It can't be easy being Teenage Fanclub. One minute Nirvana's Kurt Cobain is on every radio station in the US describing you as the best band on the planet; the next your label boss is having a pop.
One of the greatest myths about Teenage Fanclub – and one perpetuated by the man who signed them to Creation Records – is “they didn’t want to be big”.
“It’s a Glasgow thing of wanting to be cool rather than big,” Alan McGee once told me. “There was an element of self-sabotage in the way they went about [second album Thirteen].”
On this week’s podcast, Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake joins me to tell me the inside story of making Thirteen, the follow up to breakthrough album Bandwagonesque.
“We’d spent a lot of time together in the back of vans before recoding Thirteen at CaVa in Glasgow and Revolution Studios in Cheadle Hulme,” he tells me. “There were tensions.”
Norman also talks about touring with Nirvana, the departure of Gerry Love and the current mood in the band as they celebrate the release of their 13th studio album Do Not Dare to Dream.
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