Teenage Fanclub live at the Empire in Belfast with support from Papa Luna. Photos by Darren Hill
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By anybody’s yardstick, guitar rock pioneers Teenage Fanclub have enjoyed an incredible career: to date, they have notched up thirty years of crafting albums of the loveliest melodic major key songwriting this side of California, not to mention supporting the revered likes of Nirvana, Radiohead and Frank Black along the way. No small feat, and even if you may not hear their name mentioned as often and as freely as it should be, chat to any random music fan and they will no doubt wax rhapsodic about the sonic wonders of Grand Prix or Songs From Northern Britain. The fact that Death Cab…
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This year’s Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival in Belfast is already shaping up to be one of its strongest line-ups to date. With the likes of Echo & The Bunnymen already announced, today the festival has revealed three stellar bookings. On Saturday, May 4, Jason Pierce’s Spiritualized will play the Marquee. On May 7, Anna Calvi will play Custom House Square. And on Thursday, May 2, Scottish alternative rock heroes Teenage Fanclub will also play the Marquee. Go here to buy tickets. Take a bow, CQAF. Take a bow.
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After 16 years, there’s no doubt that Primavera is Europe’s premier festival, for everyone from the capped-up indie kids to right-on middle-agers seeking some escapism, from the techno heads on through to High Fidelity type nerf herders and vinyl hoarders. So: how does Europe’s best music festival follow up on a last year’s best-ever edition – a mammoth lineup topped by Radiohead. Well, partially through sticking with what works – every sub-genre well catered for and then some, and not just on the three main days at Parc del Forum, but in venues across the city in the preceding weeks.…
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Summer’s over, but summer’s here…how can that be? That’s the perennial effect of a Teenage Fanclub album – “Simple pleasures are all we need/ Sinful leisure, it’s all we need.” Recorded between Provence, Glasgow and Hamburg, Here is album number ten from a band that took the seeds sown by the finest B-bands – Big Star above all else – and made the heartlands of Scotland a rival to the American west coast when it came to pristine pop music. The time between their records has been unhurriedly expanding – six years on from Shadows the template remains unchanged as ‘I’m In Love’ strums Here…