IN search of inspiration and a change of scenery, Teenage Fanclub packed their bags and set up camp at the Black Bay Studio on Great Bernera in the Outer Hebrides for two weeks.
Having temporarily relocated in the past to cities such as Hamburg and Chicago, Great Bernera provided the Scottish alt-rock band – fronted by Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley – with a fresh perspective and creative impetus as they started working on their latest album, Do Not Dare To Dream, which will be released October 9.
Before visiting Great Bernera, the band didn’t have a clear idea of how the album would take shape or what they would sing about. They just needed an added impetus to work to a deadline and record whatever felt right in the moment.
McGinley said: “There were no pre-conceived themes other than something that might submerge from your subconscious. We just started doing it. We just do what we feel like at the time and that’s about it.
“Sometimes I think ideas can get in the way of good stuff happening because you stop what might happen spontaneously. It’s formless and shapeless until it coalesces in reality.”
After spending enough time in nature, the environment of the Outer Hebrides started to have a clear influence on the album, absorbing an overwhelming sense of history and longevity from Callanish VIII and the Bostadh Iron Age settlement.
It was an experience that took the group out of the hubris of the modern day and gave them a different perspective on the human experience.
McGinley said: “You could have been there 5000 years ago. We don’t know who made these monuments or what they were feeling at the time but someone was in the same place as you thousands of years before.
“I’m sure they would have been making music of their own and making sense of their lives too. They probably weren’t that much different from us.
“It makes you think about the length of human experience and the permanence of things. It’s like going to see Roman ruins, these people thought this would last forever.
“It’s good to see things that take you out of modern-day obsessions and the hubris of the modern age.”
Nature and the environment had a profound impact in shaping Do Not Dare To Dream and the atmosphere of isolation that was a far cry from his routine in Glasgow also made McGinley think about the simplicity of life.
“We tried to put ourselves back in a mindset where we were seeing things for the first time or trying to clear your brain of extraneous stuff and just think of the experience of life,” he said.
“People say that you get older and wiser but I often think, ‘What would the 18-year-old me think?’. Maybe that guy was cleverer than I am.
“People can get into lazy patterns of thinking over time. I was thinking about the simplicity of life and just being glad to be alive.”
In support of their latest album, the band will perform a series of live dates across Scotland in November, including sold-out shows at Glasgow’s St Luke’s and Edinburgh’s La Belle Angele.
Teenage Fanclub have been performing across Scotland since the late 1980s, when they picked up a reputation as an exciting live act. Surprisingly, however, this reputation first started to grow outside of their home city of Glasgow.
McGinley said: “You have to go to other places for the people in your home town to see you with more worth. It seemed as though we had slightly more exciting shows in Edinburgh early on and people were slightly more into it than they were in Glasgow.
“People you know think, ‘oh, it’s just those guys who’ve been kicking around town’. We were living in Glasgow, playing in Glasgow and most of our first record was made in Glasgow. But in terms of playing live, we were hungry to get on the road and do stuff.
“It seemed the more you do stuff, then the more the people in Glasgow were more appreciative as they could see we were actually doing something and not just local guys. Once we had been around the block a little bit, we connected with an audience in Glasgow and then things started to happen there too.”
McGinley said there wasn’t much happening in the local scene at the time when Teenage Fanclub formed in Glasgow in 1989. They performed their first live show outside of the city when they opened for The Pastels at University of London Union.
“We also did some shows with Primal Scream around Scotland but it didn’t feel like there was the same energy around live music in Glasgow in the late 80s as there had been two or three years prior [with Splash One],” McGinley said.
“It seemed like a desert. It wasn’t like we emerged from something where there was lots of stuff happening. We wanted to do something because there wasn’t a lot happening.”
