Interview: Raymond McGinley of Teenage Fanclub (04-03-2017)

Dave McGowan, Raymond McGinley, Norman Blake, Francis Macdonald and Gerard Love (from left) backstage at EX Roppongi Theater, Tokyo, the 4th of March 2017. (Photo by Joseph Sudiro.)

The set-up:

Compared to their Nineties-era run under Creation Records and then Sony, Teenage Fanclub’s recorded output had slowed down since going independent a few years into the 21st century, with a new album coming out every five or so years. So it became a big deal whenever the band finally had a new record out, which also meant they would be touring all over the world…except for Southeast Asia. Bah. Japan was the furthest east they went for touring their acclaimed latest album Here, so I felt it necessary to fly out and see them there because there was no way of knowing when they’d put out a new album and come back to this part of the world.

Thanks to Hostess Records, I managed to conduct this interview backstage before the band’s show at EX Roppongi Theater in Tokyo on the 4th of March 2017, a day after seeing them play in Yokohama. For this interview I was granted an audience with Raymond McGinley, the band’s lead guitarist who also shares duties as their vocalist, founder and songwriter with rhythm guitarist Norman Blake and Gerard Love. While Norman, Gerard, drummer Francis Macdonald and keyboardist Dave McGowan were chatting and enjoying omelettes cooked by their tour manager Keith Dunn in the background, I had Raymond go through the band’s history using the Teenage Fanclub CD and 7″ covers I brought along as visual aids (and to get them signed, of course), the intention being that this interview would bring readers up to speed (of light) about Teenage Fanclub. The interview took place just before the band was about to soundcheck, so I did my best to cram in as many questions as I could in the space of 30-40 minutes.

How was last night? Seemed like a fun show!
Raymond McGinley: Yeah, it was great. I mean, it was a really good audience. I think the audience last night were really appreciative, responsive, enthusiastic. It was great being back in Japan again. We’ve been on tour and the band are playing well and everything, because we’ve been playing so much. It’s going well. It’s good.

Especially since you used a Japanese taxi for the cover of “I Need Direction”.
Yeah. I took that photo, actually!

It’s like you have a special bond with Japan.
I think we first came here in January ’94, and it seemed at that point it had taken us a while to get here, because obviously the band had been active since 1990. I think we’d had an offer to come to Japan in ’92, but we’d done lots of touring and I think everyone was really tired and we thought we were too burnt out. So when we did the next record, when we came we already felt we’d missed out in coming because we hadn’t come at the start, and it kind of took us by surprise. It was great! We had a really good time and it’s great to have been back in Japan so many times. Always feels good.

So if you don’t mind I’d like to do a brief history of the band. What do you remember about making A Catholic Education?
This record was recorded in a studio in Glasgow. I grew up in a part of Glasgow called Maryhill, and when I was a small child I used to live in an old Glasgow tenement block. There was a police station across the road from where I grew up, and then later on someone else took over and it became a recording studio. The house I’d lived in had been demolished by then, but I was looking for somewhere to make this record and we ended up in the place I used to look at out the window when I was a really small child, in the same building.

But I suppose this was just deciding what the band was. We didn’t know much at the time. We’d only really formed. We’d only been working with Gerard for a short period of time, so we were still deciding how the whole thing was going to work out. But it felt good to be establishing our thing and doing what we want. But it was just us, there was no one really outside of the band. It was just us doing our thing in our own little world. There was nothing outside of that. So it was just us making something up. The picture on the sleeve, that was on the wall of Norman’s bedroom at the time at his grandmother’s house. It was undergoing renovation at the time, so that’s just what the wall looked like where we used to rehearse.

Apart from “Everything Flows”, is there anything else that seems to be outstanding from that batch of songs?
I suppose this album formed in two parts, because we started with Francis playing drums. Francis plays with us now, but Francis only could do the first session. He was busy doing stuff and he was going to university, so we were looking for a permanent drummer. Then we found Brendan, and that’s when the band became a permanent band, as it were. So there were two different sessions, one across the road from my old house, and one in Manchester at Peter Hook’s studio. The version of “Everything Flows” on this is from the second session, together with some other songs, and it felt it was two different bands had formed this thing. So it does have a whole story within that record.

Then Bandwagonesque and The King were recorded at the same time. It was talking to Norman earlier, and The King was something you knocked out in a day.
Yeah, we went into a studio in Liverpool called Amazon Studios, and after we’d done our real work, as it were, we had a day or two before we started mixing and this is what we did. But as well as this, there was a load of other stuff that was never released and probably good that it wasn’t! [Laughs] Us doing cover versions of “White Riot”, and we did the Jesus and Mary Jane. A load of stuff just when we were drunk.

Actually it would be quite interesting if it did come out.
It’d be interesting to listen to now because I honestly haven’t listened to it since then.

But you still have it somewhere?
Somewhere, yeah. But you’re always too scared to listen to these things, you know? I can’t remember what the record (The King) sounds like. I think the sleeve looks great! [Laughs] And then of course we were there to make this record (Bandwagonesque), and again when we were on Creation Records making Bandwagonesque, they just left us to do our own thing. No one said, “What record are you gonna make?” That’s the idea where people have a talk about what you’re going to do. People just left us. We had an idea of what we were going to do individually and collectively, to an extent. But there was no input from anyone outside the band. It was us and Don Fleming, who chose to work with us, who we knew already because we’d toured together. And again, it was just in our little world trying to do what we wanted to do at that time, which is different than the year before, or two years before in 1989.

So what prompted Don to suggest you try harmonies?
After we recorded A Catholic Education, we’d been touring for a while. And I suppose there had been harmonies there in the band that me and Norman had been in previously, The Boy Hairdressers. And the songs that came around on Bandwagonesque, I think we’d already been playing. And Don encouraged us, “Well, you should do what you want to do.” There’s no point to either conform to other people’s expectations, or conform to another model. You just have to do what you feel like doing at the time, what you might be good at, and just do that. Feels like you want to do. And I think we’ve always tried to do what we feel like doing at the time. You can’t really do anything wrong then, because you’re not creating a false thing that you’re aiming for. You’re just doing what you’re doing now. That’s what we felt like doing then.

Again, no one had any expectations. Creation also had Primal Scream, and My Bloody Valentine making Loveless. But it was great. I spoke to Alan McGee and I said, “We want to go to this studio in Liverpool, Amazon. We’re using Don Fleming.” And they were, “Yeah, sure, fine. When do you want to go?” “In six weeks’ time.” “Oh, yeah. We’ll book the stuff.” And that was it. We just rolled up at the studio and did it. Alan McGee came down one day, listened to some stuff and was, “Oh yeah, that sounds great. Just keep doing it.” And that was it.

Thirteen feels like the black sheep of the discography, would you say?
Yeah, I think we started that by saying we weren’t happy with it! [Laughs] But we’d been touring a lot. I think we lived in our own little world, and we lived in our own little world making this record as well that was free of any outside interference. And I think when we came to make this we wanted to go back into our own little world again, but I think we were a little burnt out. There’d been a lot of stuff. Not just touring, not so much exposure, not really even pressure, but it was more like the bullshit of other people’s opinions. And also media-wise, you kind of enter a slightly different world of…you think about yourself slightly differently than the people who recorded this (Bandwagonesque). We were just alone, and into this (Thirteen) was people thinking, “What’s this new Teenage Fanclub record going to be like?” But I think also we wanted to retreat into the studio away from what we perceived as a lot of bullshit.

We’d been on the road and doing a lot of promotion and we wanted to go back and just record music. We recorded lots of songs, more than thirty songs. And I think we just felt we maybe got a little bit lost! [Laughs] We were touring and touring and touring, we stopped and we took four weeks off, then went straight into the studio. I think without knowing it we’d perhaps been more prepared to make both of these records (A Catholic Education and Bandwagonesque) by having just more time to think. And I think when we did this (Thirteen), we just went straight in.

Without actually having concrete songs?
Yeah, we didn’t have many. Not that everything was concrete previously, but just in terms of having a calmness, thinking about what you want to do. So I think we maybe felt the process was more drawn out than we wanted it to be. Looking back, it wasn’t that long! [Laughs] But I think we also should probably have done the first session and think, “OK, we’ll just take a break for a couple of months, then go back.” But we felt, “We have to keep going!” So there was part of the process that for us seemed a little negative or whatever. And we were honest in saying that to people when the record came out, so it creates an impression.

Apart from “Radio”, are there still songs you feel are strong to this day?
Well, I think there’s lots of strong songs on this. A lot of them, we just don’t really play them. I think “Hang On” is great. We were rehearsing “The Cabbage” yesterday, and it sounds really good. I think there’s a lot of really good songs on this.

And this is where you started writing more songs.
Yeah. But there were a lot of songs beyond these. So it just felt like we were wrestling this thing that we created. But yeah, I think there are a lot of good songs. We don’t play so many live, it’s just kind of random. But we have in recent times played “Hang On”. People always ask us to play “Gene Clark” all the time, which I think is great. I think there’s a lot of great songs. I mean, for us, I think the songs are as good as anything.

Deep Fried Fanclub is basically just a compilation.
Yeah, it was on Fire Records, it was Dave Barker that we worked with to put this together later. It just had some early stuff, b-sides and things, some things that hadn’t been released. These last three songs (“Don’t Cry No Tears”, “Free Again”, “Bad Seed”) were recorded as part of the same session. But yeah, this is mainly a compilation.

In between Thirteen and Grand Prix, Brendan was out and Paul was in. What’s the story behind that?
There’s probably a lot of stuff around then that you can’t quite remember, and there’s probably also an element of things we as a band don’t necessarily want to talk about everything surrounding those things. Right about that time we asked Brendan to leave and then Paul came in. But Brendan’s still part of our…

Big family.
Yeah.

To Grand Prix. Some might think this is Teenage Fanclub’s pinnacle, but what do you think?
Well, I think this record, again, I think we felt comfortably back in our own…we did a lot of rehearsing before this record, and we were in a rehearsal on the outskirts of Glasgow just kind of doing our thing without outside…I don’t think there was any expectation out with the band. We just felt comfortably in our own world, doing our own thing. And I suppose Paul was in the band, so it was kind of…not a new start, but it was a different band. As soon as someone comes or goes, the band is different, you know? It’s always a different thing if you have a different person involved. Again, I think we felt quite relaxed and comfortable doing what we wanted to do. We had a good time in the Oxfordshire countryside in the autumn making this record. It all went really well. We were all quite comfortable with everything.

Would you say the so-called Britpop boom benefited Grand Prix and Songs from Northern Britain?
We kind of tried to stay outside of all of that. It all seemed kind of ridiculous to us. It seemed to us at the time people talking about Britpop seemed a little desperate, kind of London media trying to make themselves important. ‘Cause we’ve always tried to just remain outside of everything, and we weren’t even part of the Creation gang in London. We’d just hang out with them, then go home again. So we’ve always tried to remain separate from whatever…there’s always something going on that people are talking about. I was listening to something on the radio the other just when I was at home for a day, and it was like journalists talking about Britpop and how important it was. There was a lot of retrospective analysis, people carved things up and put it in…but I think there were a lot of things around it that…’cause even…I don’t think it really existed. I think there were bands that happened to be from that island that did stuff, like Blur or Oasis, Pulp. I’m not sure any of those bands would see themselves as part of that. It was just something that was kind of created around it. But we certainly, we think we’re quite lucky that we’ve always avoided being seen as being key to anything.

Teenage Fanclub Have Lost It was something you did for fun, I guess?
Yeah. Well, Creation Records had an idea that maybe we could do an EP and maybe we might do an acoustic version of songs. And I think they had an idea of maybe us with a string section, a classy kind of thing. And we thought, “Oh no, that sounds terrible.” But we thought, “Maybe we could do something like that, but our way.” And this obviously was us doing some other versions of songs, but we wanted to do it and I think `we were really pleased with how this came out. But the Teenage Fanclub Have Lost It was a kind of joke, because we thought bands go away and they make an acoustic version of the records, and it’s like bands have lost it when they do this kind of thing. So I went down to Creation and I said…and the sunset thing, that’s kind of like the sun going down on our…

Career! [Laughs]
Yeah, you know. [Laughs] Told them to put the full stop on there, as well. Told Creation, and they said, “What’s it called?” And I said, “We’re gonna call it Teenage Fanclub Have Lost It.” And they were like, “You can’t do that! People will think you’ve lost it!” And it’s like, “Well, we’re doing this acoustic EP. Bands have lost it when they do that kind of thing!” It was a kind of joke. But we were really pleased with putting this together. I think it came together really well, trying to take a kind of shit concept but do something that musically works. And musically, some of this was recorded in my flat. We kind of made it up as we went along, which I think is always the best way to do it. But yeah, we were really pleased with how this came out, this record. People who like the band really like this.

Would you consider Songs from Northern Britain a continuation of Grand Prix?
It kind of is, because it’s obviously the same people and we worked with David Bianco again, and we went to another rural, English, this place called Ridge Farm Studios. We’d recorded Grand Prix in the Manor Studios, it was a residential studio in the countryside, this was a residential studio in the countryside. We rehearsed the songs in the same place as we’d rehearsed for Grand Prix. So there were a lot of similarities, but in the end it was really different as well. Everyone, the band dynamic was slightly different, you know? So the similarities are process, but I kind of think this record actually has been…my memories of process are really different than this record, but there were similarities of process. I think you always have to end up doing whatever…making the most of what’s around you and just thinking about that. You just need to forget about whatever and do, but the process was similar.

This has “Your Love Is the Place Where I Come From”. Has Nick Hornby praising it…
Yeah, that was nice, you know? That was good. It seems people seem to have a particular affection for this record.

It’s quite pastoral. Howdy! I think was a challenge, because Creation was going to fold.
Yeah, but we were in the studio making it. Again, we were just off doing our thing. We didn’t have any contact with anyone, and we recorded most of the record. Then we got a message saying, “Creation’s finishing. We don’t know what’s happening with this record yet, but Creation’s not going to be there anymore.” So we kind of said, Well, we’ll finish the record. We’re not going to play it to anyone until we’ve finished it, then we can decided what’s going to happen afterwards.” This was recorded in Rockfield, South Wales, just with an engineer called Nick Brine who we worked with again on that and Shadows as well. We just kind of made this record, then we ended up…it was put out by Sony in the U.K. and it felt a lot strange to us to be dealing with a major label in the U.K. ’cause it was always been dealt with the randomness of Creation Records where we had a very personal relationship, and things got a lot complicated only after, because we always separate the music. We make the music first, and then, “O.K., that’s finished.” What happens next is a separate thing.

And this was the last one with Paul.
Yes, Paul had left before we finished making this, I think. I think by the time we came to mix this record, Paul had already left. And Paul did leave; I think he decided that it wasn’t working out [laughs], and then that’s why it’s the three of us because by the time we finished making the record it was just the three of us. But we were also on this record with Finlay Macdonald on keyboards. Again, when someone comes in…he was there for the recording sessions, so his influence is definitely there.

On “My Uptight Life”.
Yeah, yeah. Sort of do things like that, and “I Need Direction” and whatever. We’d be doing organ or piano as part of the basic track. Previous records, we added those on afterwards as an overdub, but that was the first record, really, where we’d had a kind of keyboard player as part of the band. So there’s definitely an influence of that. Creates an atmosphere that’s slightly different.

But before did you have someone in as live keyboardist?
Well, I think Finlay had come in to play with us, but I think this was the first time we’d been in the studio with Finlay.

Four Thousand Seven Hundred and Sixty-Six Seconds?
Yeah, we had…the record label wanted to do a Best of record, and we agreed to do it as some kind of…

Contractual thing?
Yeah, ’cause they would let us go if we made them a record, so we tried to record. But they wanted some new songs. We recorded three new songs.

I love this package. When I first bought it, I was like, “Wow, two booklets!”
Yeah, well we had a real battle with Sony. Because we put all this together, and they said, “You can do what you want,” and then someone else came in and said, “No, no, no, you can’t do this.” And we were like, “We’ve done all this, we’ve got people to write things for us and everything.” We did a lot of work putting this whole thing together, and had to basically go into a meeting and threaten to pull the whole project in order to get this package. So I said, “O.K., we’re not going to do this. We’re going to bin that idea, we’re going to the studio and make a new record and you’re going to pay for it. And you have to do that under the contract. And if you don’t this the way we want to do it, that’s what we’re going to do.” So then they said, “O.K.” [Laughs] So that’s how the package came about, because I had to threaten them to get them to do it. Which proves it was an uncomfortable time, you know? Again, you always want to try and separate the music from the business. And this was our photographer Donald Milne’s crazy idea to put a billboard on a beach. This existed in reality, it’s not Photoshop! [Laughs]

Then you tore it down right after?
Yeah. [Laughs]

I guess these two (Scotland on Sunday and Man-Made) belong together?
Yeah. I mean, this (a rarities-filled CD given away for free with Scotland on Sunday) was just a little kind of thing that we did. We were free of our Sony relationship and we were kind of back in our own world of no outside interference, and we kind of thought of it’d be good to go somewhere else and we went to Chicago and worked with John McEntire at his studio. And I felt really good, because we were just there doing our own thing. And we’ve always been comfortable with that, because that’s how we started. We didn’t start the band by asking someone for permission to do something. It was better if you can just do something, then deal with the outside world afterwards. So this felt really good, we had a really good time in Chicago. And the cold and the snow, walking back and forth to the studio everyday, going out with John McEntire every night, doing a tour of Chicago restaurants and bars. We had a really good time making this record.

This is more of a stripped-down album.
Yeah, because we went to John’s studio, we didn’t have any of our own equipment. We just had guitars, and we just used what was available around us.

You didn’t have a keyboard player this time?
No. So we went in, John McEntire played some keyboards on this. Well, not much; piano on “Only With You” is played by John McEntire. Francis played some piano and some stuff, and everyone…but yeah, it was more of a four-piece band. It was a fairly intense session, and also outside of that, Francis’ mother was really ill when we were recorded this record and we knew that when we went to Chicago. And we knew that we had to record all this stuff so he could go back home again, and his mother actually died when he went back home. So there was that side of things that we weren’t sure whether we could go and do it, but we knew we needed to get all of Francis’ stuff done so he could go back home again. That was part of the context of the whole thing. Before we went, we were saying to Francis, “Well, what do you want to do? Shall we still go ahead?” And he spoke to his mum, she said, “I think you should still go.” And he went and did his thing and went back home.

So that might explain the downbeat feel on some of those songs, like “Cells”?
Well, there might be in there somewhere, but I think there’s always a downbeat thing in the back of our minds anyway. But there was a context there. At the same time, we had a really good time in Chicago. But there was a certain intensity, because we knew we had to get this done. And again, this (Scotland on Sunday CD) was something that we did. We recorded a couple of things in a studio in Glasgow, but that’s an older version. These were kind of things that were put together, kind of an aside to this (Man-Made).

Shadows is the first one with Dave, right?
Yeah, that’s the first record recording with Dave, and again that’s a different thing as well because Dave played pedal steel on a couple of things. Dave’s musicianship is a part of this whole thing as well. As far as recording, again with Nick Brine as the engineer. Again, we were in a rural location.

Do you feel like that’s where you do your best work?
Not necessarily, but most of what we do has been in some kind of remote…this (Bandwagonesque) was in an industrial location! [Laughs] But I think something happens from where you are. Part of the process of where we are. And we recorded this across different sessions, we do a little bit then we go back home again, then we go back again. So yeah, this is the first record with Dave, and again, it’s like that creates…this was the first thing of our current line-up.

You played “Sometimes I Don’t Need to Believe in Anything” last night. What else on this tour?
Yeah. I mean, what else have we played? We occasionally “Baby Lee”, but yeah, we haven’t played…yeah, we’ve played “The Past” occasionally. Some songs like “Sweet Days Waiting” and “Today Never Ends” kind of need to have the pedal steel, so it’s kind of hard to tour that. We haven’t played “Shock and Awe” for a while. We’ve played most of these songs last time, so I suppose…yeah, there’s a few of these we haven’t played for a while. Maybe we should play something.

And now to the present. Do you feel Here is the strongest in a while?
I don’t really perceive it that way, because for us that’s just where…this is representative of a certain part of our lives recently. You can’t really have an overview. I think we’re pleased with how this turned out. And I think we did a lot of careful work to make it the way that we wanted it to be, spent a bit of time in Glasgow just thinking about things and polishing things. But I’m really pleased with how this record turned out, and again we went to a studio in the south of France to record. And we mixed it in Hamburg, which is a city that we really like, and there was a large part in between which was working in my house in Glasgow. We did all the vocals in Glasgow, guitar overdubs and things. A lot of it, most of the time spent on this was in Glasgow, but there was three weeks at the start and intense, which produced most of all the backing tracks, and then all the mixing was in Hamburg. But all the vocals were recorded in Glasgow. So there was a different process. It took quite a long time to make this. Little pieces of work, different…we probably spent the longest making this record out of all our records.

Because of the time you spend apart?
And also just because it’s the way we recorded it: at home, so it’s easy to do, “OK, we’ll do some work today and tomorrow, and then we’ll go next week.” You’re not away somewhere, so you might work between 12 and 6 o’clock or something, and do something and think about it. And we’re not paying money for a studio. But it’s all part of it. You have to embrace whatever the process is and go with that, instead of try to get something just from the idiosyncrasy of however you work on something. And on the b-side of this (“I’m In Love” 7″), “Easy Come Easy Go”, we recorded in the north of Scotland, at Edwyn Collins’ studio. Going to Edwyn Collins’ studio was our most recent journey, and it was good to go there. It was good to record one of Grant’s songs.

Where do you go from here, pun intended?
I think it’s hard to know, because I think you always have to just see how you feel. You see what you want to do. When we made this record, all I could think about was that. There was no, like, “Oh, we’ll do that, and then we’ll do…” We were just doing that, and I think all the way through this, we just tried to think, “OK, we’re making a record now.” I don’t know if there’ll be another record. Who knows, you know? Then I had the same feeling all the way through. You don’t want to start thinking about, “Oh yeah, this is just something and then it’s part of a process,” or something. You just want to think, “I’m doing this thing, I don’t know whether…” It’s not like a stepping stone to something else. It’s just that. So I don’t like to think of anything else. We’re touring now, and I like to think about that. Once we’ve finished all this, then once we’re at home, once we’re bored, we’ll think, “OK, do we want to do something?” I can’t think about it until that point, and I felt the same all the way going back to 1989. And it just so happens that it’s continued to here, but without expectation of any of that.

Me and Joseph Sudiro with Teenage Fanclub.

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What happened next:

In early 2018, Teenage Fanclub announced the August release of vinyl reissues for their five Creation Records-era albums – Bandwagonesque, Thirteen, Grand Prix, Songs from Northern Britain and Howdy! – along with a four-city UK tour from late October to mid-November in which the band would play three shows in each city, and on each night they would play two albums in full, plus a set of b-sides on the third night. Former members Brendan O’Hare and Paul Quinn would also join the festivities by playing drums for the albums they were originally part of, with current TFC drummer Francis Macdonald taking up multi-instrumentalist duties along with Dave McGowan.

The band also announced that they would do intensive touring across the globe in 2019 – but without Gerard Love, who cited a reluctance for the air travel involved which led to a decision to part ways with the band. The Creation Years shows will be his last with the band, with the final gig taking place in London on the 15th of November.