles; the blitz of Star Sign and the impeccable The Concept. Teenage Fanclub were a band happening NOW! I was falling for The Beatles and there is never a bad time to fall for The Beatles, but I was 30-years too late. I'd fallen heavily for the Stone Roses, but I was playing catch up on all their singles and I was 2-years too late, 2-years too young to get into them at their peak.

Bandwagonesque might have been the first album I really looked forward to buying upon release as a teenager, certainly the first from a band so close to home.

This wasn't Manchester, London or Seattle. This was 4 guys from Bellshill, just up the road from me in Carluke. They were playing London, going to America, in the NME, the Melody Maker, recording a Peel Session, they were on MTV and December was even background music for a hot air balloon feature on Blue Peter!

Teenage Fanclub felt like the perfect band, at just the perfect time and Bandwagonesque was the perfect album. They felt real, within touching distance.

Why was it the right album? For all the reasons it still is.

The humour, or at times just blatant cheek. The star kissing harmonies, the glorious guitar sounds, the brilliant use of swearing in Alcoholiday, the kind of cool but also kind of sh*tty sleeve. 3 different songwriters and singers, a crazy drummer. The innocent lyrics in songs like Sidewinder  ‘saw you there with long blonde hair, eyes of blue, oh baby, I love you’ that fitted in so perfectly for young teenage boys (like me) who fell in love with a different girl every day.

Yeah Teenage Fanclub were special, Bandwagonesque was special. They both still are.

The intro lyrics to opening song The Concept still make me smile and tell you so much about the bands humour;

She wears denim wherever she goes

Says she’s gonna get some records by the Status Quo

Oh yeah, oh yeah

I could be jumping around my bedroom singing yeah, yeah, yeah to The Beatles or oh yeah, oh yeah to Teenage Fanclub. The closing extended outro of The Concept gets better with age. The guitars, the harmonies, I'd be happy if it went on forever.

The riff of Satan always makes me reminisce about the band breaking into it live, the chiming guitar of December and Gerry Love singing she don’t even care, but I would die for her love struck a chord as a teenager, now it’s like a symphony, just perfect. 

What You Do To Me is 2-minutes of guitar pop perfection. So simple, so sublime, so pure, so perfect for fitting on to either side of a C90 mixtape you were making for your friend, or to now bring a burst of sunshine to a playlist. McGinley’s guitar on I Don’t Know mesmerises, Star Sign shimmers beautifully and bursts into life in a way that still makes me want to pogo and I don't think I'll ever lose that feeling.

Flip to side 2, Metal Baby still makes me smile, Pet Rock and the aforementioned Sidewinder echo of young innocent love and infatuation, while Alcoholiday is another song that ages like a fine wine, the guitars sound more glorious, Blake singing ‘there are things I want to do, but I don’t know if they will be with you’ tugs on heartstrings. And the last 80 odd seconds of guitar - swoon! 

Guiding Star is so blissfully dreamy and Is This Music? allows you to get lost in the hypnotic riffs and answer - yeah, yeah it is music. And it’s by Teenage Fanclub, my favourite band in 1991 and my favourite band in 2021. Still creating brilliant albums with guitars, harmonies and full of songs to soundtrack my life.

Teenage Fanclub in Livingston

Guest blog by Mark Hannah

SONGS FROM NORTHERN LIVINGSTON

Teenage Fanclub at the Howden Park Centre, Thursday 25^th of October 2018

The anticipation surrounding Teenage Fanclub’s upcoming Creation Years tour has been pretty massive. Taking over venues for three nights in a row playing all the Creation albums cover to cover with some b-sides and rarities thrown in for good measure is a brilliant prospect. With over 70 songs being rehearsed with two former drummers though, seemingly quite a task. However, judging from the warm up show in Livingston on Thursday night, the band are in wonderful shape and seeing them all together at once is joyous, a feeling which will only swell come the first of three nights at the Glasgow Barrowlands on Sunday.

The Howden Park Centre was a perfect venue for this. Intimate 300 seated theatre in West Lothian. Thankfully, I was one of the very first people to phone the box office the morning they went on sale, just a week before, and bagged a ticket at the very middle of the front row. Nobody was really sure what to expect in terms of a set list, and seeing the evening was split into two with a short interval in between, it only added to the speculation. 

Seeing George Borowski pre-show tuning things up and adjusting things never fails to make me smile. They soon emerge and clatter their way into Thirteen’s “Hang On” and songs from side A of that record were plentiful. Poor Brendan on drums was jokingly ready to expire after an explosive, quick fire “Radio” with Dave and Frances present on stage adding keys and lap-steels to really enhance the on stage sound. 

The elephant in the room is of course Gerry’s departure from the band following these UK Creation dates, and his vocal harmonising with Norman is so glorious and uplifting that it brings his now limited time with the band back into sharp focus. Nevertheless, he takes centre stage with a green telecaster, “Painted by us ourselves” Norman kids, and eases his way into Bandwagonesque’s “December.” Act one is a healthy mixture of Bandwagonesque and Thirteen and I was really happy to see “I Don’t Know” thrown in there, too. Norman was interjecting about his favourite TV shows again, reminiscent of the Shepherd’s Bush gig last year. 

Brendan’s drumming is fast, sharp and showboating, here we see a man who was clearly a stand-up comic in another life with his on stage patter, regularly leaving Norman and Gerry laughing during songs. They conclude with a rousing “The Concept”, with a select few along from me in the front row trying to encourage the crowd to stand, which admittedly I would have loved, but with great power comes great responsibility, and having already gained a notorious reputation on the Fanclub circuit for an Edinburgh stage invasion two years back, I didn’t want to be “that young dick down the front”, so stayed firmly in my seat.

After a quick interval of toilet trips and restocking the cans of Guinness, back down the front for Act Two. This presented a bit of a broader mix of Grand Prix, Songs From Northern Britain and Howdy! 

Paul Quinn takes the place of Brendan on drums and the sound in this small theatre is genuinely fantastic, and the way the band all gel with so many on stage at once is brilliant to watch, even from a non-musicians perspective like mine. Particular highlights are “I Need Direction” which sounded unbelievable, and “Accidental Life.” This all proving to be a tantalising taste of what’s to come on the upcoming tour so I shall not divulge and dissect anything too greatly. 

Norman is the jack of all trades with some mighty fine whistling during “Mellow Doubt” and the evening closes with a triumphant “Don’t Look Back” asserting how brilliant a singer Gerry really is. All in all, this is exactly everything you want from a wee, intimate warm up show; plenty of banter, an adoring little crowd and a nice healthy spread of album tracks. All roads lead to the Barrowlands in just over 48 hours time as I type this sentence, hence why I’ll keep this one short and sweet, where all these brilliant records will get the cover to cover live plays that they so thoroughly deserve. It’ll be a brilliant and quite emotional few days for sure, but I wouldn’t expect anything less from my favourite band in the whole world.

See you in McChuills on Monday beforehand, Fanclub.

Mark Hannah.