From The Vault: Teenage Fanclub's 'Bandwagonesque'

It took me three decades to realize the Scottish band's third record is pure pop perfection.

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Good Morning!

Today we’re taking another look at Teenage Fanclub’s 1991 record, Bandwagonesque.

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In 1984, the Portland Trailblazers drafted Sam Bowie over Michael Jordan. Jordan, of course, became arguably the best player in NBA history. Bowie went on to become the answer to a trivia question. He was a conspicuously odd pick in a draft year stacked with talent, even before the benefit of hindsight.

Bowie wasn't even the best player Portland drafted that year (that title goes to Jerome Kersey, RIP).

Seven years later, we had 1991: arguably the best year for music in the modern era. No matter the genre, bands produced some of their best work.

• Alternative your thing? Great! There was REM's “Out of Time.”

• Metal? This was the year Metallica shot for the moon with their self-titled ("black") album.

• Into this new thing called grunge? You were in luck. A Seattle band called Pearl Jam put out “Ten," and a trio from Aberdeen went to Madison, made a record, and put a naked baby on the cover.

So when Spin magazine named its Top 20 for the year, it was hard not to glance askance at its pick: Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque. Having over half of the records on the list—including this one— and having heard all but one of them (sorry, Robyn Hitchcock), I didn't get the fuss.

I bought this record like everyone else. I wanted to like this record as much as everyone else around me seemed to. I unwrapped it, put it in the player, and…nothing.

It was like when you want your kid to try new food and entice them by saying, "you like everything in it." Here was a record with songs that sounded so much like Big Star that Alex Chilton might've mistaken it for one of his own. On tracks like “Satan,” there's fractious noise. That's a plus for me.

"What You Do To Me"? Pure power-pop perfection.

They were humble, repeatedly saying they had no interest in the life of a pop star. BIG check from 16-year-old me.

And yet, it felt flat. I turned my nose up.

Was it influential? Yep. Did people rave about it seemingly forever? Also, yes. I didn't care. For years, Bandwagonesque was my cautionary tale—an argument against buying an entire CD on the strength of one song.

It became my sonic Sam Bowie.

Later, as iTunes came into being, this was a slide in my pitch deck on why streaming was a good thing (“You can just buy what you like!”).

I put it on a shelf (literally and metaphorically) and forgot about it.

Flash forward 30+ years. I'm writing again and listening to music more than ever. I've fostered an uneasy peace with the algorithm gods I so championed in their infancy and rationalized the dissonance of hating the compensation model while also being dazzled by the discovery.

Slowly, the band starts showing up in my feeds. Once in a while at first, then on friend's lists, then as a constant on my own. I take it as a sign but still refuse to give the entire record a listen.

Old habits die hard, I guess.

The final straw? A former co-worker messaged me to talk shop. I won't bore you with that chatter, but had I heard Ben Gibbard's cover of the record? My curiosity was piqued. It was time to give the album another listen.

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I know that the record today is the same as in 1991, yet it feels entirely different. Opening with "The Concept," a mid-tempo song with an easy gait, there are plenty of "oohs and aahs" within 3 minutes.

As its comically literal music video demonstrates, "The Concept" works better as a foggy daydream than as an actual character study. This is part of the charm of Bandwagonesque: Its love songs, like the swooning "What You Do to Me," seem more inspired by the genre of love songs than by actual love.

~Sam Sodomsky, Pitchfork magazine.

That's followed by "Satan," which starts with fractious noise and, at 1:22, feels like a fraction of a song. Yet it's reminiscent of the Nirvana sound I loved at the time. What did I miss?

"What You Do To Me," my one song for this record, was—and is— the stuff of earworms. It's gooey pop perfection.

What you do to me...
I know, I can't believe
There's something about you
Got me down on my knees.

The middle of the album becomes a bit repetitive, with “Pet Rock,” “Sidewinder,” and “Alcoholiday” all blending into one. But it's a nice enough-sounding blob, and after a few listens, I find myself singing along with each just the same.

My new favorite is "What is Music," the final track on the record. There's no punchline here; it's not because the record is over. It's a beautiful instrumental and wouldn't be out of place on an athlete's highlight reel.

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Bowie was gone before Jordan retired the first time, flirted with baseball, or made Space Jam. He has found success in harness racing in his native Lexington, Kentucky. A horse he owns has won hundreds of thousands. In 2005, he was inducted into Kentucky's Basketball Hall of Fame, a small bit of consolation for being cursed with injuries.

And in a similar vein--yes, this has been the clumsiest analogy ever--Teenage Fanclub has grabbed a bit of redemption as well. Bandwagonesque isn't a one-trick pony. It's a solid power-pop record.

Looking back through the lens of hindsight, it stands up as well as any other record on that fabled list.

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Listen:

Click the record to listen on the platform of your choice.

What do you think of this record? If you had it when it first came out, did you like it, or did it grow on you slowly?

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Thanks for being here,

Kevin—