DCist Interview: Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub

There's a documentary on Creation Records coming out soon. Are you involved in that in any way?

I was interviewed for it, but I don't know how much of me will actually be in it. I don't think I said anything of any great significance, so I think most of me will be on the cutting room floor.

I read a piece in the Guardian last week where Alan McGee talked about a time you and he took a load of ecstasy and stole a boat from a posh Scottish hotel.

I don't remember it quite that way, but yeah, we've had a couple of nights out with Alan. [laughs] I think he was really just trying to make the point that we weren't a bunch of squares. I don't know.

I think he was saying that while Bobby from Primal Scream and Liam and Noel from Oasis were the big partiers on the label, you guys weren't exactly slouches in that department.

I think we were more discreet than anyone else. All we ever did, I think, is what any normal young person would do. Everyone goes through a period of experimentation. Ours were very brief I would say.

What's your best Alan McGee story?

I'm not really sure. It wouldn't be a debauched one, you know? Because actually there's another Alan McGee. There's Alan who is full of anecdotes and crazy rock n' roll stories, but there's the Alan McGee that helped my friend Chas Banks out. He was our tour manager and he got a viral infection in his spine and was paralyzed from the neck down. Now he can't move below the waist but he can still get an erection, which he told me he was very happy about! [laughs] But when that happened to Chas he was our tour manager, and he also worked for The Pixies, and Alan McGee got in touch with loads of people that he knew from the labels and said, "Look, Chas is a good guy, give us some money." And he put a lot of money in and bought Chas a house. Alan would probably never have spoken about that. So there is another Alan McGee and I would rather focus on that guy. It was a really nice thing to do and he would never tell anyone that he'd done it. But he did.

I've been watching the set lists from this tour and you've been choosing from a pool for 30 or so songs. How do you choose what your going to play each night?

We'll sit down, and we keep all the setlists that we've done, so really we tend to start with two or three different songs. So we'll decide what we're going to start with and take it from there. We always try to maybe throw in a couple of things we haven't played. Unfortunately for this tour we haven't had a great deal of time to rehearse. What we'd normally do is work that out at soundcheck, but we've not had a great deal of time so far. But as the tour progresses, I'm sure we'll have more time. We're also aware that a few people have been to a few shows, and some have been to every show we've done in the U.S., so we like to change it for them. Also for the fact that you can find the setlists on the internet! People will be aware if you're not changing them.

Oasis toured for two years and didn't change their set. I don't get that at all.

Some people do that. I would find that pretty boring. We like to mix it up a bit. And it keeps us sharp too.

Rehearsing must be harder since you moved to Canada.

Yeah, we don't rehearse, we just do soundchecks. The thing is we've been playing together for so long...

It's like second nature at this point.

Yeah. Actually, we did one day's rehearsal at a club near where I live in Canada. I'm friendly with the guy that runs the club, a place called The Starlight in Kitchner. And he very kindly gave us his place for the afternoon on the day before the tour started. The first date was in Toronto, so we got the barbecue going and had some beers in the backyard, bought all the equipment and we rehearsed that afternoon and off we went.

So you living on a different continent is not a big deal at this point in your career?

I don't think so, really, in terms of keeping touch, because of the internet. The only thing we can't do anymore which we could in the past is like a one-off show in Spain or somewhere. Or one-off festivals. But if we can line up three or four shows over the course of two weeks, then I'll fly back because it's worth doing it then. But it's a long way to go for one show. But having said that, I don't mind flying. Sitting on a plane for six and a half hours to get to Glasgow doesn't bother me.

So you're playing with The Vaselines tonight and you played with Belle & Sebastian the other night in New York. How did all these bands from Glasgow end up on the East Coast at the same time? I imagine you all know each other, right?

Yes, we are all know each other and have for years and years. We were all hanging out in New York last night, because we all did the Jimmy Fallon show last week.

Oh, okay. That all makes sense now.

We did the Tuesday, Belle & Sebastian did the Wednesday and The Vaselines did Friday [Ed's note, they actually performed Thursday], so that was great. if you could imagine backstage at the Belle & Sebastian show, there were a lot of Scottish accents.

So your new album Shadows, you put it out yourself, right?

Yeah, we've got our own label in the U.K. and Europe.

So you just have a distribution deal over there?

We do and then Merge over here. And it's been working out great. The initial period when you set up a label, there's quite a bit of bureaucracy. But once that's out of the way, you can slip back into working with the people you've worked with before. You put the record in place and then it just takes a few phone calls.

And on the new record, you, Ray and Gerry all have four songs each. Is that by design?

It's our modus operandi. What we've done on the last few albums is we'll all bring 5 or 6 songs, we'll probably each start with a few more than that, but then we edit it down to 5 or 6 each. We'll record those and then decide on our favorite four and then put those together.

What's your favorite song that Ray's written?

I like the song "The Past" from this record. I think Ray wrote a pretty strong album. I certainly enjoy playing it a lot.

And what about Gerry?

I like "Shock and Awe." It's quite the straight ahead rock song. I like playing that one too.

Are there any deluxe reissues in your future?

Possibly. We're looking at reissuing our first album. I don't know if we'll put any extra tracks on there, because I don't know if there are any. But we have lots of artwork and photographs and things like that that we could put in there. Maybe even our second album Bandwagonesque. I suppose it's getting to that point where it would be worth remastering them. And we've always liked the idea of doing a b-sides compilation.

That would be great. I used to have all the Bandwagonesque singles and over time I've lost most of them.

They're quite hard to get. During the 90s in the U.K. we had the formatting wars, where you could put out two versions of a 7-inch single and they would count as two separate sales and what happened was you would end up recording an album of 12 songs and recording 14 b-sides. It was insane, but that means we have a lot of things we could choose from. I think we could make a pretty interesting compilation. At the time it was hard work coming up with all those songs, but in retrospect, it's nice we them all. It's definitely something we'll do at some point. Hopefully in the next couple of years we can get that together.

Shadows is out on Merge records right now. The band continue their US tour through October. Be sure to check out our review of Saturday's show here.