Teenage Fanclub is a British pop-rock band from Glasgow, Scotland, founded in 1989. Their sound can be characterised by swirling guitars and strong vocal harmonies.

Song-writing duties are shared between the three permanent members of the group: Norman Blake, Raymond McGinley, and Gerard Love, but there have been a succession of other members including Brendan O’Hare, Francis Macdonald, Finlay Macdonald and Paul Quinn.

For anybody interested in the music of sixties West Coast bands like the Beach Boys and Byrds, and their seventies counterparts Big Star, Teenage Fanclub are the essential contemporary equivalent. Born from Glasgow's charmingly low-budget C86 scene just as grunge exploded, Teenage Fanclub started out as a noisy, chaotic band, as can be heard in A Catholic Education. From this album, only Everything Flows is an essential song, though the album as a whole represents an interesting mix of harmony and dischord. Follow up The King is widely panned, and probably for good reason. It was Bandwagonesque, with its more deliberate song construction, that brought TFC commercial success - the hooks became stronger, the guitar riffs were brought under control and the vocals took shape. Thirteen was almost identical in style, and remains the most under-rated of Teenage Fanclub's albums. Grand Prix, meanwhile, is perhaps the high water-mark of the Britpop scene which it found itself in. Songs such as Sparky's Dream, Neil Jung and Going Places approached pop perfection, without being complicated affairs. At around the time of this release, Liam Gallagher of Britpop favorites Oasis called the band "the second best band in the world", second of course to his own outfit.

Songs From Northern Britain followed Grand Prix and marked a move towards an acoustic sound. This sound followed the band for their next album Howdy, the band's most recent full length. A recent compilation, 4766 Seconds - A Shortcut to Teenage Fanclub, attempted to collect together the best bits of these albums. No easy task, given the strength of the band's back catalogue - songs such as Alcoholiday and Verisimilitude would merit a place on most band's best-ofs, but were omitted here. New material is due to be released in early 2005.

Discography

• A Catholic Education (1990)
• The King (1991)
• Bandwagonesque (1991)
• Thirteen (1993)
• Grand Prix (1995)
• Songs from Northern Britain (1997)
• Howdy! (2000)
• 4766 Seconds - A Shortcut to Teenage Fanclub (2003)

External links

• Official site (http://www.teenagefanclub.co.uk/)