Rosa Parks is arrested in Montgomery, Alabama; Former communist official Sergei Kirov is assassinated in Leningrad; Beatlemania arrives in America; Actor and director Woody Allen is born. (Dec. 1)
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Raymond McGinley and Norman Blake in conversation…Teenage Fanclub are always different, always the same. Each album has a welcoming feel, like resuming an age-old conversation with a close friend, gently easing itself into fresh areas while still tugging on old memories.
This time, though, is a little different. It’s a slightly different line up, for one, with Gerard Love having departed the group in 2018. Welsh musician Euros Child comes into the fold on keys, with the newfound space enabling Dave McGowan to move full-time on to bass duties, a line up that was finesse’d on some global – pre-pandemic, we might add – live shows.
It’s a subtle but striking transition, one that Clash explored at length with songwriting pair Raymond McGinley and Norman Blake earlier this week. The two are dynamic but very distinct characters – Norman Blake is staying at his parent’s place just outside of Glasgow, and his breathless comments on the phone arrive in the aftermath of a 10 kilometre walk. He grins down the line: “Just want to keep busy!” His counterpart, however, is rather more taciturn and thoughtful – in terms of conversation, at least, less is more.
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New album ‘Endless Arcade’ is out in March, with exploratory opener ‘Home’ leading the way. “We’re keen to get it out and let people hear it because we’re really pleased with how it’s come out!” Norman exclaims. “We’re all frustrated that we had to cancel the dates. It’s funny – I’m still getting alerts on my calendar every day!”
“Obviously we had to put both the album and the tour back a bit, because of the pandemic. That’s frustrating, but things look as though they’re going to be resolved early next year.”
Every cloud has a silver lining, however, with Teenage Fanclub afforded that rare ability to truly live inside their album. “Because of what’s happened, it did give us more time to spend with the mixes,” he continues. “I was over at Raymond’s – we finished mixing it there, he’s got a nice set up – and it allowed us to ponder our choices. I think we’re really happy with the mixes, and the way everything sounds.”
“It’s always good to get to the end of something,” Raymond comments. “I think everyone who makes music obsesses about it, and you get into this bubble when you’ve been working on a record and it’s just you vs your own expectations. Then you finish… and you sometimes forget that other people will hear this thing you’ve been working on!”
The band picked Clouds Hill Recording in Hamburg as a base – a residential studio, it found the reconstituted line up bedding down in a city they’ve come to love. “Hamburg has always been a place that we liked to go to,” confirms Raymond. The mixing desk is the same one used on John Lennon’s final solo album ‘Double Fantasy’, a piece of Beatles lore that thrilled Norman Blake. “The equipment is great!” he purrs. “There’s accommodation there, and you’re only a couple of stops on the S-Bahn from the Reeperbahn and central Hamburg. It’s a really good city and a nice place to work.”
Choosing six songs each, the band worked quickly, moving with alacrity. “Sonically we’ve always been a bit like this – we don’t conceptualise it, we just do what we feel like doing at the time,” says Raymond. “And that leads to what exists sonically. Sometimes I think you can kid yourself on a bit, that you’re completely in control of how the record is going to sound. From my experience, records come out sounding a bit different to what you actually imagined. Unless you make the record completely on your own, you’ve got other people’s humanity on board, and that’s not a controllable thing… and nor should it be.”
“Sonically, to me, I can hear Euros on keyboards, I can hear Francis on drums, I can hear Dave playing bass. I can hear the people. The sonic thing is a result of different people’s tastes, individual decisions, and what equipment we have at the time. So there’s an element of randomness to that. In any record we’ve ever made, you’re just going with the instinctive feel of what you’re doing at the time. Instead of going into the studio with a half-baked concept in your head… and the reality ends up different! As it always does. You just have to go with the process and see where it takes you.”
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For Norman, the motivation is almost a form of self-competition. “You’re always trying to write a better song, or something that’s interesting, or something people can relate to, or find catchy. You can come up with a good melody. Come up with an interesting arrangement. I think that’s all you’re ever trying to do – you’re striving to make a better record,” he laughs. “I don’t think we’ve ever done anything that’s tangentially, massively different. It’s pop songs with verses, choruses, and solos – that’s what we do! We feel comfortable doing that.”
‘Endless Arcade’ certainly delivers on that. It feels refreshing but also familiar, with Teenage Fanclub allowing the essential chemistry that lingers inside the line up to come through on record. Teenage Fanclub are a band who thrive on being a band, on the processes and decisions that entails. For Raymond, songwriting is almost a form of self-discovery, with its “self-indulgent processes” affording him moments of creative analysis. “It’s not like you sit down and before you start writing a song you know what you’ll be writing about,” he insists. “Sometimes just the process of writing the song leads you to think about things in different ways. It all comes out as part of deciding to do it in the first place.”
The results speak for themselves. ‘Endless Arcade’ has a real sense of daring, it’s looser, freer than Teenage Fanclub have been for some time – just check out the four minute guitar wig-out that adorns Velvets-inspired chug ‘Home’. “The way we work, we go in, we set up, and we start. We try to make the process as simple as possible,” explains Raymond. “Individually we all care about what we do, we’re all passionate about it, we’re trying to do our best. Sometimes you’ll feel good about what you’ve done, but I don’t think we’re necessarily an angst-ridden bunch in any kind of cliched way – I mean, we have our own cliches, I’m sure! But we go in, we set up, we get comfortable, and do some takes. It’s pretty straight forward, really.”
Perhaps its this simplicity that has enabled Teenage Fanclub to persevere as their peers tumble by the wayside. Labels come and go, line ups shift and evolve, but that central ethic remains the same. “I think we are pragmatic people,” agrees Raymond. “You find yourself in a situation where you’ve got a slightly different thing around you, in terms of what the band is. With Gerry not being there… it’s different. But then Dave is on bass and Euros is there. It’s an inspiring thing! It’s the same as when we moved from Francis playing drums to having Brendan playing drums, and it felt different… there’s a different personality there.”
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“I think – and maybe only people who have played in bands know the extent of this – that little changes around you can have a big impact on you. Being in a band, in terms of the way we work, we go in, set up, look at each other, and go to work. So the personalities involved – everyone involved – does make a big difference to the sound of the record. It sounds like the people.”
He continues: “Different changes led to different elements. I can hear that. When I listen to aspects of the band’s history it sounds like the people involved. Being inside it, we’ve got our own take on how it all is. So having that slightly different set up, it was inspiring to us, definitely.”
With extra breathing space during the pandemic, Teenage Fanclub have taken time to pin down the final elements. They’ve refused to become lost in this endless world, however – at some point, Norman explains, you simply have to cut your ties. “I read this really good David Bowie quote – and he made brilliant-sounding records – and he said, you have to abandon records. Because you can just keep going forever, tinkering with them, and changing little bits and pieces. The way I look at albums is that it’s capturing a moment in time. If we made this moment now it would sound different, for sure. What’s happening in your life – what’s happening environmentally – will influence how the record sounds.”
“When you make something, you’re just happy to reach the end of the process,” he adds. “There’s a sense of fulfilment purely from completing a record. Once it comes out, and you’re on tour… that’s when you start to think – OK, we’ve done that, and now we have to move on to something else now. I suppose in that sense it’s constant evolution. You can never rest on your laurels. And that’s what most songwriters do – anything who is creative will want to do something new.”
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Teenage Fanclub will release new album ‘Endless Arcade’ on March 5th – order it HERE.
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In October 1978, in what remains one of the worst episodes in the program’s history, Frank Zappa appeared on Saturday Night Live. The rock musician and controversialist worked through a trio of musical numbers, delivered a flat monologue, and hammed his way through a Coneheads sketch. The episode’s centerpiece was a bit called “Night on Freak Mountain,” which saw Zappa, playing himself, ducking ruthless record execs in a mountaintop retreat where a group of hippies (Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, and Laraine Newman) are holed up. Realizing they’re in the presence of weirdo, guitar-god greatness, the hippies offer Zappa joints and magic mushroom tea. He demurs; he doesn’t like drugs. “Frank Zappa doesn’t do drugs?!” Aykroyd explodes. Belushi’s character flips out, smashing his meaty fists against the prop walls of the cheapo set.It’s an exasperating piece of late-night comedy, even by SNL standards, and Zappa was no fan of it himself. As recounted in Alex Winter’s new documentary, Zappa, he thought “the whole skit sucked.” And who could argue? It runs its one joke deep into the ground: that Frank Zappa, while writing far-out rock music and appearing unconventional, with his long hair and (literally) trademarked facial hair configuration, his penchant for bell-bottoms and neckerchiefs, was actually pretty straight. Despite all appearances to the contrary, he was no avatar of the official counterculture. For Zappa, hippiedom was just another orthodoxy. To forsake individuality was a kind of hypocrisy.Born in Baltimore in 1940, Zappa was into his mid-twenties by 1965, which Hunter S. Thompson proclaimed “the best year to be a hippie.” It was also the year Zappa and his band, a blues-rock outfit called the Mothers of Invention, were commanding attention in L.A. for confrontational stage shows that straddled the line between dorky comedy-rock and Artaudian theatre of cruelty. Both Zappa and Thompson viewed the emerging counterculture with suspicion. Thompson lamented a lack of political engagement, observing that students “who were once angry activists began to lie back in their pads and smile at the world through a fog of marijuana smoke.” Zappa’s early music expresses a similar contempt. “I’m hippy and I’m trippy and I’m gypsy on my own,” the Mothers of Invention coo on “Who Needs the Peace Corps?”; “I’ll stay a week and get the crabs and take the bus back home.”For Zappa, hippiedom was just another orthodoxy. To forsake individuality was a kind of hypocrisy. Buying in was a form of selling out. In his music and his thinking, Zappa was a committed formalist. It’s not about what you’re saying, but how you’re saying it.As Winter’s documentary makes clear, for a time Zappa pushed individuality and originality to extremes. The Mothers’ 1966 double-L.P. debut, Freak Out!, served as an early statement of purpose. If Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, released the same year, elevated rock to the status of high art, Freak Out! reveled in collapsing such distinctions. It mixed rock, R&B, doo-wop, and avant-gardish sound collages. It expressed, both lyrically and sonically, an utterly sincere distaste for conformity of any stripe. Missing the memo, the counterculture set flocked to Mothers’ shows for their weirdness, which Zappa displays in abundance: archival shots of women in scarves gyrating, of band members simulating sex with plush toys, of Zappa himself holding the crowds in his thrall. In 1967, Zappa and his band relocated from L.A. to New York, escaping the artistically gentrifying Sunset Strip for the relative obscurity of Manhattan. There, businessmen in rolled-up shirtsleeves were still mass-producing pop hits at the Brill Building, and the nascent rock scene had a demonstrably artier bent. The Mothers installed themselves in the dingy Garrick Theater for an extended residency, honing both their increasingly complex music and their progressively confrontational antics. One notable performance from this period had Zappa inviting a group of U.S. Marines onstage to dismember a plastic doll dressed up as a Vietnamese baby. Another saw concertgoers sprayed with whipped cream through a hose fed through the hind quarters of a toy giraffe. As Zappa put it, in a quote immortalized on a poster enjoying pride of place in my teenage bedroom: “You can’t write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say sometimes, so you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.”The extent to which you find such stunts meaningfully confrontational, crass, or merely juvenile likely boils down to personal taste. Not everyone was impressed. Lou Reed lambasted Zappa as “probably the single most untalented person I’ve heard in my life” and “a loser.” (Reed would subsequently honor Zappa at his 1995 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction.) What’s undeniable is that these performances and performers were unique. Zappa and his band distinguished themselves from the popular, and profitable, peace-and-love set. And that NYC residency earned the band plenty of faithful fellow travelers—among them Ruth Underwood, a young timpanist studying at Juilliard. “All of that,” she explains in Zappa, “just crashed and burned when I heard my first Frank Zappa concert.” She ditched her Juilliard baroque composition classes and joined his band, enjoying a lengthy tenure as a percussionist, contributing virtuoso playing to Zappa’s run of remarkable mid-’70s records. From that fateful encounter, Underwood saw Zappa as he saw himself: not as a rock musician or provocateur but a “living composer.” If there’s a single idea of Zappa that Alex Winter’s Zappa propagates, it’s this one. The film develops an image of him as a self-taught composer of modernist music, in the style of Stravinsky or Edgard Varèse, but forced by the demands of the marketplace to ply his trade in the guise of a rock star. He was the sort of guy who talks, incessantly, about The Work. The difficulty of that work seemed inseparable from his personality. And nothing could distract him from it.This shaped his rather unfashionable (for the time, anyway) approach to drugs, which so galled the hippies, both real and fictional. It’s not merely that Zappa didn’t use drugs. He abhorred them, and he prohibited his bandmates from indulging. Indeed, Zappa so detested the notoriously drug-permissible Grateful Dead, ostensible countercultural contemporaries, that he forbade his band members from fraternizing with the group. Such holier-than-thou moralism betrays Zappa’s image as defiant iconoclast. He was, in a word, conservative.It’s a label Zappa openly embraced into the 1980s, staging a career rebrand that saw him asserting his fierce individualism along more conventionally political lines. In 1985, he became a regular feature in talk show junkets, speaking against the efforts of Parents Music Resource Center, the committee Tipper Gore co-founded to devise a movie-style ratings system for rock and pop records. Zappa devotes significant attention to its subject’s activism in this regard, as he chats with Ted Koppel, Larry King, Regis and Kathie Lee, Arsenio Hall, and the usual circuit of mid-’80s news magazine hosts. Despite his music not being explicitly targeted by the PMRC (which was probably a letdown), Zappa went to Congress defending Prince, Sheena Easton, Ozzy Osbourne, and others, decrying the censorious scheme as “an ill-conceived piece of nonsense,” which was true enough.Shorn and clean-shaven, flecks of gray in his sideburns, swapping denim and frills for off-the-rack suit jackets, Zappa perfectly fit the image of the American civil libertarian. In a 1986 Crossfire debate with paleocon pundit John Lofton, Zappa raised eyebrows by squarely admitting: “I’m a conservative.” Elsewhere in the debate, Zappa pursues a line of free speech absolutism that borders on the self-parodic, insisting that offensive or “pornographic” rock lyrics are “just words” and thus incapable of harm. In Zappa, band member Scott Thunes attempts to frame these media appearances as yet another Zappaesque prank, a form of provocation by means of public service devil’s advocacy. Maybe. But even admirers may feel a bit betrayed by this late-career heel turn.His music from the era provokes similar disappointment. The freaked-out provocations of the early Mothers of Invention records (and concerts) and the slicker experimentation of Zappa’s various ’70s bands settled into a mix of mean-spirited satire (“Jewish Princess,” “Bobby Brown Goes Down”), overly indulgent guitar solo compilations, and chart-topping novelty songs (1982’s “Valley Girl,” featuring Zappa’s teenage daughter, Moon Unit, proved his sole top 40 hit). That rigorous musical formalism ceded territory to sub–MAD magazine satirical broadsides. His attacks on hot-button subjects like Reaganism, televangelism, and MTV felt a little facile when hard-core punks half his age were lodging the same complaints with twice the ferocity. The PMRC-baiting 1985 record, Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention, which came affixed with its own Zappa-designed parental warning sticker, plays like a self-martyring vanity project.What rankles—or to use one of the artist’s preferred words, sucks—is that Zappa’s concept of anti-conformist individualism settled into something so conventional. Zappa became a household boogeyman for all the wrong reasons: threatening to shock, not with deliberately ugly and alienating music, but with pitchy lectures—equal parts Jello Biafra and Dennis Miller—about the imminent threat of a Republican fascist theocracy. Zappa would reappear on Saturday Night Live in 1990, this time in the form of a Dana Carvey impersonation, warning against an America where “Nazi stormtrooper automatons feed us the party line, while Big Brother Bush and Reichsmarschall Tipper watch us on Tele-screens operated by Thought Police.” In 1991, Zappa publicly mulled the possibility of a presidential bid (eyeing Ross Perot as a running mate and Alan Dershowitz as prospective attorney general) on an independent, libertarian-minded platform of eliminating federal taxes and “getting the government out of people’s faces.”There’s a warning here. Zappa’s early music felt like an intervention in the ’60s culture war between the hippies and the squares. He aped outmoded genres with genuine affection and indulged an experimentalism that inspired the Beatles and the Beach Boys, while arguably outshining them, weirdness-wise. What rankles—or to use one of the artist’s preferred words, sucks—is that Zappa’s concept of anti-conformist individualism settled into something so conventional. The “freak” became an emblem of an orthodox third way. Follow the premises of radical iconoclasm and libertarian self-sufficiency to their end, and you might end up a little lonely and isolated, pathologically propagating an image of yourself as the only honest man.Like its subject, Zappa wraps with its own ready-made Hollywood ending. In the last years of his too-short life (a prodigious smoker, Zappa died of prostate cancer at 52), his conception of himself as a genius composer was finally vindicated. Zappa’s orchestral music was treated to a number of high-profile concerts by Frankfurt’s Ensemble Modern. The group performed a number of Zappa compositions with titles like “Dog-Breath Variations,” “Food Gathering in Post-Industrial America, 1992,” and “G-Spot Tornado” before attentive, sit-down audiences. Zappa himself served as conductor for several of the gigs, received the ceremonial oversize bouquet, and basked in lengthy standing ovations. It’s a satisfying conclusion, given the image of the anguished genius Winter offers. But it feels nonetheless incomplete.Director Alex Winter—who plays Bill in the Bill & Ted movies—is himself a die-hard Zappa fan. And while Winter never intrudes on-screen, Zappa feels preoccupied with redeeming his hero’s image: memorializing him not merely as a shock-rocker or snappy CNN talking head but as a bona fide genius. And to paraphrase Roger Ebert’s comments on Bob Fosse’s 1974 biopic of Lenny Bruce, unless we go in already assured of this genius, the movie is unlikely to convince us. In the end, both the man and music are rendered inaccessible and a bit alienating. There’s little talk of Zappa’s idiosyncratic guitar playing, which is both technically snazzy and immensely affecting (see: “Watermelon in Easter Hay” or “Son of Mr. Green Genes”). And there’s even less of the appreciative audiences who responded to his music beyond its freak-show appeal. These are the things that escape politics, or hoary clashes of countercultural values. The rare feeling of hearing something weird or new, of an ugliness that strikes the ear of the sensitive listener as what percussionist Ruth Underwood calls “beautiful music.” It’s the feeling of intimate communion with an artist’s work and with an artist himself; when a piece of music is so penetrating that it seems to reach into the listener and play them like an electric guitar, or a giraffe filled with whipped cream.
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(Los Angeles, CA) November 6, 2020 — “My Satellite” was just released by Canadian, multi-instrumentalist Zachary Toigo. This alternative song is the third release off of the upcoming album, following “Perfectly Clear” and “Miloš”. “My Satellite” is a buoyant ballad heavily influenced by the sounds of Wilco, Bowie, and the Beatles. While it doesn’t finish […]
The post Rising Canadian Artist Zachary Toigo Releases Latest Single, “My Satellite” appeared first on Chart Attack.
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Attorney General William Barr has notified the U.K. government that the U.S. will not impose the death penalty on two Islamic State militants accused of helping kill American hostages.
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The US will not seek the death penalty against two British Islamic State fighters dubbed “The Beatles” who are suspected in the beheadings of Western hostages.
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Attorney General William Barr has promised to formally rule out the death penalty for two notorious ISIS detainees dubbed the ‘Beatles,’ relatives of the victims told NBC News.
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McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr formed the legendary English rock band in 1960, which broke up a decade later after myriad disputes.
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McCartney was often blamed for breaking up The Beatles and says he turned to booze to cope with the fallout in a new interview with British GQ.
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