From: Charles Holland (briefs@NETCOMUK.CO.UK)


Here's a review of the last Wednesday's Astoria concert, which appeared
in the London Observer 


Pop by Sam Taylor

"Non-hit wonders - but they make boozy, beefy men go all slushy"

Looking around the Astoria in London last Wednesday, one thing quickly
became clear about Teenage Fanclub: they do not have a teenage fanclub.
In fact, their fanclub seems to consist mainly of beefy, boozy
twentysomething men with hearts of slush.

The Fannies, as they are rather indelicately known, are a Scottish
indie-rock group who have been around for most of the Nineties, and have
made five albums of three-minute pop songs with three-part harmonies,
sun-drenched guitars and simple, bittersweet lyrics.

All fairly conventional, but they're unusual in several respects.
First, they have three songwriters - Norman Blake, Gerald Love and
Raymond McGinley, all of them equally good writers and singers, none of
them particuarly good-looking or charismatic, and none of them really
the 'leader'.  Second, they are, against the grain of the times, almost
entirely unironic - which is not to say they're not funny, because they
are, but their love songs (and they don't write much else) are totally
sincere, which makes them seem very old-fashioned and endearing.  And
third, despite many predictions of imminent megastardom, they have
peversely managed to miss every passing gravy train and bandwagon of the
past five years while bands with a fraction of their talent have cracked
the Top 10.

Teenage Fanclub's minority appeal is particuarly hard to fathom as they
are not a 'difficult' band at all: their songs are so beautifully put
together, their voices so liquid and prettily forlorn, that they slip
down almost without noticing.  They're so good at what they do, people
tend to take them for granted.

The only time this didn't happen was with their third album, "Thirteen",
which was - inevitably - the album which was supposed to launch their
career.  They had just had a promising amount of success with
"Bandwagonesque", their colourful, poppy second album, and hopes were
high that they would help put Britain back on the world pop map. (This
was 1993, before anyone had heard of Oasis, and Nirvana were the biggest
band in the world.)  And the Fannies blew it, spectacularly, with a
noisy, fractured, resolutely difficult album.

Their forth album, "Grand Prix", was a gem, but - coming off the back of
"Thirteen" - it failed to make much of an impression commercially.

So now it's 1997, and the Fannies are back with their fifth album,
"Songs From Northern Britain" (out next month on Creation Records),
which, on first hearing, suffers from the oyster syndrome that I
mentioned earlier.  It slips down so easily, you barely register it.
Repeated listenings reveal a confident, heart-warming and occasionally
heartbreaking country-rock album with at least six songs good enough to
be singles.

If "Songs From Northern Britain" has a fault, it is - bizarrely,
considering that the 12 songs are evenly divided between the three
writers - a kind of soporific sameness; they are all mid-tempo, all have
aching but affirmative choruses and sweetly naive lyrics like "Here is a
sunrise/ Ain't that enough?", and all make you want fall asleep on a
grassy hill in Scotland on a sunny day, having drunk a few cans of cold
lager.  The best songs "Can't Feel My Soul", "Mount Everest", "Your Love
is the Place Where I Come From" - are those with a bit more angst.

Anyway, the Fannies are still a very good live band, though they no
longer kick footballs into the crowd or crack incomprehensible Scottish
jokes, as they did in the wild days of their youth.  They've shaved off
the facial hair they sported the last time round, and they play lots of
old songs as well as some new ones with wry introductions "This is an
old flop single" and "This is our new flop single". And, of course, they
play an obscure cover version by a Sixties psychedelic band ("He'd Be A
Diamond" by The Bevis Frond) because that's the sort of guys they are -
a bit anal and a bit wacky.  And all the beefy, boozy twentysomething
men jump around to the upper-mid-tempo songs, and stand on tip-toes
staring dreamily at the stage during the lower-mid-tempo songs, even
though there's not really anything to see - just four clean-shaven men
in T-shirts playing guitars.

None of which gives you any reason to believe that this is going to be
the year Teenage Fanclub finally make it big ... but it does make you
glad to have them around.

[This article was accompanied by a pic of the band, captioned "Teenage
Fanclub: Not a lot to look at.]