However romantic the notion might appear on paper, no artist really wants to be saddled with the reputation of "best-kept secret" - the implication being that a select few are privy to one’s genius but no-one is shouting from the rooftops. Trashcan Sinatras have laboured with this label for their entire career, from their 1990 debut single Obscurity Knocks through to their third album, 1996’s A Happy Pocket, and on into an eight-year void between albums.
Their musical drought is finally over. In a couple of weeks Trashcan Sinatras return with a shimmering new album, Weightlifting. Right now, they are rewarding their most loyal followers - a considerable US fanbase - with a five-week tour of North America.
Back home in Scotland, there is perennial admiration and affection for the band. Earlier this year they played to a huge home crowd at the Belle and Sebastian-headlined free gig in Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens, having been invited by B and S frontman Stuart Murdoch. But this recognition has never been matched by commercial success and it remains to be seen if the group can finally counter years of neglect on home turf with this comeback.
"We’ve never really had any joy here," says a resigned frontman Frank Reader - brother of singer Eddi Reader. "We’ve just never been played on radio."
"I can remember going down to London, feeling proud because in my back pocket I had a great record [the band’s second album I’ve Seen Everything]," says guitarist John Douglas. "It came out at the time that grunge was taking off and radio was concentrating on that, and our record got ignored. It really floors you when you are so proud of something and feel that it’s a piece of work that will last, and it comes out and it’s just neglected."
The lack of exposure may have been soul-destroying for a band who, in the early 1990s, always seemed to be on the cusp of greater things. But worse was to come when their record company Go Discs! was bought over and later liquidated.
"It was dark days for us," says Douglas. "We all stopped answering the phone, stopped going out and became really scunnered with the whole idea of being in the music industry. It didn’t seem to bring any joy whatsoever and it took a few years for us to get our spirits back and just think about writing songs."
"Our confidence had taken a fair knock," agrees Reader. "But I think that had been happening anyway. Go Discs! had been expanding and it just lost its essence. We were already starting to slip through the cracks there and, with that expansion, it was more imperative that bands succeeded. People who had let us do our own thing before had started to make ludicrous suggestions about our music."
Most galling of all, the eventual collapse of the label meant that the band couldn’t afford to keep their beloved Shabby Road Studio going. For years this dilapidated, isolated building in Kilmarnock had been Trashcan Sinatras HQ. At one point four of the five band members were living there, Monkees-style, in order to save on rent elsewhere.
"We could make a racket at 3am and no one would bother apart from the guy in the Chinese restaurant downstairs," Reader recalls fondly. "It was an old building, so if the rain came down it would get behind our windows and flood the guy’s rice room. We would send Paul [guitarist Paul Livingston] round, because he’s the tallest and he’d repaint the ceiling."
Shabby Road became a modest Mecca for other groups, some coming from as far afield as Japan to avail themselves of the Trashcans’ equipment, and hospitality.
"We set it up for ourselves because there was nowhere else," says Reader, "so everybody from Ayr and the Garnock valley would gravitate towards it because it was the only place they could go. We were the hosts so we ended up socialising constantly, always wasted. We needed to calm down and shut the door." |
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When they did finally shut the door it was under duress. The band declared themselves bankrupt and members scattered to gather their thoughts, finances and dignity. Then, after a few years of relative inactivity, they got the chance to record an album in Hartford, Connecticut, apparently the insurance capital of the world. In keeping with the Trashcans’ tradition of stumbling on unusual recording environments, the studio was in an old Colt gun factory.
"It was like an average shut-down factory but with this purple and gold minaret on top which the Russians gave Colt after the Second World War as a thank you for supplying their army with guns," says Reader. "It was an eerie, strange environment, like a cross between a factory and the hotel from The Shining.We were living there too. We were eating out of vending machines every night because we were too scared to go out. It was in the middle of a ghetto and you used to hear gunshots at night."
"The engineer would stop the recording session and say, ‘that’s an AK47’," says Douglas. "He was well up on his armaments." The band were still in sombre mood and the resulting sessions were deemed too dark to form the basis of a comeback album. The recordings were scrapped, although some of the songs made the Trashcans’ exacting grade and were re-recorded for Weightlifting.
"It was an eye opener," says Reader of the experience. "It was almost like we went too early. We were desperate to get going again, but the end result was we tried to do too much too soon.We weren’t recovered from all that stuff. We weren’t at peace with each other so afterwards we ended up scattering again."
Reader took a job in a sorting office, Douglas went busking. Meanwhile, they kept themselves afloat by selling demo CDs, with homemade sleeves, through their website. But, after so long in the creative wilderness, many presumed the group had split up. The band are not afraid to admit that they considered it.
"Every day you’d question, ‘is this worth it?’" says Douglas. "But every couple of weeks or months, there’d be a song that we’d write that would make you forget about the bad side of it."
Eventually, Reader says, "the muse came a-calling." With a fistful of new songs, the band regained their confidence, even recaptured the excitement and empowerment of their early days. Weightlifting - whose completion is, appropriately, a weight lifted off their shoulders - was recorded in their own time, with their own money and, in the UK, will appear on their own label, Picnic Records. It is the Trashcan Sinatras at their graceful, atmospheric, melodic best. "In the two weeks after we finished the record we were walking tall down the street," say Douglas. "We had self-respect again." "Looking back, I’m just amazed that we made the record we made," says Reader. "I like it so much. It’s got a real redemptive feel. That’s what it means to us - the fact that we’ve learned to accept each other and what we do, and play to our strengths rather than fight to be something that we’re not. The record rewards us for sticking to our guns." Let’s hope that this time round opportunity, rather than obscurity, knocks.
• Weightlifting is released by Picnic Records on 18 October
Originally appeared in the Scotsman. |
