Teenage Fanclub, live at La Cigale, Paris – via RAI Radio 2 – April 11, 1993 –
Jumping into the 90s this morning for a concert featuring Teenage Fanclub, recorded live in Paris and run on RAI Radio 2 in Rome on April 11, 1993.
Taking the decade into consideration, the 90s were a pretty interesting time for music, if you recall. There was a flood of bands coming from the UK and we were smack in the middle of Grunge and it was another period of huge upheaval. CD‘s were getting well-established and not only was there a lot of new music to check out, there was also a ton of older music being reissued in the new medium to consider.
Some bands did get lost in the shuffle. I don’t think Teenage Fanclub got nearly the recognition they really needed here to establish themselves on equal footing as say, Oasis or Blur or The Charlatans, but they had a lot of good material in their repertoire and, dusting off this concert tonight, I realized a lot of their music wound up on my headphones at the time. They did achieve a level of success in the U.S. early on, and even prompted Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain to consider them “the best band in the world”.
In August 2018, the band issued new versions of their five Creation Records era albums which had been remastered at Abbey Road Studios. To celebrate the reissues, the band also announced Songs from Teenage Fanclub: The Creation Records Years, a four-city UK tour during late October to mid-November in which they would play three nights each in Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham and London, with each night’s setlist covering different periods of the Creation-era discography, and featuring former drummers Brendan O’Hare and Paul Quinn participating, in which both drummers would respectively perform the albums and B-sides they had originally recorded. These gigs would be Gerard Love’s last with the group, as he separated from the band due to differences in opinion on their future touring plans, later revealed to be a reluctance to fly frequently around the world for live performances.
After Love’s departure, Euros Childs joined the band on keyboards and vocals, with Dave McGowan switching over to bass and vocals. A new album with this line-up, titled Endless Arcade, was recorded in early and late 2019. It was originally planned for release in October 2020 to coincide with a UK and Europe tour the following November and December. However, the tour was rescheduled for April and May 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the album’s release date would eventually be set for 5 March 2021. The album release date and tour would end up being rescheduled once again, with Endless Arcade coming out on 30 April 2021 and the tour dates postponed to September 2021 and April and May 2022.
On 23 May 2023, Teenage Fanclub announced the September release of their twelfth album Nothing Lasts Forever.
So, if you forgot about Teenage Fanclub in the early years, here’s a reminder.
