There’s a La’s story I was party to a few years ago. It concerned the recording of their album – I mean, it would, wouldn’t it? The gist of the story involved a conversation between Lee Mavers and a producer – Mike Hedges, maybe, Steve Lillywhite, perhaps (whichever one they’d been encouraged to work with on this particular session, it doesn’t really matter), with Mavers getting hot under his Evertonian collar at the producer’s inability to capture the sound in his head.
‘But it sounds great, Lee!‘ said the producer, with genuine reason.
‘Nah. It’s shit, mate.’
‘It’s brilliant, Lee. Honestly!‘
Mavers looks him directly in the eye.
‘D’you know when yer mam makes soup and she takes all the ingredients; the lentils and the beans and the pulses and the onions and the stock and she mixes it all together and what it tastes of isn’t only the lentils and the beans and the pulses and the onions and the stock…but she’s somehow created another flavour? That’s what I want from our music. You,’ said Mavers pointing accusingly at his patient producer, ‘are incapable of bringing out that magic flavour.’
Lee Mavers. Souperstar.
It’s more fact than argument these days, but when Gerry Love left Teenage Fanclub, the magic ingredient that elevated that group’s music above and beyond their peers also left with him. A musician with a supreme pop nous derived from the left of centre and the more obscurish corners of music fandom, Love is a master at wringing a melody from simple words and chords. Hindsight shows that, while in Teenage Fanclub, the Love-penned tracks were often the best. Slower to hit the spot in some cases, immediately ace in others, a song written by G. Love comes with an 18 carat gold certificate of excellence.
I sat in on a soundcheck a couple of years ago while the now-solo Gerry and his backing band worked up dazzling versions of Don’t Look Back and Star Sign and Sparky’s Dream and December and Sweet Days Waiting and Thin Air and…(you get my drift, surely)…this – one of his greatest compositions.
Teenage Fanclub – Going Places
Nestling innocuously in the middle of side two of 1995’s Grand Prix – the thinking man’s favourite TFC album (or is that Songs From Northern Britain?) – Going Places show cases not only Gerry’s way with a melodic twist, but also Norman’s divine harmonies and Raymond’s tasteful use of fuzz guitar. It’s Teenage Fanclub in microcosm – a beauty, in other words.
Ringing in on a riff born from Roger McGuinn tackling Maggie May, Going Places is classic mid-paced, mid-era Fanclub. It’s Gerry’s song, so he takes the lead, singing against his trademark frugging bass, his bandmates clearing a space around him. ‘Look at this,’ they go in the playground of pop. ‘Ain’t Gerry’s song sumthin’ special?!‘ The group picks it up for a chorus which arrives on the coat tails of hammered-on and hanging on chords, replete with some sweet, sweet Norman harmonies, Raymond and his fuzz box roughing it up just so. ‘Just kick my feet off the ground, I’ll embrace the sky,’ goes Gerry, Norman joining in on honeyed harmonies as the group behind them aims for the stars and overshoots to the sun.
They know, the Teenage Fanclub, that sometimes less is more, so they immediately pull back. Is that a banjo after the first chorus? I think it is, y’know. A gentle clatter of milk bottle percussion amongst the down-home brouhaha? Sounds like it. There’s some reverberating, vamping organ, some mild tremolo action from Raymond in the second verse, a subtle hint of polite feedback and then the next chorus is upon us, guitars zipping freely as the clouds part, the sun-scorched melody sounding both melancholic and uplifting – a rare trick that not many writers can pull of successfully. The whole thing chimes and clangs and rings and zings in a giddy union of interplay, the McGuinn-does-Maggie-May signature riff echoing forever and we’re – yes! – into another chorus, Gerry kicking his feet off the ground, a falsetto’d Norman momentarily letting himself go and woo-hoo-hooing like Al Jardine in 1966. If y’don’t like this song, the saying goes, you must be deaf or dead, or both.
Gerry Love is, like me, an alumnus of Our Price. While I was manning the counters in Irvine and Kilmarnock, Gerry was doing likewise in Hamilton. Within the identikit shopping centres of Hamilton, Irvine and Kilmarnock you’d find branches of a chain of travel agents called Going Places. I like to think that the shop name stuck somewhere in Love’s head, waiting for the right song to come along. We might not have Our Price and Going Places anymore, but we’ll always have Going Places.
Plain Or Pan 