Teenage Fanclub: 'I think we’re actually in a good place as a band'

Hangovers aside, the 57-year-old singer and guitarist is on good form as he discusses Nothing Lasts Forever, the 13th album by his long-running band Teenage Fanclub. It’s a breezier affair than its predecessor, Endless Arcade, with Blake and his long-time compadre Raymond McGinley looking forward in its 10 tracks, rather than back.

“There is some intention in the title – here’s a band who’ve been around for 35 years making an LP that’s called Nothing Lasts Forever,” Blake notes.

Newly ensconced in “a little place” in a valley about 20 miles from Glasgow, the singer and guitarist sounds upbeat. He reflects that four years earlier, when the band were making Endless Arcade, his songwriting had become more pensive as his marriage was breaking up. “My lyrics were all very dark, but it was actually very cathartic, really, to be able to use those lyrics to go through what I was thinking.

“That was four years ago when we were making that and I’m way beyond that now, I’m in a different part of my life,” he says. “I’ve moved into this new place and I’m personally feeling more positive.”

He feels “there is some synchronicity” with McGinley’s lyrics too. “He’s in a good place as well at the moment, and I think we’re actually in a good place as a band. Everyone’s happy, we’ve got a good dynamic going on, this line-up has been playing nearly five years, which is a good amount of time.”

In addition to Blake, McGinley and drummer Francis Macdonald, Dave McGowan has switched from keyboards to bass after the departure of founding member Gerard Love, while Euros Childs, formerly of Welsh band Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, is now permanently on keys. “I think we’ve done something like 150 shows with this line-up, so we’ve been quite busy on the live front and it feels good,” Blake says.

As a songwriter, Blake has noticed a shift as he turned from his forties into his fifties, with a greater willingness to address themes of ageing and mortality. “I think when we write lyrics we’re really writing about ourselves and our experience of the world,” he says. “Inevitably as you get older you start to think about mortality. I think I mentioned in the press release for this album you get the black tie out more often. You start to lose family members and friends. I don’t think we’re morbidly obsessed by it; it just becomes part of your thinking.”

Several of the songs’ titles refer to the light, but Blake says that was accidental. “I suppose there are only so many descriptive words you can use,” he jokes. “We did notice that, but we thought ‘Oh that’s a theme’. A couple of them are mine and a couple are Raymond’s and we thought ‘That’s just the way we expressed ourselves there’. But I guess that’s indicative, it’s an optimistic and forward-looking record. It’s not a dark place, we are in quite a light place as a band.”

Back To The Light is a musical nod to Big Star, the 1970s cult power-pop band fronted by Alex Chilton and Chris Bell, who remain an abiding inspiration for Teenage Fanclub. Blake recalls bonding with McGinley over the first two Big Star albums back when they were teenagers. “When we started the band Raymond had a compilation that Stax had issued many years ago, but this was at a time when Big Star weren’t that well known. Alex Chilton was probably more well-known as a solo artist then than Big Star.

“When you’re starting a band your first records are kind of the sum of your influences and then you eventually develop your own thing from that. We listened to those records, we listened to Exile on Main Street (by the Rolling Stones) and we listened to Sonic Youth, and all of those things came together in terms of us making our early records. I still like those Big Star records, they still sound very fresh, they’re incredible albums. Those structures and the sounds, the instrumentation, I’m still very drawn to that.”

Later on Teenage Fanclub became “pretty good friends” with Chilton, recording a single together for the NME and sharing a stage. “We were playing in New Orleans the first time we met him,” Blake remembers. “He’d heard Bandwagonesque and in all the interviews we’d talked about liking Big Star, so he was aware of that and he liked it. Alex was known as being a bit of a contrarian but for some reason we clicked and we got on well with him.

“It’s amazing to think back, Alex was 39 or 40 when we first met him. We hit it off and then he came and hung out with us in Glasgow, we did a bit of recording together and he became a really good friend. He’s been gone (for over) 10 years now and I’m actually standing looking at the wristwatch that he was wearing when he died. Laura, his widow, gave me that as a gift. She came to visit me and my wife in Canada (where the couple were living) and she brought that along. It’s a little Timex watch and it was Alex’s.

“He was a great guy, he had a cutting sense of humour, he was hilarious and he was a great musician, a really fabulous guitar player. I remember him showing me a chord and I said, ‘That’s a great chord’ and he said, ‘Yeah, Carl showed me that’. He was talking about Carl Wilson (of the Beach Boys). So he was a good friend, but what a talent, he was really great to work with. He was a bit of an Anglophile as well, he loved The Beatles and he liked and knew his Joe Meek stuff as well, he was a big T.Rex fan too. A really cool guy.”

Nothing Lasts Forever is out now. Teenage Fanclub play at the Brudenell Social Club, Leeds on November 8 and The Leadmill , Sheffield on November 12.