Written by Charlie Sweeney
I have grown up on a lot of Teenage Fanclub. Bandwagonesque is easily one of the best albums of the 90s. SPIN even named it the best album of 1991, beating out My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, REM’s Out Of Time, and even Nirvana’s Nevermind. So when I got the chance to chat with Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake, I was ecstatic.
Teenage Fanclub have been around since 1989, and their upcoming album, Nothing Lasts Forever, is their 13th album to-date. Coming out 22nd September via the band’s own PeMa label, the band are accompanying the new album with a seated album tour, coming to Sheffield on 12th November, where they will be playing at The Leadmill. I spoke with Norman, who shares vocal and guitar duties with Raymond McGinley, about Nothing Lasts Forever, the band’s longevity, feelings of retrospection.
Hi Norman, how are you?
Hey Charlie, I am good yeah! I am just making myself a coffee to wake myself up at bit. It’s quite foggy here and it looks really beautiful, so I have just been admiring that!
That’s right, you are no longer based in Glasgow are you?
No, not anymore. We are based in a village, still close to Glasgow, but a lot more in the country. It is really beautiful out here, and I have been able to do a bit of gardening, and can grow some things here. Getting very into my horticulture now!
Ah that sounds lovely- although does this mean the next Teenage Fanclub album is going to have a farming vibe ?!
*laughs* I don’t think so but who knows!
I think it’d work! But on the subject of new stuff, I recently listened to your upcoming album, Nothing Lasts Forever, and it was fantastic. It has a very retrospective sound to it, especially with the name. Would you say that this album represents a more nostalgic, wistful vibe for the band?
Definitely yeah! So Raymond chose the album name, and I think we found the idea funny, that a band who has been around for over 32 years was saying that nothing last forever. But there is definitely a truth to how we were feeling. We have always tended to write very personal songs, and this album is nothing different. Obviously we are getting older and stuff, but I have never wanted to shy away from that, and pretend about being anything different. We wanted to be honest about the realities of getting older, and be a reflection of what we’re going through now. I think it is natural when you reach a certain age you think a bit more about mortality. Don’t get me wrong, the album isn’t exploring death and old age in that way, more just a reflection of where we are right now.
That all makes a lot of sense. I do get what you mean about the name- is the joke extended a bit by the fact you are still called *Teenage* Fanclub?
*laughs* The band name gets funnier the older we get! Genuinely though, like we’ve had it at the border checks in America when they see the name of the band and then look up and see people who are definitely not teenagers! But that’s just the way of band names, really. When you’ve been going on for a while, the band name loses all meaning, it just becomes associated with you. It’s like, look at Oasis- no disrespect to Liam and Noel, they are immensely talented and this is nothing to do with the music, but the name “Oasis” isn’t great- what does it even mean?! But no one cares about the meaning, all they see when they hear Oasis is the fantastic stuff the band has done. You can say the same for The Beatles!
You recorded the music for the new album in 10 days- was this an intense period? Did you find that it had an effect on the sound of the album?
Yeah, so we recorded the album at Rockfield Studios, the famous recording studio which is in the Wye Valley, just outside of Monmouth. We like to isolate ourselves when recording, and it was perfect there, it’s such a fantastic studio. And the Ward family, who run it, are just brilliant. But we didn’t do any pre-production or any sort of preamble to the recording. We hadn’t even played any of the songs we had written to each other beforehand, we just went into the studio and played it there. It was really in-the-moment, and that’s how we like doing things generally. Just capturing the sound there and then, no sort of tweaking or anything. There is obviously a bit of an element on risk with that, it could potentially go wrong or not sound the best, but we quite like that risk. It was really great though, each day you would start with an idea and then by the end of the day you had a full song.
The album has a slightly more nature-influenced sound to it, did recording at Rockfield influence this at all?
The album definitely has a more pastoral sound to it, yeah. As I said, we hadn’t really tweaked any of the songs, the recordings are all very natural. The country around us was massively conducive to the sound of the record. But that is similar to our other albums. We recorded our last album at this industrial studio in Hamburg, and that definitely had a huge effect on the sound of that album.
Teenage Fanclub are quite a prolific band, with this new album being your 13th record. Looking through your discography, you haven’t really taken much of a hiatus between any of your albums. How have you managed to maintain such a sustained creative output? How do you stay, motivated?
Well I think the big thing is that, up until our last album, the song-writing was shared between myself, Raymond McGinley, and Gerard Love. Gerard has left the band now, but I think having three of us writing material meant no one ever felt too creatively exhausted, and allowed us to be a bit more prolific. I think, also, we just find it fun to do. It is still as thrilling to go into the studio now as it was in the beginning. It still has that utterly magical quality to it. Plus, even outside of the band, all my hobbies are music related, so I don’t think there is much escaping it.
So I got into Teenage Fanclub because my dad is an absolutely huge fan, and I knew I couldn’t very well interview you without letting him know and seeing if he wanted to ask something, and he had one question for you:
Do you agree with eminent musicologists (me) that the first verse of The Concept is the greatest lyric ever in the pop/rock genre?
*laughs* Of course I do! *laughs*
That song is actually a weird one because, as I’ve said, usually I tend to write more personal lyrics. However, that song was a very off-the-cuff narrative song I totally made up in the studio, one day as we were recording. You never know what’s going to happen with the songs you write, especially critically. I never have any idea how it’s going to be received. I am never worried or nervous, but it is a weird feeling, definitely.
Final question for you Norman, are you looking forward to playing Sheffield? I definitely have hugely excited for your gig!
Definitely! We absolutely love The Leadmill, I think we must have played it a dozen times already. It is one of those venues which you just have to play on a tour. It’s a disgrace what is happening to it, I hope it manages to survive it because it is really great.
Nothing Lasts Forever, Teenage Fanclub’s upcoming album, is out September 22nd. You can listen to their newest single, ‘Foreign Land’, here.
[Feature Image Photo Credit: Donald Milne]
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