In October and November of this year Teenage Fanclub will be playing 35 shows across the European continent, specifically in Spain, France, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, UK, and Ireland.

Norman Blake: “We’ve been doing this touring thing for a long time now, someone just told me it’s 37 years since our first show in 1989, but I don’t think about it that way. This is just my life, our lives, it’s what we do. But we seem to enjoy it now more than ever. If you ever felt jaded by the prospect of doing this kind of thing it would be best to give up. 12 shows in Spain, and all the other places too - amazing!”

So is this an anniversary tour? Raymond McGinley: “Well, for us it’s the anniversary of everything and the anniversary of nothing. “Anniversary Of Nothing” – that could be a good album title. I suppose every day is an anniversary of something…”

If not an anniversary tour, will this be a tour around a new album? Raymond again: “As a band we think it’s good to have a mindset that you’re always working towards something new. In our minds we’re still a contemporary band, not much different than when we started. At some point we’ll have new songs ready to release, but until then we’d rather keep any work in progress to ourselves.”

n November of last year, at the end of a three week American tour, fellow musicians Steven Black (bass), Peter Richardson (drums) and myself were booked in to record an album in Nashville, Tennessee with engineer Mark Nevers.

Recorded live over six days, sessions were easy going stress free affairs, starting at 11am and winding down around tea time. We never played a song more than a handful of times and most were captured in the first or second take. The fact that the studio was also Mark’s house probably added to the relaxed atmosphere of the sessions.

As a result, I can’t help feeling slightly guilty that the recording sessions didn’t require the usual exhausting thirteen hour days and endless takes of songs. The album came together so quickly that I can barely recall the recording. And from a personal point of view this makes for a good listening experience, even to the extent that it feels a bit like listening to somebody else’s record. The whole album sounds very fresh to me.

Cheer Gone isn’t a country record. It was recorded in Nashville because I like the sound of Mark Nevers’ records. If he had been recording in Port Talbot we would have gone there to record. Having said that the album does feature some fine Nashville musicians who have been known to play in the country style: Chris Scruggs who played some lap steel and acoustic guitar, Jamey Lampkins who plucked the banjo, veteran session fiddle player Glen Duncan and Matt Swanson of Lambchop who played bass on ‘Saving up to get married’.

That’s about it, hope you like it.

Euros