ever the optimist – Plain Or Pan

To paraphrase a well-worn old cliché, there are two types of people; those who love the Trashcan Sinatras and those who haven’t yet heard them.

The Trashcans are the epitome of the cult band. Look up the meaning and see for yourself:

A niche appeal that doesn’t conform to mainstream trends. In the late ’80s, their tight, studied Caledonian jangle was at odds with the more loose-limbed approach that seeped its way outwards from Manchester’s Oldham Street like a pair of Joe Bloggs bell bottoms. In the ’90s, their now-considered classic second album I’ve Seen Everything was lost to the blustery winds of grunge. Their third, 1996’s A Happy Pocket – an album packed full of tunes and melody and inventiveness – failed to make an impact in a musical landscape dominated by two mega-selling and zeitgeist-surfing guitar groups. And so it went on.

Longevity and influence, maintaining relevance over decades. The Trashcans have been making records for over 35 years. Rightly so, I’ve Seen Everything regularly crops up in lists of ‘Best Scottish Albums Ever’ – as should their fourth album Weightlifting, if yr askin’. A young Fran Healy popped up as a support act at one point, his demo tape making its way via the supportive headliners to the label which would sign him and the group that eventually became Travis. That’s longevity and influence right there.

A dedicated fanbase, with intensely loyal supporters. Fans of the Trashcans are well used to playing the long game. By the time their magnificent seventh album arrives at the end of July, it’ll be over a decade since their last album, 2016’s Wild Pendulum. A brief reissue period of their Go! Discs albums and a couple of stand alone singles aside, Ever The Optimist is a record that is eagerly anticipated. The group’s intensely loyal support has, for a few years now, subscribed monthly to the group’s Patreon page. Their subscription fees have gone a long way to financing the upcoming record and patrons of the group have been rewarded with a drip-feed of brand new material that suggests the Trashcans have lost none of their way with a melodic twist and a hooky guitar line (they haven’t – I’ve been lucky enough to have been living with the new record since October last year and it is indeed every bit as good as the released tracks suggest it will be.)

I’ve been doing a bit of writing around the new album too. As with previous publications The Perfect Reminder and The Full Pocket, this new book (?) will dig deep to uncover the inspirations and perspiration around the 11 songs that make up the new record. It’s about 80% finished and, even if I do say so myself, it’s a worthy companion to one of the records of the year. So, you can look out for that when it makes it into print.

It was during an interview with Francis around March when it was suggested that the Trashcans might want to film a video for the title track of the new album. Could I find availability in Irvine’s Harbour Arts Centre around the middle of June? The Trashcans had a small window of opportunity – both Francis and Paul would be home to visit relatives around the 18th of the month and if possible, they’d be looking to film the video then. They were keeping their options open though – a Glasgow pub was also pencilled in as a possible location, the pros and cos of both venues a fiercely debated conversation between band and manager and video production team and – batting for the home team – myself. Eventually, Irvine won out; the right decision as everyone agreed.

It was suggested in conversation that perhaps, maybe, possibly, the group might entertain the notion of playing a few songs after they’d filmed the video shoot. “Like a gig.” There. It was out. The five group members hadn’t been in the same room for eight years. A rehearsal would be necessary. Or rehearsals, plural. When would they fit that in? A gig was unlikely then. Or was it? Yes. It was definitely unlikely. Really though…was it?

Somehow, come Thursday there, the group was into both the video shoot and a small, low-key gig on the same night. With the Harbour Arts Centre’s 100 capacity audience, it was immediately clear that demand for such a show would far outstrip supply, and so, in lieu of selling tickets, the group took the decision to invite family as well as close friends and allies to the performance. It would need to be top secret. Silence Is Golden. The Sound Of Silence. Enjoy The Silence. Enjoy the silence?!? It’s agony knowing about something that’s guaranteed to be totally magic, yet being forbidden to mention it. Word gets out about this and Irvine harbourside would be awash with collapsing quiffs and foggy spectacled, ticketless fans. Silence should indeed be golden.

A guest list was drawn up. Whittled down. Re-drawn. Re-whittled. Augmented and amended. Replies were immediate and almost all in the affirmative. ‘Yes! We’ll be there! Yes! We won’t tell a soul!’ And d’you know what? No one told a soul. I was amazed that nothing as much as a squeak got out. If you were on that list, well done you. The gravity of the occasion – the classic line-up of the Trashcan Sinatras, live and in the same room for the first time in eight years – was clearly not lost on any of the invited audience.

Thursday 18th June eventually arrived…and there they were! All five Trashcans, packed onto the small ‘stage’ of the HAC, standing on yr actual Paolo Nutini’s Persian rugs for a mid-afternoon soundcheck doubling as a second rehearsal (they’d rehearsed in Glasgow the day before) where they greased the rusty cogs of guitar-based melodic pop back into action. They sounded brilliant; a bit scuffed at the edges, and with not as much of the polished sheen that helps make the records so timeless and essential, but playing with vigour and a studied dedication to the cause.

They looked great too. A crack New York video team had been flown in especially and the tiny theatre had been transformed into a proper video set. Greens and aquas and scarlets and cyans swept and swooped above…behind…below the group, throwing long shadows on the walls, throwing those in attendance into a bit of a tizz. A pop video! Being made right in front of us! (And this was just the afternoon too; the only folk there were those essential to the running of the show – just wait until later, when 100 eager fans are in attendance.) They run through the video playback five or six times and then, with relevant footage in the can, everyone stops for food and braces themselves for the evening ahead.

There’s a queue longer than Irvine Mall come doors open time and once in, the lucky hundred make straight for a seat. There’s not a bad seat in the house though – indeed, ‘house’ is being generous to this small and intimate room – and once they realise, half the audience makes their way to the merch stand instead. There are bespoke ‘Trashcan Sinatras HAC Irvine’ t-shirts for sale. By the end of the night, none remain. A momentous occasion requires a momentous t-shirt.

The performance? It’s their first hometown show for 39 years – that’s thirty-nine, Archie, and it’s dazzling…melancholic…life-affirming…tear-jerking…unbelievable…funny…pinch me…all of that and more. The Trashcans did two sets of career-spanning fan favourites (Hayfever! Got Carried Away! How Can I Apply?! Easy Read! Orange Fell! Weightlifting!) as well as live debuts of new material (Games For The ZX Spectrum! The Bitter End!), a couple of kinda live, kinda mimed filmed video performances the meat in the musical sandwich. A set that closes with Send For Henny and Earlies would be exquisite in anyone’s repertoire, and in the hands of the Trashcans, the entire room melts just a little. An unplanned encore of Obscurity Knocks was outrageously brilliant, the scrubbed acoustic guitars that little bit faster, the lightning flash of guitar solo that little bit slicker, the ‘turned 21, twist, bust, wrong again‘ line delivered like Johnny Rotten in ’76. Old Irvine punks never die, apparently. Pound for pound, this was breathtaking stuff.

Will the group tour to promote the album? With Francis and Paul both living on the west coast of America, and what with the cost of touring these days, it all makes for a logistical headache. I’m not so sure they will. Will they play bespoke live shows here and there when the stars and travel arrangements align? I certainly hope so. Everyone in Irvine – band, crew and especially audience – were enraptured. If it can’t be bottled and sold along with the t-shirts, it needs to be brought to the people, however that may be.

You can order Ever The Optimist here.

While you’re waiting for the end of July, here’s the visualiser for Games for The ZX Spectrum…or Zee Ex Spectrum, if you happen to find yourself talking about great music when you’re Stateside with the Tartan Army.

There’s been a good wee buzz in the more discreet corners of the world wide web surrounding the imminent release of the Trashcan Sinatras‘ (magnificent) seventh album, Ever The Optimist.

Around the turn of the year, Billy Sloan’s BBC Radio Scotland show had the first play of The Bitter End, the irony of the track’s title only slightly lost on the evergreen presenter who was at the helm for his second-to-last late-night radio show. A sparkling and thumping three chord guitar anthem, The Bitter End was, in the absence of an actual physical single release, the ideal track with which to announce the return of a group which had been low-key to the point of invisibility over the past decade. Save a couple of largely ignored (yet indispensable) 7″ and 12″ releases and a back catalogue reissue campaign through the Last Night From Glasgow label, the group had been apparently inactive. Their previous album, Wild Pendulum, was now ten years old and there was an uneasy air that maybe, as far as cult groups go, that was that.

Little did anyone outwith the group’s close-knit inner circle know, but ideas and rhyming couplets and chord progressions and guitary hooklines and actual songs were percolating, whizzing around the planet between the principal Trashcans in the form of digital demos, the bedrock upon which Ever The Optimist was taking shape.

If The Bitter End was the perfect ‘we’re back! back! back!’ lead ‘single’, then its follow-up would further whet the appetite of a collective fanbase desperate for more few material. Bad Husband was ushered confidently into the world a month or so ago, a duet with Camera Obscura’s Traceyanne Campbell with a cyclical chord progression and weaving melody to die for; the Trashcans of old, but viewed through an Islands In The Stream filter. I must’ve heard – and really listened to – this song a couple of hundred times by now and it’s yet to sound anything less than fresh and urgent.

I’ve been very lucky, y’see, to have had the entire record on repeat for six months or so. I’ve grown to love its perfect mix of bombast and brittleness, the way it flits from loud to quiet, from foot-down-and-drive anthemic to heartstring-tugging introspection and insularity. Without spoiling anything further, I’d say with a fair amount of confidence that Trashcan Sinatras fans will really take to it and love it. I might even suggest, debatable as that will prove to be, that it’s the band’s greatest album.

I was actually a wee bit surprised at the choice of third ‘single’.

Melodramatic and its accompanying video was released mid-week there, again to high praise and an outpouring of superlatives. Within the context of the album, Melodramatic might be my least favourite track (yes, really!) – which might say something to anyone here who’s reading this and now can’t wait for the album – but taken as a stand alone track…and with the benefit of a video behind it, (especially the video) I’ve been appreciating it all the more.

Much of the studio footage in the video was captured four years ago in Glasgow’s Gloworm Studios by Stephanie Gibson. Stephanie, as some readers here will know, was responsible for the portraits and abstract images that helped elevate The Perfect Reminder (my book on the making of the second TCS album) from mere reportage to definitive biography. Stephanie’s video footage was sympathetically edited and knitted together by Chris Dooley. Chris, as some readers here will also know, was responsible for the design, look and feel of The Perfect Reminder, elevating it from definitive biography to luxury item. And why am I telling you this?

I’m telling you this because four years ago, just after our book was given the Saturday night headline slot at the Aye Write book festival in Glasgow, Stephanie and myself were invited to Gloworm for an afternoon. So while Stephanie was filming the band at work, I was sat on a couch in the studio taking it all in; John as he played a chord sequence – warming up, I thought – until Davy leaned over and slid the faders on the desk to bathe the room in a sound of liquid gold – a brand new Trashcans’ track in the process of being born! I could see Stephen in the drum room, working his kit with a tender touch. I could hear Paul’s guitar(s), flown in digitally from the west coast of America and playing fantastically and loudly through the studio’s speaker system. And although I couldn’t yet see Frank, I could hear him and his unmistakable pitch-perfect voice. He was singing slowly – crooning even – about ‘the likes of Cincinnati‘. Wow, I thought. They’re channelling Scott Walker, but twisting his words through trademark TCS wordplay and turning out a slow-burning beauty…and right before my eyes and ears. If this is the demo, I’m thinking, I can’t wait to hear the finished version.

“Yeah,” said Frank to me a month or so ago. “We binned that one.”

It’s not on the upcoming record at all. Which, again, should give TCS fans a glimpse into the high watermark of quality they demand before they’ll attach their name to a song.

If you watch the video carefully – and don’t blink at the wrong moment – around the 37 seconds mark, you’ll catch a glimpse of my surprised face as Stephanie’s camera swoops down on the sofa I was sitting in while that glorious Trashcans sound filled the room. Look ma! It’s me! In a pop video! What a thrill!