In 2018, bassist Gerry Love departedTeenage Fanclub(TFC) after 29 years, much to fans’ despair. It’s perhaps a little romantic to see The First Sight as his parting gift, but it’s certainly an impressive closing statement of his songwriting talent: an intricate mesh of guitars, a buoyant horn section, and a typically stunning tune.
Most artists called upon to pad out a best-of collection with a few new tracks – by a major label about to drop them – would understandably offer something substandard. Not TFC. Driven by an unexpectedly tricky rhythm, Did I Say is folky, beautiful and a noticeable diversion from their usual style.
Bandwagonesque’s follow-up Thirteen gets a bad rap, not least from the band themselves – its recording was fraught – but 30-odd years on, it sounds better than its reputation suggests. Escher certainly smooths out Bandwagonesque’s rougher edges, but its drawing of a muddled relationship is no less charming for that.
From its title down, TFC’s most recent album Nothing Lasts Forever conjured up a kind of twilit optimism: a band staring down their 60s, slightly bruised by life but facing forward. Final track, I Will Love You sums the mood up: slowly shimmering atmospherics that eventually burst into striking, warm vocal harmonies. A joy.
The arrangement of Your Love Is the Place Where I Come From is almost wilfully understated – for most of its three minutes, you could be eavesdropping on a rehearsal – but its no-frills simplicity allows the songwriting, a sigh of contentment in musical form, to shine all the more clearly.
TFC aren’t famous for brooding, which makes the sombre tone of Cells all the more striking: the muted take on their sound perfectly fits a set of lyrics haunted by a very middle-aged sense of ageing and loss. And the lengthy acoustic guitar coda is just exquisite.
Before their perplexing second album, The King – seven grungy instrumental originals and covers of Pink Floyd’s Interstellar Overdrive and Madonna’s Like a Virgin – TFC released one-off single God Knows It’s True. It’s solo-heavy and slacker sloppy but crucially also a fabulous song.
Initially, TFC were a boozy, chaotic proposition, particularly live, but they proved surprisingly adept at growing up in public. Planets alchemises an unpromising subject – relocating to the countryside with your growing family – into musical gold. Sweet, but not cloying, there’s something really moving about its string-laden sense of contentment.
You couldn’t miss the influence of Big Star on Bandwagonesque – it even featured a quote from their lyrics on the cover – but nowhere was it deployed more spectacularly than on Alcoholiday, a glorious, harmony-laden depiction of uncertainty over a blossoming relationship: “Went to bed, but I’m not ready / Baby I’ve been fucked already.”
It wasBandwagonesque producer Don Flemingwho first suggested TFC concentrate on harmony vocals, but nowhere in their catalogue were they deployed to more euphoric effect than on the second single from Songs from Northern Britain, which is furthermore blessed with the kind of tune that isn’t ripped off from anywhere yet sounds instantly familiar.
The chaotic early Fanclub had their moments, but the release of The Concept introduced the TFC that Kurt Cobain called “the best band in the world”: the guitars are still unruly with feedback, but the melodies are amped up to match them, the vocal harmonies are luscious, the lyrics smart and witty.
The idea that none of the singles from Grand Prix made the Top 30 seems absolutely confounding: how could anything as self-evidently brilliant, as insanely tuneful as Neil Jung – romantic disaster plus incredible chorus plus fantastic (and suitably Neil Young-ish) guitar solo – not have been a huge hit? What waswrongwith people?
Thegreat TFC deep cut, Broken was inexplicably relegated to a B-side. An acoustic guitar and organ-driven masterpiece of beautiful, mournful simplicity – the lyrics feature just one line, endlessly repeated – it has subsequently also evaded streaming services. If you don’t know it, seek it out and luxuriate in its divine melancholy.
Packaged in a terrible sleeve and released by an indifferent major label to a decidedly muted response, 2000’s Howdy! tends to get overlooked. But if it’s not quite as good as its two predecessors (Songs from Northern Britain and Grand Prix), it’s still pretty great, as demonstrated by opener I Need Direction: unassuming but utterly delightful, thick with Beach Boys harmonies.
By the time of 2010’s Shadows, it was clear that TFC were refining their sound rather than radically overhauling it, but they could still surprise you with the sheer quality of their songwriting. The Norman Blake-penned Baby Lee – lyrical misery, impossibly sunny music – is a triumph.
Apparently, Love’s favourite among the songs he wrote for Teenage Fanclub, the autumnal Don’t Look Back builds wonderfully from reflective verses into a monster chorus. The advice said chorus doles out, and the acoustic version on the Teenage Fanclub Have Lost It EP, are both worth heeding.
Debut album A Catholic Education is messier and noisier than the rest of TFC’s output: a decisive, Crazy Horse-influenced, instrumental jam-laden break with the members’ C86 pasts. But, Everything Flows – twentysomething ennui with a wonderful, wistful melody beneath the guitar overload – pointed the way ahead, an early song as good as any they’ve written.
Star Sign initially sounds like a Sonic Youth-y drone experiment – over a minute of beat-less monotone guitar – before exploding into life: an irresistible tune built around the kind of descending-but-uplifting chord sequences that helped define glam rock, and a lyric that keeps indifferently shrugging “big deal” in a way that’sveryearly 90s.
Songs from Northern Britain’s jewel, and – perhaps – TFC’s essence distilled: plangent guitars, sunlit harmonies, a melody the Fifth Dimension-era Byrds would have been proud of, life’s simple pleasures unfashionably hymned at the height of Britpop’s gruesome cokey grandiosity (“here is a sunrise – ain’t that enough?”). What a lovely song.
The songs at the top of this list are all so great, ranking them is mostly just a matter of personal preference, but the highlight of Grand Prix clinches it on the basis of its sheer ebullience – enough to pull any listener out of a gloomy mood – and its absolutely preposterous abundance of hooks: the main riff, the moment in the verses where the vocal melody soars upwards, the solo guitar motif that introduces the chorus, all three parts of the chorus. It’s essentially an album’s worth of incredible tunes crammed into three minutes – not a second of them wasted – and it soundseffortless.