Into Music: Teenage Fanclub – Do Not Dare To Dream
I’ve seen Teenage Fanclub play live more times than I can recount but there’s something uniquely exciting about watching a band play outside their natural habitat. The intimacy of the venues. Proximity to the stage? The feeling of commitment rewarded. A bit like a Tartan Army expedition overseas but safe in the knowledge that music this good rarely lets you down.
The gig itself was typically excellent. Nineteen songs, three of them from the new album, delivered with a sharp melodic resonance that’s the band’s trademark. They have so many great songs to choose from (even post Gerry Love’s departure) although inevitably it’s the four from Bandwagonesque that are greeted most warmly by those in Granada.
Like many of you reading this, I suspect, the younger me loved that record. And I mean really loved, like it was a family member I knew I’d never fall out with. But the younger me was also hyperbolic. Emotions dialled up to the max like a Fast Show character where everything was either brilliant or it wasn’t. The current me is less prone to reactive extemporisation. More inclined towards personal reflection.
Enter, with notable prescience, the thirteenth Teenage Fanclub album. Do Not Dare To Dream – named as an inverse to the ‘always on’ Panglossian worldview of Instagram influencer messaging – is a reflective record in so many ways. As the twelfth established, Nothing Lasts Forever; a universal truth, and a mood setting for its successor. It isn’t a surprise then to read that the new album was recorded during winter months in the remote, sparse environment of Black Bay Studios in the Outer Hebrides.
Across thirty-nine minutes, these ten songs don’t deviate far from the tried and tested. The traditional twin Fanclub pillars of harmonious vocals surfing the gentler waves of chiming guitar lines. When combined like this, It’s hard not to think of the sun going down and the tide gradually going out. But, just as there’s nothing here to raise the blood pressure, that’s metaphor, not criticism.
Those of us in the later stages of life are more regularly taking stock. Of our relationships with those we love and have loved. Of what we’ve achieved and might still aspire to. And what we might leave behind. That, for the most part, is the DNA of these songs. Musically, CSN&Y is an obvious touchstone. Although, ‘Over and Over’ recalls Simon & Garfunkel in its hopeful message that love is indeed the answer. ‘Be With You Tonight’ continues this cautiously optimistic theme.
To balance this, the album’s title track – and its high point – is an affecting reflection on male vulnerability. It acknowledges the challenges that many of us feel when faced with doubt. That palpable sense of merely hanging on in the slipstream of loss: of identity, of confidence, of love, of health, of life. When underscoring all is the fear of letting go. Of losing control. The remaining songs tilt on this emotional axis. The rollercoaster of hope and anxiety that constitutes modern life in a worldwide context of malign artifice and with existential threat around every daily news corner.
“Time to look out, time to look in … time to take time.”
The lyrics aren’t Dylan profound. But there’s subtle, nuanced meaning and personal connection in the album’s simple and direct poetry. And it hits home a little more with each repeated listen. With age, we yearn for things to stay the same. For the musicians we love to produce music as vital to us as it was the first time we fell in love with it. But if we’ve all changed then this desire is unrealistic. I no longer expect music to change my world. I now hope that it reinforces it.
To return to the significance of context, music becomes great when it finds you at points in life where it comforts, reassures, inspires, and lifts you up. Do Not Dare To Dream – released on my 62nd birthday – does exactly that.
Go on, let yourself be lifted up.
