On Monday, March 11th, Teenage Fanclub’s North American tour graces the Paradise Rock Club with support from The Love Language. We spoke to founding Fanclub member Raymond McGinley before the tour kicked off.
Allston Pudding: So I want to start with… you’re playing the Paradise Rock Club, and this isn’t the first time you’ve played there, right? …I saw in February of 1992, when you were touring Bandwagonesque—
Raymond: –oh, right, wow [laughs]
AP: –you’d just played Saturday Night Live, and you were touring with Uncle Tupelo. Do you remember anything about that tour?
R: Yeah, I remember lots of things about that tour. I’ve got a memory of… Mark Coyle might’ve introduced the band—I don’t know if it was that show or another show—he went on to work with Oasis, and shared the flat with Noel Gallagher, but this was pre that. I was talking to Norman the other day, I said, “I think Coyle introduced us on stage somewhere, it might’ve been Boston.” It might not have been that show, I can’t remember. But yeah, those kind of little details of things I tend to remember. But you know it was a good tour with Uncle Tupelo.
We first played with them in a bar somewhere in Philadelphia, I can’t remember the name of it, in 1990 or something… I think there were 13 people there or something, but it was a good show and then afterwards went to New York and I started hanging out with those guys and Jeff Tweedy and stuff. Yeah we had a good time there.
AP: That’s awesome. You have a better memory than I do.
R: [Laughs] I can’t remember sometimes, after such a long time, memory can be extremely unreliable, you know, some things become conflated…
AP: Another show I wanted to ask you about… I saw you played a massive show here with Radiohead and the Dandy Warhols in 1997. What was that like?
R: Actually, my memory of that… I’ve got a memory of certain backstage… Was it like an outdoor thing? …Sometimes with those kinds of shows, one of those venues blurs into another… So yeah, the Radiohead show we did was… They were really nice to us, those guys. We didn’t know them at all personally, we didn’t know what they were gonna be like. But they were really nice and really friendly and they were really good to us. We were unsure what kind of band they might be—they might be kind of difficult people or something—but they were lovely. And a lot of times on that tour Jonny [Greenwood] did lights for us. He would kind of go up to the lighting desk in disguise so he didn’t get mobbed. They were lovely to us on that tour, Radiohead. Really friendly, really hospitable.
Another downside to playing those kinds of things is you go on stage and you look at the audience, and the audience all look at you, and you can see in their eyes that they’re thinking, When are Radiohead coming on? [Laughs] And that was a period where we probably disconnected from the people that wanted to see us… There was a period we did tours like that. I thought it was great doing the Radiohead tour. We should’ve probably been playing the Paradise over again at that point. I think we… Sometimes people get really excited about the concept of a support tour, but in the end I thought it was a great experience for us… We had a great time doing that, but I think we had a bit of an unfortunate hiatus from doing our own thing for a bit at that time.
AP: Do you prefer doing support tours to headlining?
R: I think ultimately headlining is more satisfying. You’re playing to the people that have come to see you. On a support tour, there’s something about it which is really easy, but you don’t get the same satisfaction from it ultimately. I mean it’s good when it works, and we’ve done great support tours like we toured Europe supporting Nirvana around the time Nevermind was out, and that was great, and I think lots of people still talk about those shows, and the Radiohead show was great and everything, but ultimately I think if you want to feel like it actually connected with the audience it’s better if you’re doing your own thing.
But both experiences are good. Like I don’t know three years ago or whatever we played with The Foo Fighters at this massive show in Manchester, and it’s good fun to do something like that, but I think largely you want to play and do your own thing. But it’s always good fun to do those big support shows.
AP: Have you had any memorable fan interactions that have stuck with you over the years?
R: It’s hard to pick something out without thinking about… I would say lots of memorable interactions with people on tour, but at this particular point in time I’m struggling to come up with a great anecdote. [laughs]. Maybe I’ll come back to that one. We’ve met, regardless of whether we think about as fans, it was just people, and… The first time we came to North America we met some people that came to the shows that have become friends of ours, people we stayed with in Providence and Boston and people we stayed with in Brooklyn that put us up and welcomed us at their homes and looked after us when we were basically sleeping on floors at the time, and we’re still friends with those people. You never forget when someone looks after you.
AP: There’s a lot of love for Teenage Fanclub in Boston, especially among those people who were there at the beginning. Are there any artists out here that have resonated with you over the years?
R: I suppose lots of people and I, whenever I try and think of these things sometimes I forget people and later on go, Huh, what, I forgot about them. And I suppose thinking of bands that have come from that area… I’m trying to think, I don’t want to get my geography wrong in terms of who came from where because sometimes people move about. But obviously The Pixies and Dinosaur Jr., and we toured with Buffalo Tom and lots of people. There’s lots of people from that part of the world that we both toured with and liked.
AP: So you had the opportunity to revisit those Creation-era albums recently, and reissues are this opportunity for you and for the audience and people you affected to kind of reflect collectively on that period. Were you surprised by anything you found or from other people’s reflections on those albums?
R: Well I think we as a band have tried to keep moving forward and once we’ve done something we tend to—we’ll play the songs live and stuff, but we don’t really dwell on what we’ve done and we certainly don’t listen to stuff so it was interesting, the process of reissuing those records… We had to go back and listen to all those records. And actually listen through to all of them and re-master everything and find original tapes and all that stuff, and it’s an interesting process to… I mean some of the songs we played for years and hadn’t actually listened to them in any detail for years… Oh right, that’s what I meant to play, I’ve been playing this wrong for years. But… it’s an unusual process for us to spend a period of… having that kind of retrospective mindset of looking at these things but it was also good that it forced us, because we decided to play some shows, and play those albums in their entirety and play all the songs on them. It forced us to learn a lot of songs that we either hadn’t played live or we hadn’t played them live for 20, 25 years.
And we had to do absolutely everything. It seemed a bit daunting at first because we played over 80 songs over three nights, you know we’d play three nights in one city and play everything. But it was a good thing to do and it’s funny listening to yourself slightly detached…
But the good thing about looking back at all that stuff is, you kind of think, We did OK with these records. You know, there was no cringe. We recently as well were in the process of thinking about reissuing A Catholic Education and listening back to all of that, and I was thinking, Yeah, we did a pretty good job with this record. Because otherwise we never listen to those records. If we hear something coming on we say, “Ah, I don’t want to listen to that,” you know? So we had a period of enforced looking in the mirror. I think we did ok.
AP: [laughs] I agree with that, you did ok! Speaking of… songs… I heard you guys are working on some new stuff. How’s that coming along?
R: It’s really good actually. I mean it’s just good… I mean obviously we’re in a situation where Gerry’s not gonna be playing with the band at these shows this year, and again we felt well we want to, well we spent for a lot of last year working on the reissue stuff and focusing on that and we were kind of keen to come back and work on new stuff which is always, y’know, you want to feel like you’re still alive in the here and now. So yeah we’ve been working on some new songs, and I was just in rehearsal, we were playing a couple of them just before I started talking to you. It sounded good actually, we’re really pleased. So we’re just trying to… positively and cheerfully be in the present and move into the future.
AP: Is there anywhere you’re looking forward to playing on these upcoming tours?
R: There’s places we’ve never played before… We’ve never played in Hong Kong before. That’s the first show we’re playing. And then we’ve never been to New Zealand before. It’s always good to go to places you’ve never been to before. Part of the process of doing all these shows related to reissues, we’ve learned a lot of songs that we haven’t played for years, so we’re trying to play stuff that people haven’t heard us play for a long time, and bring the stuff we learned last year into what we’re gonna be playing this year. We’re just looking to getting into it. Once we leave home, I think next Wednesday, and then we’re on tour until about about March the 21st, or something.
AP: The last thing I want to ask you about is, I saw in a piece in The Guardian from the other year, it mentioned you were in Syria at one point visiting Aleppo and Homs. I’d love to hear about that if you don’t mind.
R: Me and my wife went to—I’m trying to think… At the time, we’d been thinking about going to Lebanon and going to Beirut, and at the time there was a bit of a conflict happening, so we didn’t go to Beirut, we went to Syria. [We thought], well if we’re going on holiday, there’s a lot of places we’ve been on tour, let’s go someplace we’re unlikely to play shows. We had a great time in Syria. It was before all the… war and what’s happening at the moment. It was before any of that happened. I wouldn’t want to give any kind of sense that everything was fine before then because obviously it was a dictatorship, and everywhere you’d go you’d see Bashar al-Assad and his father in paintings and all that kind of stuff. And saw a little glimpse of how feared Assad was.
We drove into Aleppo and went to the place that ISIS were blowing up temples—Palmyra… and just drove around. The thing that was concerning at that point is when you drove to Palmyra, you had to take the Baghdad road… and you’re just worried about driving 20 miles too far and you’d end up in Iraq. But it was peaceful at that time. You could tell some feeling of repression among people and chatting with some local people when certain subjects would come up and then people would look at each other and think we can’t really go there in this discussion. But, back to the Aleppo story, we were trying to drive into Aleppo, and we couldn’t get in. Everything was blocked off. We were going to a hotel in the center of the city and everything had been blocked off and we would talk to local people and I remember people were really helpful. Some guy in like a kebab shop came out, stopped the traffic so we could turn around and try to get down another road… What a tough day it was.
The president was opening a hotel that day and they closed off the whole city for a mile radius all around it. Heavy, heavy security. So you could see that even in his own country and his own city there was major concerns for, you know, not necessarily that he was gonna be loved by the people of Aleppo. So we eventually got in and he’d just left. And he was also meeting the president or the prime minister of Turkey, who was there at the time at our hotel. I walked into the elevator and these big security guys… I kinda got a vibe that I shouldn’t walk in and I was like maybe I’ll take the next one, and we went back to put the TV on in the room 20 minutes later and Turkey and Syria were playing a football match in Aleppo. And I could see this guy who I’d just about gotten in the lift with who was the Turkish prime minister or president, I can’t remember, and he took his place in the VIP box next to the president. And when we went into the hotel… all these really heavy security guys scanned all our bags… You could see that things weren’t exactly a happy camp when we were there.
But it was great and the people were great and we had a great time there. And it’s a real shame the country’s been torn apart. And a couple of years later we went to Beirut finally, which was great as well. But we did all sorts of touristy things in Syria. Went to a crusader castle, went to see Roman ruins in the desert… we had a great time there.
AP: Was that the early 2000s?
R: This was 2007
AP: That’s awesome. I wish I’d gotten the chance…
R: You know, things change. Maybe Europe will end up in some big war again and the Middle East will become a peaceful region. Who knows what’s gonna happen. Things change.
AP: Totally. Well thank you so much for your time