Re-Enter The Vaselines

In December 2008, The Vaselines packed out the Glasgow ABC with a hushed crowd of awed indie fans practically rubbing their eyes to make sure they weren’t dreaming; in May, the resurgent Bellshill legends will undoubtedly garner a similarly adoring response on their first US tour. The band’s pivotal duo, Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee, are pleased, but thoroughly freaked out. “The adulation has floored me a wee bit,” admits McKee. “I’m pleased playing to ten people anywhere I go... It’s just really unexpected.” Kelly sounds a similarly nonplussed note: “The Glasgow show was a bit odd. It was such a big show, and we were headlining it – we just didn’t know where it had come from.”

This modest response may sound surprising from a pair responsible for the only Scottish band with a very real claim to underground superstardom – a group who supernovaed in the late 1980s with a pair of superlative singles and one album, before splitting, the records going out of print until one Kurt Cobain discovered them and propelled The Vaselines’ 19-song catalogue back into print and worldwide recognition with a few well-placed covers. Yet the band’s near-mythical status belies the fact that in real life they are overwhelmingly down to earth, and that their records were not borne from the ambition to make history, but rather with the goal of “having a laugh”, according to Kelly. Touring back then was very different. “Back in the ‘80s we were a bit more rough and primitive live, messy and shambolic… you couldn’t get people to shut up! It was just people talking and ignoring us. They didn’t really know who we were back then, so we were just another band on the bill…we didn’t really get any respect.”

This is a far cry from The Vaselines’ current string of dates across the globe. McKee finds that she is enjoying herself much more this time round: “People already know the songs so well, so you don’t have to break an audience: they know what they’re getting, we know what we’re giving, and it just makes for a really easy night.” Kelly credits the Nirvana connection with bringing the Vaselines this wider attention: “I’ve always said this – if it wasn’t for Nirvana recording our songs, we would just be another band who came along and disappeared and no one would have ever been talking about us now.”

Yet, as the musical tide swells and ebbs, a host of other bands are claiming The Vaselines’ influence. Kelly has read about new critical darlings Vivian Girls and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, who appear to be the musical children of The Pastels and The Vaselines, but is uneasy about pinpointing their influence: “there’s definitely bands out there who must be sounding a bit like us, but it’s a bit bigheaded to think that your music’s influenced people. I don’t really see it, and a lot of those bands would probably deny they’ve been influenced by us as well.” Besides, he’s uncomfortable with placing the band within an indie tradition, as he feels that they were never really part of the scene with The Pastels which everyone supposed. “I don’t know where we stand,” he explains, “and I find it hard even being connected to all those bands [The Pastels, The Jesus and Mary Chain et al] because they were before us and they kind of inspired us. Maybe to other people it’s like we were part of the same scene, but to me, we were always slightly younger and distanced from them. It’s kind of hard to see where you are in the scheme of things when you’re inside it.” McKee, in contrast, sees The Vaselines almost “as an entity outside of myself… it doesn’t actually feel like me, so sometimes I can hear influences.” She cites Adam Green and Kimya Dawson’s perv-pop duo the Moldy Peaches as an example of a group who have taken The Vaselines’ sound forward.

Kelly and McKee’s differing attitudes to the role The Vaselines plays in their lives perhaps has the development of their respective songwriting confidence at its root. Although the pair collaborated on the group’s songs, The Vaselines was to be the crucible in which Kelly’s idiosyncratic songwriting talents were fired, while McKee was content to work with him on songs he had brought to the table until she found herself with later project Suckle. As the band write new material, McKee is taking more of a lead, explaining that “because I’ve written so many songs on my own, it’s obviously given me confidence to be a bit more forthright with what I want the new songs to sound like”, and Kelly is enthusiastic: “It’s great, because it means we’re both sort of working at the same level… it’s good to get a different perspective on life and music and writing, to just be equal with someone and say let’s split everything and let’s work together”.

Arguably the strength of Kelly and McKee’s working partnership, which has survived a romantic involvement first time round and twenty years of doing other things, is based on the common influences which encouraged them to form the band. A tentative question about the extent to which their home in the west of Scotland has influenced the records provokes an enthusiastic response from Kelly. “That’s the biggest influence on us and probably a lot of people who are musicians. Where you are from, your upbringing, your family, it all influences you, ‘cause the music you’re introduced to is first supplied through your family. Me and Frances, we’ve got very similar upbringings and the music that’s played in our houses which was kind of country music, and then glam rock and punk rock, that all trickles through – you can't help but be influenced by it. That’s totally shaped the way we were because everything I’ve heard, I’ve heard through growing up in Glasgow.”

Arguably, this is the key point at which bands such as Vivian Girls diverge from The Vaselines’ sound. Any musician with a limited grasp of the guitar will make a similar kind of racket; the unique nature of these bands comes from the personality and local colour in the vocals and lyrics. The Vaselines reveal what makes them special through the rainy majesty of the countrified Slushy, or the minimalism of Son of a Gun, a plodding rocker rendered a transcendent manifesto by McKee’s unabashedly Glaswegian vowels.

This gleeful insistence on being wholly themselves is what renders them unusual. While other bands whose musical naivety led them to being put in the C86 playpen - like The Pastels - climbed out, pushing the boundaries of what they were capable of, The Vaselines created havoc from within their limited musical palette, trading wide-eyed innocence for lyrics that exploited innuendo and daring to make a joyful noise on tracks like the freewheeling Dying for It. The uniqueness of their approach and their reference points is impossible for the new breed to replicate; so we can still find a place for the Vaselines in our (painfully pure) hearts twenty years on.

Yet their most important legacy, which will outlast their slim catalogue and whatever additions may be made to it in the coming years, is arguably the spirit of their endeavour. McKee concurs: “the legacy for me would be that anyone can do anything. We actually limit ourselves as individuals so much, and we always think we can’t do this or we can’t do that, we can actually do anything… that’s the sort of feeling that I want others to have.”