If there were an annual award for the nicest man in music, Norman Blake would clean up every single year.
The versatile singer-songwriter, one-fifth of alt-rock titans Teenage Fanclub, is famously polite, proving happy to talk to both fans and the media at large with genuine gusto.
“You must just be sitting down with your morning cup of coffee, hey?” he purrs happily in his soothing Scottish accent, showing an altogether rare interest in the actual human being on the other end of the line in an otherwise formal interview situation.
And yet, despite his status as a beloved staple of the indie scene, Blake doesn’t really rate himself – in fact, he reckons he’s a bit of a bore. “I have no hobbies really,” he laughs. “I’m just always making and listening to music, even in my leisure time. It’s all music-based stuff for me.”
In that way, Blake is one of the lucky few who have managed to turn a hobby into a way to pay the bills, and via Teenage Fanclub and his own notable solo records he has spent years making his passion and his job indiscriminate. Although there are some who might find such a confluence of interest and economics a curse – the one way to jeopardise something you value is by doing it every day – Blake has managed to ensure his music remains vital and important to him, even as he admits his relationship with his own songs is always changing.
“I mean, it is difficult for me to connect with the guy who was 22 writing ‘Everything Flows’,” Blake says of that Teenage Fanclub hit. “But we’ve been playing the songs for so long now they get kind of indelibly printed on your brain. It’s muscle memory. It’s quite easy to perform them. And it feels as though they still mean the same thing.”
He takes a moment to reflect. “In any case, I’m too scared to look back at YouTube videos and see if we do play them the same,” he chuckles. “That would be awful. That’s my Guantanamo Bay. Stick me in a room and make me watch Teenage Fanclub videos. You just can’t listen to your own music – it’s masochistic.”
Such a reticence to over-examine the past is the key to the Teenage Fanclub legacy. Though their sound draws on the pop of yesteryear as much as from the alt-rock assault of the ’80s, the Fanclub are ever looking forward. Their tenth album Here, released this year, mixes retro influences with something that is yet to occur in their discography – a kind of genuine warmth that feels both cutting-edge and deeply understandable.
That selfsame warmth obviously comes from the sense of enjoyment the musicians themselves get from hitting the studio. “The process of making a record is great fun,” Blake says. “When you start writing a song it’s like, whatever, but when you actually start recording it you listen to all of the elements. It’s great.
“I mean, the way I look at a record is being a statement of that period of time and place. If we made the record two weeks later in a different place, it would probably be totally different, you know? You’re making a statement, then you just move on. It’s either when we run out of money and that forces it to be finished, or we just kind of set a deadline.”
With Here, it was very much a case of the latter – the record was laid down over three international recording studios with two-month breaks in between, so the band was forced to hop around the globe with the clock ticking. “There was an imposed deadline there because we kind of had to make our way to Hamburg from Glasgow,” Blake says. “Because we were in Hamburg, we had to leave at a certain point.
“When we were working on a song and a half a day, that meant we were working pretty well. We just stuck to that kind of schedule. We’ve been doing this for long enough, so you know when you get to the point where it’s as good as it’s going to get.”
Teenage Fanclub’s creative process is a very collaborative one, and the group’s four principal singer-songwriters frequently help shape each other’s work. “We’re of a similar age, we’re of a similar background, and probably really similar political backgrounds as well,” Blake says. “’Cause you’re hearing what other people are writing, we’re kind of influencing each other as we go along. It also helps that we’re all singing on each other’s songs and we’re all playing on each other’s songs. We’ve been doing that for years now.”
At the end of the day, Teenage Fanclub are a group of individuals who truly love making music together. Though Blake is not entirely sure when or if the band will make another record, to borrow a phrase from Joe Strummer, the future is unwritten.
“We don’t really sit and talk about things,” Blake says. “We just kind of do them, you know? We never have. We’ve never planned from one thing to the next … which, you know, perhaps we should.” He laughs. “Maybe we should be a bit more organised after all of this time.”
Here is out now through PeMa/Warner; andTeenage Fanclub appear at Twilight at Taronga,Taronga Zooon Friday March 10, with The Goon Sax.
