Teenage Fanclub @ Trades Club, Hebden Bridge, 17 Aug

The indie rock stalwarts signal the beginning of the end of an era with a masterful career-spanning set in the Calder Valley

Live Review by Joe Goggins | 22 Aug 2018

“It’s very frustrating to be in such a small venue.”

Up until this point, Norman Blake and his Teenage Fanclub bandmates had seemingly been enjoying themselves in the cosy surrounds of Hebden Bridge’s Trades Club. You wonder why, mid-set, he seems to have changed his mind. “It’s just that we’re playing Wembley soon,” he grins, “and we’d had a walkway built.”

In actual fact, the evergreen Bellshill band have made it to the Calder Valley to warm-up for something much more in their wheelhouse – a slot at Green Man festival in Wales the following day. It’s their first show in over a year since they wrapped up touring for 2016’s warmly-received comeback record Here, but there are few signs of rust – later in the year, they’ll play residencies in Manchester, Birmingham, London and Glasgow that span their nineties releases on Creation Records, so they’ve no doubt already been delving more deeply into the back catalogue in rehearsals than they might normally. Accordingly, we get a genuine career-spanning set tonight, starting with the airy majesty of epic opener Sometimes I Don’t Need to Believe in Anything, plucked from the underrated 2010 LP Shadows. 

There’s a sense that some of the more boisterous moments in their canon – the rambunctious pop of Star Sign, the noisy, pointed rock of Sparky’s Dream – have become slightly less spiky with age, although all that actually serves to do is bring their irresistible melodies even closer to the surface. For the purists, meanwhile, the band still do cut loose on the freewheeling classics Eveything Flows, closing the main set, and The Concept, which rounds off the encore.

Since the show, the band have made the surprising announcement that they intend to continue without Gerry Love, the founding bass player and singer who has been with the band for almost 30 years, due to a fallout over touring plans. Those November residencies will now take on a bittersweet feeling; Love has been a key part of the group’s unusual multi-songwriter dynamic and it won’t quite be Teenage Fanclub without him. This show might have been their penultimate without Love’s impending departure hanging over them. Fitting, then, that they should have delivered such a sparkling paean to their own body of work tonight.

https://www.teenagefanclub.com