GLASWEGIAN ICONS Teenage Fanclub’s latest release ‘Endless Arcade’, due in a couple of weeks, is a real stepping stone for the band, as the first record since the departure of one of their three core songwriters, Gerard Love. 

Love’s departure has come as something of a shock to the way the band perform: they’ve long rotated vocalists on their tracks, and have already had to adapt their live performances to work around some of Love’s iconic hits. Not that it matters, particularly, to those still involved., now including Euros Child, formerly of cult Welsh act Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci. They feel the partnership had run its course, and they’ve never been that keen on nostalgia anyway.

Instead, Teenage Fanclub charge on with a new album that’s bittersweet, and takes place in a mythical endless city of the act’s imagination. “The pandemic gave us a bit of extra fiddling time on the album,” Raymond McGinley, guitarist and vocalist, told the Gazette. “It’s new territory for us having a record out but not going on tour.”

“The title wasn’t so much born out of a conscious process, but it came out of writing the songs. I wrote the title track, and afterwards, doing vocals in the studio, Norman [Blake, co-writer and guitarist] saw it and thought it would be a good song title.”

“As a concept it just worked, and kind of came out of nowhere,” he continues. It was reverse engineered in our heads a little bit. It’s this idea that life is just a thing you kind of wonder through. It seemed to be something that fit. It was just part of our expression, really.”

After Gerard’s departure, in fact, the process for the album still felt quite normal particularly with Euros involved, too. “There was a long process with Gerry,” McGinley explains. “We still worked together for a long time after we knew he wasn’t going to be in the band anymore. More than six months. The weirdness was in the consideration of everything that was happening at the time. It had gone by the end, and we’d processed it while he was still in the band and rationalised it, and then we just got on with our lives.”

“I guess it’s unusual that someone who’s not going to be in the band is still in the band, but we did all that together. We worked together from June until November knowing he was leaving, and we had that nostalgia tour, and then we moved on. That’s life. We were a bit self aware about it, about taking it too seriously. It’s only a band. No one died, and we’re not The Beatles.”