When it comes to best Teenage Fanclub album, there are probably three main contenders.1991's breakthrough moment, Bandwagonesque, 1995's redefining Grand Prix and 1997's Songs From Northern Britain.
The band have put out a lot of great stuff over almost thirty years, including their latest from earlier on in this year, Endless Arcade, but essentially all you really need to understand what makes them such a great thing, with the exception of breakthrough singles Everthing Flows and God Knows it's True, is contained on these three records. Increasingly with time I come to see Songs From Northern Britain as my own personal favourite.
I think I'll always think of this as a CD even though I've recently treated myself to a vinyl copy. It came out just a couple of years after I'd made my own conversion from one buying records to buying CD's. By necessity really, as I was living abroad at the time, but really I'd probably have done so anyhow as even hardline record buyers were tending to make this switch from the mid-Nineties onward.
I'm glad I've now got a vinyl copy. It's difficult for someone of my age to establish the same kind of a relationship with a CD as with a vinyl a record and Songs From Northern Britain is a record worth establishing a relationship with. It's a beacon of positivity, the sound of a band utterly hitting their stride.
Part of Teenage Fanclub's central appeal is their gentle three part attack. Norman Blake, Gerry Love and Raymond McGinley the essential core of the band and providers of their songs. Each of them has their own slant and approach but it's on this album I'd say that it all comes together. It's a record of mid-career maturity and assurance, even though they were by no means at their mid-career point. This is where a lot of things they were working on and living through come to full fruition.
They had always worked within a seam of tradition most obviously that of six B's; Big Star, Byrds, Beatles. Badfinger, Beach Boys and Buffalo Springfield, (Neil Young most of all). Once they'd shed their early Grungey roots, this was the path they chose and have followed ever since. That of classic songwriting, the pure thrill of melodic guitars, joyous harmonies, positive vibrations.
Songs From Northern Britain finds them reaching the point when they're thinking of settling down with partners and having kids. 'Going over the country and into the Highlands, to look for a home.' in the words of Planets. Finding alignment, a compass point for personal fulfillment.
There are twelve songs on the record, and they're divided up equitably between Blake, Love and McGinley. Four each. No one of them feels like the dominant partner and sometimes it's difficult to determine who contributes which song without checking the sleeve notes. They're working as a true team. There's the occasional mention of sadness, but they keep forging forward with an incredible sense of purpose.
It's a record I played a lot at the time of its release and have kept coming back to ever since. It seems imbued with certain verities. Eternal truths. The unacknowledged awareness that life can be a difficult road, but you'll still get there, with the help of friends, families and the tap of music.
Teenage Fanclub will not be for everybody. They have a cosiness, a domesticity that can make the primitive long for dirtiness, messiness, meanness components of Rock and Roll the band have eschewed since their early days.
Personally I like them all the more for the determination to stick to their chosen road. Songs From Northern Britain contains not a weak song, nor a false note. A record and a band to come back to in times of need. Start Again.
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