Back in 1991, Teenage Fanclub released their third album Bandwagonesque. I was 16 at the time and thus, at the perfect age to discover and fall in love with their brand of Scottish power-pop. Truth be told, though, even though SPIN famously named it the best album of 1991 (topping Nirvana‘s Nevermind and My Bloody Valentine‘s Loveless, amongst others), I was a bit underwhelemed. I absolutely loved Gerry Love‘s “Starsign”, the album’s most well-known track and the closest they’ve ever had to a hit single in the U.S., since it more closely resembled the speedy punk rock I was then obsessively listening to than anything else on the album, but most of the rest kind of left me cold.
Thus, I made the mistake of ignoring them for almost two decades despite the vast amounts of critical praise that has been heaped upon them in the time elapsed since then. I tried 1997’s Songs from Northern Britain recently, though, just to see what I’d been missing and it completely blew me away. I found out recently that Thom Yorke called it his favorite album of 1997 and I completely understand why. Since then, I’ve absorbed most of their catalog and even reconnected with Bandwagonesque, which I now view as a half-great album that was just a lead-in to their true breakthrough, 1995’s Grand Prix, 4 years later.
It also doesn’t hurt that their new album Shadows is superb and one of my favorite records of the year. In the more than two decades (!) since they started, the band has aged gracefully and now makes records that have more in common with say, The Pernice Brothers and The Trashcan Sinatras (two other big favorites of mine) than anything resembling the grunge-pop of their early years.
All of this back story is basically just an excuse for why I’d never seen them play live until next month. Boy was the show worth the wait, though. The setlist was just about perfect as they covered the best moments of Bandwagonesque (“The Concept,” “Starsign” and the final encore, “What You Do to Me”), Grand Prix (the amazing “About You” and “Sparky’s Dream”) and especially Songs from Northern Britain. I fully expected them to play “Ain’t That Enough” and “I Don’t Want Control of You”, the album’s two most well-known tracks, but we also got “Start Again” in the main set and I was singing along frantically! Even better, we got Raymond McGinley‘s masterpiece “Can’t Feel My Soul” as the opening track in the first encore. I really didn’t expect them to play that one and I was really pleasantly surprised to hear it in the set.
They also covered lesser known tracks like “I Need Direction” from 2000’s overlooked Howdy!, but a bit disappointly, only played five tracks from Shadows. We didn’t hear “Into the City” or “The Back of My Mind”, my favorites from that record, but we did get “Sometimes I Don’t Need to Believe in Anything,” “Baby Lee,” “When I Still Have Thee” and “Sweet Days Waiting”, which featured a pedal steel guitar!
It also must be said that singer/guitarist Norman Blake‘s exuberance and obvious love of performing in stage, complete with grins and shout-outs to various members of the audience between songs, contrasts nicely with Love and McGinley’s stoic, business-like nature, similar to the contrast between Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle of the Buzzcocks.
I just hope that it doesn’t take them another five years to come back here, as the last time they played here before last night was in 2005 at the much smaller North Star Bar. This was a show that my wife attended and she said that they encored with “Everything Flows” that night. That incredible first single is a particular favorite of hers and on this night, they played a typically great version of it as a closer to the main set. Appropriately, we listened to it several times in a row on the drive home. What a show!
Openers and Merge labelmates Radar Brothers opened the show with a set of Neil Young (or perhaps “Neil Jung”)-esque classic rock that while not phenomenal, was certainly serviceable. I should note that my wife enjoyed their set more than I did.
All of the pictures in this review were taken by Greg Polard and are used with permission.
