Teenage Fanclub’s Do Not Dare To Dream takes its name from Norman Blake’s “I Do Not Dare To Dream,” an infectious anthemic song driven by ringing acoustic guitars, joined at the end by duelling electric guitars that wrap around each other like a reassuring hug. Blake says that the title is meant to mock those memes that urge people to “dare to dream,” which to him are “kind of ridiculous... I don’t think the world works that way.”
Teenage Fanclub’s 13th album is full of songs that are calmly resolute, taking stock of the fraught state of the world without succumbing to despair. Blake’s warm, organ washed midtempo ballad “Day In The Sun” and Raymond McGinley’s “Over And Over” both speak to how everyone can find a renewed sense of purpose by opening their hearts. “We can still be cheerful and optimistic in the face of things not being great,” McGinley says. “My parents’ generation lived in Glasgow when there were bombs falling out of the sky. And here we are, however many years later. Things change.” Blake and McGinley are joined on Do Not Dare To Dream by their bandmates Euros Childs (keyboards and vocals), Francis Macdonald (drums) and David McGowan (bass). This quintet has played together long enough now that neither of Teenage Fanclub’s principal songwriters and guitarists feel the need to fuss over their songs or work up arrangements before they enter the studio. They’d rather wait for the rest of the group’s input.
The initial sessions took place over 14 days at Black Bay Studio, in the township of Kirkibost, on the Scottish Outer Hebrides island of Great Bernera. Teenage Fanclub likes to take advantage of what a studio has available to use, and at Black Bay the band found a Domus church organ (prominently heard on many songs, including “Over And Over”) and a lot of different synthesizers. Euros Childs on keys brings a lot of sonic colour on this record, from the ’70s sound of the Solina String Ensemble on “Tomorrow People” to the Mellotron flutes on McGinley’s gently reflective “Take Time”, and across every other song. Add to that the musicality of David McGowan’s counterpoint melodies on bass and Francis Macdonald playing so freely and expressively on the drums and you can hear how it all adds up to the confident collective identity of the band that McGinley was talking about.
As longtime fans are likely aware, Teenage Fanclub record each album in a new place so that they can let its unique atmosphere influence the music. Great Bernera is their most remote recording location yet, which helped the band focus on the work but also put them in a place of awe, surrounded as they were by the crashing sea and ancient ruins. Blake recalls “not too far from the studio, on the adjacent island of Lewis, there’s an ancient monument called the Callanish Stones, which is older than Stonehenge. The whole area is kind of magical.” McGinley expands, “it’s a place where they had a lot of Neolithic monuments. Later on it was a Viking area. And on our time off, we’d go see these things which are like, I don’t know, 5000 years old. Some of us went for a walk every morning, ‘round over the hills and stuff. I think all that plays into the feeling on the record, being in this kind of timeless landscape with connections to unknown civilizations from a long, long time ago. All those things that make you feel small, but in a good way.”
The result is a collection of songs suffused with the proper perspective of musicians who have been around for a while, recorded in a place that has been around even longer. As Blake puts it, “I think what happens is you just move from one thing into the next and before you know it, 30 years have passed. McGinley adds: “Yeah, it’s been a while since we started doing this thing we do, but to us it feels like no time at all. In the place where we made the record people would have been singing thousands of years ago. Life is short, but music is eternal.”
