Norman Blake, Raymond McGinley, and Gerard (Gerry) Love are Teenage Fanclub, which may be the most underrated band of all time (even more so than Big Star, a band to which they are inevitably compared). Prophesied by critics as the Next Big Thing in 1991 (and we all know what became the Big Thing that year), Teenage Fanclub was then summarily tossed off as yesterday’s news as “the Seattle sound” usurped the rock world. But Teenage Fanclub has thrived under the radar.

             To date, the band’s sizable discography includes seven proper albums and a number of EPs, singles, and compilation tracks (and in 2003 a "Retrospective" release on JetSet), but Teenage Fanclub has never had a single chart on the US Billboard Top 40. And the only UK Top 40 hit came in 1997 (“Ain’t That Enough”), nearly ten years after the band's inception.

             But fuck charts. Not since the Beatles has a band included three songwriters with a proclivity for top-shelf songwriting. This is not hyperbole. The value of Teenage Fanclub is not in its story, but in song quality (my assertion is that this should be the gauge for any band). Teenage Fanclub songs are too impeccably crafted, too insanely catchy, and too subtly experimental to be merely commodified pop music.

             According to the soulfully pedantic rock critic/historian/philosopher Greil Marcus, a good record is “one that carries surprise, pleasure, shock, ambiguity, contingency, or a hundred other things, each with a faraway sense of the absolute,” and a bad record is “one that subverts any possibility of an apprehension of the absolute ... a record that is so cramped and careful in spirit that it wants most of all to be liked.” I agree. So many records strive to be liked, to be all good. But the good record is good art, a gift rather than a commodity, it gives life. And Teenage Fanclub’s records are full of songs that contain twists and turns that move your whole being, not simply your booty. Pay attention discerning music listener, this is the story of good records by a good band called Teenage Fanclub.

             Even in the earliest days of Teenage Fanclub, the songs were there. Following the demise of Blake and McGinley’s previous band (the absurdly named the Boy Hairdressers) in 1988, the duo began writing and recording demos for their next musical venture. Hanging out in the Glasgow clubs, including Bobby Gillespie’s Splash One, they met Love and asked him to join their new band while attending a Dinosaur Jr. show. He accepted, and the trio went into the studio to record the first Teenage Fanclub album, A Catholic Education.

             Released in 1990, the debut found Teenage Fanclub mining the territory of their musical heroes—the Pastels, Sonic Youth, and Dinosaur Jr.—and while the record is messy, with heavily distorted guitar sludge, crude proto-grunge instrumental jams, and mid-fi production values, their collaborative sense of melody can be heard being born: 60s garage affectations such as handclaps, ba-ba-bahs, and big beat hooks that showed the potential that would be realized on their sophomore effort, Bandwagonesque.

We did an interview with this guy and he asked us, "What are you listening to?" And we said, "Well, we really love this Big Star record." And he said, "Well, I’ve never heard of them." And we said, "Alex Chilton was in ’em!" And he said, "Alex Chilton? I’ve never heard of him either." ....a few months later he’s wrote this article accusin‘ us of rippin‘ off Big Star!

             Considered to be the ultimate Teenage Fanclub record, the 1991 follow-up sold respectably in the US and UK (the band even appeared as the musical guest on "Saturday Night Live”). Still, some questioned the legitimacy of Teenage Fanclub’s music.

             Jim DeRogatis wrote about this in his “Great Albums” column in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Authenticity has always been a thorny concept in rock ’n‘ roll. Critics love to laud originality and innovation, but this has always been a bastardized art form, wantonly stealing from any number of other styles and genres. In rock, nothing under the sun is ever really new.… If the music is good, just turn it up!” In its review section, Rolling Stone declared the album mediocre with a couple stars.

             Going further near their homeland, Melody Maker’s Paul Lester called Bandwagonesque a note-for-note rip off of 70s cult rock faves Big Star.

             “This is totally true,” singer/guitarist Blake recalled during a recent interview, laughing. "We met [Lester] right around the time we were doing A Catholic Education, and we’d been listening to a lot of Big Star at the time, and Exile On Main Street. We did an interview with this guy and he asked us, ‘What are you listening to?’ And we said, 'Well, we really love this Big Star record.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’ve never heard of them.’ And we said, ‘Alex Chilton was in ’em!’ And he said, ‘Alex Chilton? I’ve never heard of him either.' ....A few months later he’s wrote this article accusin‘ us of rippin‘ off Big Star!"

             But Bandwagonesque had cleaned up the derivative and abrasive qualities of A Catholic Education and let the melodies flourish, taking the band’s songs to a whole other level. The guitars were crisper, the vocals moved out front, harmonies abounded, and the hooks were simply scrumptious. Songs like “The Concept,” “Star Sign,” “What You Do To Me,” and “Metal Baby” defined the creative Teenage Fanclub sound. Some shrewder underground critics hailed it as a masterpiece.

             I asked Blake, what with all the attention, the press, the videos, the strong singles, it had to feel great, like they’d arrived?

             “I guess we didn’t really think about it,” he claimed. “When you make a record, you never listen to it again if at all possible. You just do your best to make a good record and people will either like or not like it. It's great when you get a really positive reaction.”

             Thirteen was an eagerly anticipated record, but when it was released in 1993 many felt that it didn’t deliver the proverbial goods. Critics cited “Norman 3,” with its pop mantra of “I’m in love with you, and I know that it’s you ... Yeah,” as the flash point for all that was wrong with Thirteen. The repetition of the hook line (eleven times over three minutes!) seemed to drive people bonkers.

             This confounded Blake. “Who’s makin‘ up the rules? Are people making sure there is a melody, a verse, a chorus, or whatever? I didn’t know that there were any rules, you know?” He added with a devilish tone, “If someone thinks there are too many ‘I’m in love with you’s,’ then actually I’ll sing on for a bit then.”

             Objectively, the brilliance of the album’s best songs—“The Cabbage," "Hang On," “Ret Live Dead,” “Radio,” “Tears Are Cool”—were possibly diminished by heavy expectation, and the record sunk. Thirteen may have also been panned partly due to the band’s own lack of enthusiasm in interviews.

             “It ended up takin‘ a long time to make the record,” Blake said. “When it came time to do interviews for it, we were asked ‘What do you think of the record?’—‘Oh we don’t like it, we’re sick of it.’ As soon as you say it, everyone thinks it’s bad. Looking back on it, it’s as good as we could have done at that time, and that doesn’t make it a bad record.”

             Incessantly dubbed imitators by the ignorant majority of the press, and a flop by the suits, indifference set in with the masses—thus, Teenage Fanclub was freed; no one expected anything.

We all felt that we really wanted to make a good record, because Thirteen had got such ... lukewarm reviews. We really wanted to come back strongly. We were quite well prepared for [Grand Prix] and David Bianco pushed us quite hard. We are all quite happy with that record, and as a group I would say that is probably our favorite record.

             With the Grand Prix record (released in 1995), the by-then ubiquitous in rock distorted guitars gave way to a quieter, inquisitive, deeper mood, yet no less intense, and the three songwriters all began contributing equally great songs (erasing the eerie and weird Lennon/McCartney/Harrison Who's in control? semblance). The pressure to make a good record came from within the band rather than from a label.

             “It was summer, the weather was great, and we had all the songs worked out,” Blake remembered. “We all felt that we really wanted to make a good record, because Thirteen had got such ... you know ... OK reviews, a lot of lukewarm reviews. We really wanted to come back strongly. We were quite well prepared for [Grand Prix] and David Bianco pushed us quite hard. We are all quite happy with that record, and as a group I would say that is probably our favorite record."

             Teenage Fanclub released Songs From Northern Britain in 1997 and Howdy! in 2000, and the songs grew stronger and stronger; not only the melodies and hooks, but also the lyrics.

             “I think that when the group started it was really always the music [that mattered], and the lyrics were kind of secondary,” Blake confessed. "As the group’s gone [on], I think we all spend much more time on the lyrics and see them being sort of central to the song.”

             The lyrics on the first three records were twee-romantic and/or sarcastic, not awful, but kept the listener at arm’s-length. On Songs From Northern Britain they seemed to be more revealing, bringing the listener closer. “To me, I think a song needs to have good lyrics,” Blake said. “That’s really important to make a complete song. It’s not just good enough to have a good melody and a hook. To make something really special it needs to have a good lyric. It makes it harder—that’s the challenge I suppose."

             The usual trajectory for a band over ten years old seems to be to release the “good” records early in the career and then fade into obscurity, releasing records that are sub-par to pure shit. Sometimes there are just only so many songs to be written, usually crafted in the dynamic youth of the band. For some reason, Teenage Fanclub has averted this course. The new tracks, “Did I Say,” “The World’ll Be OK,” and “Empty Spaces,” from the career retrospective on JetSet, 4,766 Seconds: A Short Cut To Teenage Fanclub, are three of the best songs the band has ever written. I mean call-your-friends-begging-them-to-buy-the-record-great. Paradoxically complex and simple, the songs are infused with piano, serendipitous drum fills, inconspicuous guitar noise, handclaps, ear-opening changes—all contributing to a traditional yet progressive pop noise. And all three are intelligently romantic without cheesy clichés and banality.

             The retrospective is a tremendous, if incomplete, document of the reconciliation of the pop song craft with the rock aesthetic. It seems Teenage Fanclub just gets better with time. And still without long-term commercial success (like R.E.M. or U2), Teenage Fanclub has stayed together, regardless of units scanned or audience size. Why is this?

             “Um, I’m not really sure, to be honest with you,” Blake responded. "Probably the biggest factor would be that we all go on pretty well together, you know. There isn’t really the clash of the egos, we don’t have that in the band. I think another one is that we haven’t worked too much, and we haven’t over-stretched ourselves. There are three of us writing the songs, there isn’t one particular person to come up with an album’s worth of material every year. So, for most groups, they run out of steam pretty quickly when their main songwriter runs out of ideas, you know. So, we get three times the life of normal groups! (Laughs.)

             “Don’t get me wrong, we’ve done pretty well, we’ve made money over the years, you know,” Blake added, rejecting pity. “We still definitely do it for the love of it, and I don’t think we just do it purely for cash. That just seems depressing really. Obviously, you need to make money and pay your rent, but if you ask any musician the thing that drives them or whatever, it is to make music. People will make music for not a great deal of money,” Blake laughed.

             Regardless of the record you choose, Teenage Fanclub has always made records that are good. The band’s songs are an incentive for movement from the listener. While some cannot help but fish for influences, playing with quick dismissal like lint from their navel, they miss the point. Teenage Fanclub is good because the members do what they do without concern for mass approval, progressively playing with pop structures without pretension, cleverly moving them around, touching the base of human pleasure with the fantastic noise from their instruments, and affecting the mind with smart words, contagious melodies, and sturdy hooks. Teenage Fanclub may not have the noise and distortion of ten years ago, but they are still a rock band.

             I like what Duglas T. Stewart (Blake’s childhood friend from BMX Bandits) had to say: “On the surface [Teenage Fanclub may have mellowed] a bit, but underneath I think they are still rebels.”

             “It’s really good fun playing music, you know!” Blake summed up humbly. “It’s a really good experience to get on stage and crank up our guitars and sing harmonies with other people!”