When you deal in the kind of melodic, harmony-rich guitar pop that Teenage Fanclub do, you’ve got to be mighty careful you don’t topple over the edge from sweetness into banality. Fortunately, throughout their twenty-five plus year career, the Fannies have always stayed the right side of that fence – firstly, through the sheer quality of those melodies; secondly, through the lingering indie cred of their early days; and thirdly, by being such a likeable bunch of blokes. The Bellshill Beach Boys deserve their place among Scotland’s musical aristocracy.
Nonetheless, unless you’re part of the Fanclub fan club, tonight’s gig could feel rather humdrum – a group of nice middle-aged guys chopping away unenergetically but pleasantly at their guitars. The uninitiated may struggle to see why sweaty, merch-laden fans are swaggering through the crowd boasting “I saw them when…” or what it is that moves a burly-sounding fellow to bellow ” ‘MON THE FANNIES!!!” as if they’ve just scored a winning goal. It’s at least partly a hometown thing.
Tonight’s gig is the last of their UK tour (their first in six years), and they’ve seen fit to mess with the set list, no doubt in part due to the number of repeat offenders in the audience from last night at the Barrowlands. It means an underwhelming opening trio from new album Here, rather than the instant hit of Start Again and the luscious Sometimes I Don’t Need To Believe In Anything which have opened the rest of the tour.
The set sparkles in other places though. Verisimilitude twinkles brightest in the early part of the set and the Krautrockish repetitiveness of 2005’s It’s All In My Mind shows how mid-to-late period Fannies were comfortable tweaking the template slightly. But when, to open the encore, Norman Blake returns with an acoustic guitar for a finger-picking new number, Connected To Life, it only draws attention to how similar in tone the rest of the set has been.
Teenage Fanclub were always at their best at their loudest; the juxtaposition of squally noise and honeyed melody is what first won them admirers. So it goes here. Radio explodes from the stage as the second song of the encore, and the lazy drawl of Everything Flows makes a supreme finale. If only they’d let rip sooner. Earlier, Can’t Feel My Soul‘s spacious outro still sounded gorgeous, but had been crying out for an extended wig-out, and The Concept could have rolled on into ever more waves of feedback.
Blessed with three songwriters/lead singers, the Fannies will never lack for tunes, but perhaps with six years between albums, they do lack the urgency which characterised their best work.