An extract from Higher Than The Sun looking at the album Teenage Fanclub made by accident...
It must have been some relief, then, when Creation received a telephone call from Teenage Fanclub in late spring. Signed quietly to Creation early in 1991, the band had been packed off – possibly as a cost-conscious measure – to Amazon Studios in Liverpool, a smaller scale facility though one with a rapidly growing reputation; in addition to its use by many successful local artists, The Smiths had recorded Meat Is Murder there with Stephen Street in 1984. Well used to even their most productive signings displaying a tendency towards taking their time in the studio, Creation were pleasantly surprised to the point of incredulity to be informed that after just three weeks of recording, Teenage Fanclub had completed an entire album to everyone’s satisfaction. At Creation’s suggestion, and with the enthusiastic support of producer Don Fleming , the band used the remaining pre-booked studio time to rattle through as many potential b-sides as they could, with the result that when the completed album was delivered it came accompanied by a dozen or so improvised songs, tongue-in-cheek cover versions, and wild instrumentals. When he heard the results, Alan McGee had one of the most inspired ideas of his entire career.
The only problem that Creation had encountered when signing Teenage Fanclub was that as a result of an earlier arrangement, they were still nominally contracted to Matador Records for the USA, which not only brought with it a level of potential interference from the long-established and notoriously anti-materialistic label, but also prevented McGee from pulling off one of his lucrative licensing deals at a time when the additional revenue was sorely needed. Although Matador’s reputation had initially appealed to the band’s instincts, they had by now come to share McGee’s belief that their music deserved far wider exposure, and this was something that was never likely to happen with Matador influencing their commercial moves. Once an up and coming American musician named Kurt Cobain had started to namecheck Teenage Fanclub in interviews, it was clear that something had to be done to improve their Stateside prospects.
Feeling that the hastily-recorded extras were just about interesting enough to constitute a low-key release in their own right, McGee assembled the peculiar collection of tracks into a limited edition mini-album named The King, which was then duly presented to Matador as the next Teenage Fanclub album; whether this actually fulfilled their contractual obligations to Matador or the label simply washed their hands of the band in alarm remains a matter of some debate. What nobody was really prepared for, however, was that the ragbag assembly of spontaneous playfulness would, when released in the UK, both meet with positive reviews and even briefly find its way into the lower reaches of the album chart. More a successful accident than a proper project, The King has been largely unavailable since its initial release, and whether it stands up to repeated listening is a debatable point, but the fact remains that in its proper context it was a credibility-maintaining album that effectively gave Creation two releases for the price of one. This was a trick that the label would later utilise again, to even greater commercial effect.
Heavily influenced by Don Fleming’s input, The King is a frenzied and chaotic yet also coherently assembled collection of oddities and experiments. Much of the album is largely instrumental; there are two frantic, shambolic rattles through Heavy Metal, a track that had originally appeared on their debut album A Catholic Education, only haphazardly sped up and with police sirens and atonal saxophone thrown in for good measure, along with a rumbling tempo-careering tribute to American hardcore band and longtime Teenage Fanclub favourites Mudhoney, and a disjointed cover of Pink Floyd’s 1967 excursion into free-form guitar noise, Interstellar Overdrive. The only full song is a surprisingly effective, if amusingly unlikely, rendition of Madonna’s 1985 chart-topper Like A Virgin, while the album’s highlight, the penultimate track The Ballad Of Bow Evil (Slow And Fast) which teeters on total musical disintegration throughout, is as unlike anything recorded during the proper album sessions as it is possible to get.
Higher Than The Sun - the story of Screamadelica, Foxbase Alpha, Bandwagonesque, Loveless and Creation Records' first attempt at taking on the world - is available as a paperback here or as an eBook here.