One Band One Day

Shadows could be described as music to drift away with, next to a warming fire, a glass of single malt placed nearby. Doesn't that sound wonderful?

'Man-Made is the fading Autumn light to the summer picnic of the albums before it: not so much an album of happiness, but an album of longing.'

Familiarising myself with Howdy! once again I feel like perhaps I judged it too harshly on its release. Listening now it feels fresher and more intriguing than I thought at the time.

For all the supposed narrative peddled (on these pages and elsewhere) about how Thirteen was seen as a disappointing follow-up to Bandwagonesque, and Grand Prix suffered as a consequence, the chart placings of Teenage Fanclub’s...

With Grand Prix it's as if Teenage Fanclub have had their crisis talks, been through the awkward raising of issues, bickered about who trod on whose toes, and hammered out what it really is that...

Critically underappreciated on its release, Thirteen was not the triumphant breakthrough that the response to Bandwagonesque had suggested would be on its way from Teenage Fanclub. It's biggest crime - it's only crime really -...

When you're supposed to be writing a review of one of your favourite albums of all time, and you end up just listening to it, lost in thought, and realise you're just going to have...

The Peel Sessions EP captures Teenage Fanclub at a cross-roads between the murk of A Catholic Education and the gleaning glam leanings of Bandwagonesque.

Two immediate yet contradictory impressions of Teenage Fanclub's debut album A Catholic Education: it doesn't really sound quite like the band they would later become; it does contain one of their defining moments in Everything...

At the end of 1993 I saw Teenage Fanclub play one of the greatest gigs of my life; in 2000 I saw Teenage Fanclub play one of the greatest encores of my life. And in...

“Of course I love the old songs, from New Wave to Murder Park” sings Luke Haines on Future Generations, from the fourth (we weren’t expecting another one…!) album by The Auteurs. See what you can...

After the relative failure of Now I’m A Cowboy, and the irrepressible surge of Britpop, it’s tempting to describe After Murder Park as more of the same, only more so. In order to understand what’s...

“If you possess the wrong kind of ambition, you fall between the cracks”, Luke Haines opines with the final sentence of Chapter 10 of Bad Vibes, the first part of his autobiography.

“What makes you ashamed to be British?” asked Select Magazine of each of its cover stars in the now infamous ‘Yanks Go Home!’ edition in May ‘93. Luke Haines, lead singer of

**New Wave** is 21 today. To celebrate this momentous occasion I am giving myself over - for better or for worse - to the uncompromising snarl and dark mind of Mr Luke Haines for the...

After the not entirely modern, not so old-fashioned either, relatively straight-up Victory for the Comic Muse, much of Bang Goes the Knighthood is refreshingly and charmingly off-beat. At times it’s endearing or silly; sometimes it...

The obvious reference point for the title is the long-forgotten début album Fanfare for the Comic Muse. The truth, as so often is the case with The Divine Comedy, is more ambiguous. Victory for the...

After Regeneration sadly, mystifyingly failed to have the intended impact, Neil Hannon broke up the band, toured with Ben Folds (the two performing extra-special covers of classics such as Careless Whisper to great acclaim), before...

Maybe if just the music had changed…

Fin de Siecle was the last album The Divine Comedy recorded for Setanta; its title is almost too perfect. There’s a definite sense throughout that this thing, in its present form, has gone about as...