TEENAGE FANCLUB

AS GLASGOW’S FINEST RETURN WITH THEIR ELEVENTH ALBUM, ENDLESS ARCADE, WE ASK CO-FOUNDING GUITARISTS NORMAN B LAKE AND RAYMOND MC GINLEY ABOUT SONGWRITING, STOLEN GUITARS, CHANNELLING ROBERT FRIPP AND WHY THEIR WORKING RELATIONSHIP IS “LIKE THE CHUCKLE BROTHERS”…

- Jamie Dickson & Henry Yates

Since their formation in 1989, the thumbnail sketch of Teenage Fanclub has been a band for the good times, trading in blissed-out, beatific, Byrdsian jangle, with vocal harmonies so close you couldn’t fit a plectrum between them. But the Glaswegian group once dubbed “the best band in the world” by Kurt Cobain would never have sustained a three-decade career, nor commanded such a loyal army of fans, without the brains and bite that temper those innately optimistic chord voicings.

Tracked live at Hamburg’s Clouds Hill Recordings, eleventh album, Endless Arcade, finds the band walking the same tightrope, with co-founding guitarists and songwriters Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley evoking autumn sunshine from their instruments, on songs that are touched by sorrow, loss and the hand of mortality. “You go through life,” says McGinley, “and everything is going to fall apart. But it’s not so bad.”

Endless Arcade is such an evocative album title. What made you choose it?

Norman Blake: “I just liked the sound of those two words together, and also the song Endless Arcade, by Raymond, which talks about our journey through life. I think we’ve always shied away from pretentious album titles. Even when we started the band, we were looking for the dumbest or least pretentious name we could come up with up. Ironically, none of us were teenagers when we started Teenage Fanclub. I think I was 22.”