TEENAGE FANCLUB

TEENAGE FANCLUB/FROKEDAL & FAMILIEN AT THE WEDGEWOOD ROOMS, PORTSMOUTH – 17/4/22

We had just been discussing the possibility of seeing the members of TEENAGE FANCLUB out on the streets of Portsmouth for a pre-gig stroll when I see a man walking along carrying a guitar.
  “Look,” I say, “there’s a man with a guitar.” And then, just a moment later: “It’s Norman Blake! Sam, it’s Norman Blake! And Euros Childs! Sam!” Sam is with me, you see, in the car, as well as wives. We hurriedly park the car and walk quickly back to the road where we had seen them, but they are long gone – probably because I had to run back to check if I had locked the car (I had) – which is a good job too because neither Sam nor I would have known what to say to such icons of our lives. “I just haven’t got anything to talk about,” laments Sam, and I have to concur that I too have nothing to talk about, not to such icons of our lives.

Once inside wife decides to get drunk. She starts ordering and consuming drinks at quite a rate and I start worrying that she might have another of her moments of “clarity”. But no one else seems too concerned so I try to put the thought to the back of my mind.

FROKEDAL & FAMILIEN sound a bit like Fairport Convention. They also remind me of Abba. Not musically, perhaps, but they share a sort of aesthetically pleasing symmetry. I have to check that the latter comparison isn’t xenophobic in some way as both bands are from Scandinavia and maybe that’s the only reason I have made the link, but Sam assures me that it isn’t. It is a valid point of reference, he seems to imply. Everyone likes it but feels as though there is something missing, drums or bass possibly. At the end they take a bow. A nice, formal touch, which is well received.

Well received

Yesterday evening, during a lacklustre game of Jenga, I had put Bandwagonesque on the record player. “God,” said wife, while listening to the dulcet sounds and banal sentiments of Metal Baby, “I forgot how much I hate Teenage Fanclub. It’s just so pedestrian.” And suddenly, under her withering critique, the music did sound terrifically weak and a bit lame. The whole edifice that Teenage Fanclub and I had spent decades building came crashing down. Wife really does have that power – it’s quite a gift – to cut things down to size. Her sentences are like axe strokes, or the foot of a child coming down on a father’s elaborate sand castle construction. Metal Baby wilted like an old flower. But tonight, as soon as they take the stage, and they start playing Home and she sees Norman Blake’s lovely little Scottish smile and the haunted, Heathcliffian look in Euros Childs’ eyes, she is a convert, arms in the air, hollering, whooping, even dancing! 

Yes, dancing. 

Later, when she asks me why Sam and I (“unresponsive comatose zombie twats”, as she clarifies later on) are not dancing, I try to explain that people don’t really come to Teenage Fanclub gigs to dance, and, anyway, in my own estimation, I am dancing, even if to an onlooker it might have just look like I am swaying in a small breeze, or trying to stand still in a train approaching a station. Norman Blake, as you would expect, radiates bonhomie in quite an infectious way. I find it unthinkable that anyone could be moved to say anything mean or unkind about him, but poor Euros I’m really quite worried about. I just don’t feel the world has given him his due, and he keeps dashing offstage when he’s not needed, even if it’s only for a minute or too. Either, I think, he’s got a bad drug habit or a really weak bladder. It becomes a running joke of the evening that Raymond McGinley can’t get through a gig without going to the toilet, and sure enough when the encore is delayed for a few moments, Blake comes onstage to explain that a couple of the band are just having “a wee wee”. Oh, how we did laugh. But, of course, we’re really just laughing at ourselves because our bladders are not what they used to be either and we find ourselves in a state of increasing decrepitude too, and find that laughing in the face of our own slow, terminal decline is the most effective way to deny it its power. “Everything’s falling apart,” sings McGinley, over and over again. Quite, McGinley, quite. Indeed, yes.

‘Everything’s falling apart’

After the show we all dash off to the toilet, the sound of wife singing The Patio Song at high volume echoing through the corridors. 

‘My patio’s on fire’