Liam Gallagher once called Glasgow five-piece and indie-rock favourites Teenage Fanclub ‘the second-best band in the world – after Oasis’. But we’ll circle back to that.
Teenage Fanclub will return to Australia early next year for a limited run of dates that will see them play songs from across their back catalogue, which spans ten albums and nearly thirty years.
“It’s been a while since we’ve been there, I'm guessing I'd say four years maybe, it could be longer,” founding vocalist and guitarist Norman Blake says.
“It’s a place we love coming to because of course most people from here [Scotland] never get the opportunity to travel to the other side of the world. It’s an amazing thing and you can never take that for granted.
“I come from a pretty small town in Scotland, so if I come back here and I go to the pub or whatever and someone says ‘what are you doing?’ and I say ‘going to Australia’, people are like 'wow'. We’ve been lucky enough to come and play in Australia a number of times, so it'll be great to come back.”
Teenage Fanclub formed in 1989 and in that time have released seminal albums such as 'A Catholic Education', 'Bandwagonesque', 'Thirteen' and 'Songs From Northern Britain', securing themselves a reputation as one of Britain's best-loved cult bands.
When they come to Australia next year, they will be sans their original bassist Gerard Love who Norman says has decided his time with the band has come to a justifiable end. “I think he felt he didn’t want to fly anymore; he’s done a lot of flying in the last couple of years and he just felt he couldn’t do these shows,” he says.
“We really wanted him to do them but he felt he couldn't... It’s a shame because we had a good run with Gerry, but we felt everyone else wanted to do the shows so with Gerry’s blessing we’re going to do them.”
Now, on to that whole runners-up-to-Oasis thing. During the '90s Teenage Fanclub and Oasis were label-mates on Creation Records.
One day in London's Air Studios when Teenage Fanclub were mixing their 1997 album 'Songs From Northern Britain'... “We were working upstairs and [Oasis] were downstairs, and we could hear all this noise coming through the floor, which is unusual because studios are usually pretty well-insulated,” Norman says, setting the scene.
“Liam comes up to invite us down to hear the playback of the album, so we go down to their studio and we discover why the noise was coming through the floor – the reason was they were mixing the album on a full PA system like you would get in the club.
“Liam got us all a beer and proceeded to do the playback of the album, but he mimed the entire album to us; he held the microphone pretending he was singing and doing air guitar solos.
"That's the day we all had a beer together and he said we were the second-best band in the world, after Oasis. We thought that was pretty funny.”
Teenage Fanclub 2019 Tour Dates
Sat 9 Feb - Capitol (Perth)12-13 Feb - The Corner Hotel (Melbourne)
Fri 15 Feb - Metro Theatre (Sydney)
Sat 16 Feb - The Triffid (Brisbane)
