I had a brief moment of contemplating writing a 33 1/3 about Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque when I saw the recent open call. I won’t because I don’t think I have time or energy in the middle of pandemic uncertainty and what it means for the day job, and also because of one of the things that’s so beautiful about the album: its (sometimes deceptive) simplicity of music and lyrics means that it’s quite difficult to imagine writing something that isn’t very self-involved. So here’s a few scraps.
The opening track, ‘The Concept’, begins in a wail of feedback before the lyrics come in on top of a reverberating, distorted G chord. The opening progression of the top line melody (G – F# – E) is the same as The Beatles’s ‘All You Need is Love’, but this is a love story rewritten for the late twentieth century. “She wears denim wherever she goes / Says she’s gonna get some records by the Status Quo / Oh yeah” croons Norman Blake, looking at an incongruous object of his affections. By 1991 there’s not the same sense of utopia as in that 1967 TV broadcast. This is a realistic love, in which the woman ‘don’t do drugs / but she does the pill’. The tone is closer to the novelists from not so far away in Scotland who were beginning to cut their teeth in the early 1990s like Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner.
Listening to the band playing the outro to ‘The Concept’ at the Teenage Fanclub show at Manchester Academy 2 in 2010, I remember having a profound physical reaction. Hairs standing up on the back of my neck. Choking back a sob at the beauty of the interplay between the harmonies and Raymond McGinlay’s guitar solo (I am a pathological non-cryer).
‘What You Do To Me’: five chords (depending on how you count it), four lines of lyrics. Cyclical, crystalline power-pop perfection.
I can never quite decide whether ‘Star Sign’ is for or against superstition. Great song and riff though.
There’s something about the F Aug chord which makes the chord progression in ‘Metal Baby’ so seductive…
‘Alcoholiday’ is one of those classic love/drugs (love (of) drugs) songs (see also: The La’s, ‘There She Goes’). But it also explores the uncertainty of the aftermath, lying awake questioning everything in the silence and darkness after a skinful, wondering whether you did anything really shameful. The bridge is the heart of the song, and as Gerry Love sings about being ‘led a course you can’t command’, and concluding that ‘Baby, I’ve been fucked already’ it’s difficult to know whether he’s talking about sex, love, intoxication, addiction, outsiderdom, unemployment, political disenfranchisement, or an unholy combination of them all.
‘Is This Music?’ Bringing joy to shoegaze by pastiche for nearly thirty years.
Academics Are People Too 