how i enjoyed a sound thrashing

the scotsman

by craig mclean
october 26, 2001

QUESTION: Are The Trash Can Sinatras Scotland’s greatest wee band? Answer: Yes. Will that do?

Well, it should do. I’d just like to be a fan, thanks, if it’s all the same. I’d just rather be blindly enthusiastic rather than strategically supportive or offer qualified encouragement.

Are they trendy, happenin’, edgy, innovative, cutting-edge, bleeding-edge, multi-media, handsome, youthful prodigies, aggro merchants or nursing heroically rock’n’roll drug habits? Nope, sorry, none of the above. They’re just magic. I’ve always thought this, from hearing their first single, Obscurity Knocks, in 1990, and onwards through three albums that seemed to be bought by fewer and fewer people. My faith has been simple and simplistic: they do "guitar pop", knife-sharp tunes, scalpel-deft lyrics, arrangements to die for and gigs of head-banging fun like no other band. I’ve seen them play loads of times, all over Scotland, even enjoying the times they pished on their own chips by being so falling-down drunk that they could barely play and singer Frank Reader could hardly pronounce his own name.

I interviewed them on a few occasions, a couple of times in their Shabby Road studios in Kilmarnock, and was perplexed by their mumbling reluctance, or inability, to be as persuasive as their music. For one so erudite, prosaic and witty in his lyrics, why was Frank so unwilling to talk at all, far less proclaim the band’s brilliance? But they’d rather go for a pint than go for the public’s jugular.

What rubbish pop "stars" they were. They were unlucky: their literate, wry second album, I’ve Seen Everything, emerged as the grunge wars raged; their third, 1996’s A Happy Pocket, came out just before their record company died. They were the bridesmaids: Travis, early on, played a breakthrough gig supporting The Trash Cans, and Fran Healy would go round Frank’s house asking for advice. Six
years later, the ideas that Travis, Coldplay and David Gray have made mainstream and massive can be traced back to the more interesting and involved ideas of The Trash Can Sinatras.

They were lazy (too long between albums), perverse (burying singles deep in albums), poets but pragmatists, rain-lashed west-coast pessimists. The closing line from A Happy Pocket is: "these Scots west coast delta blues give me the hump-backed bells of hell, so shut up, your time is up ... " There followed rumours of tax exile for Frank, bankruptcy for the band, and the obligatory "millionaire guardian angel Japanese fan/label wants to pay for new album … " Another diamonds-in-the-dog-dirt Scottish band dies a death.

Then, last week, The Trash Can Sinatras played a few shows. They did two in London, at the 200-ish capacity King’s Cross Water Rats. I was very, very excited, and very, very drunk, and jumped about like an eejit, and ended up on the stage with some other bloke, cheering on the claps for one more song, and helping carry the gear to the van, and then bending the band’s ears about how magic they were, and how awesome The Safecracker sounded, and what was that last new song called, and would there be a new album soon?

It was fantastic. It was fantastic to just be a fan, drunk and stupid and gibberingly enthusiastic, and not go afterwards, "Yeah, it was all right, but … " God knows these days, there are few enough bands who aren’t mediocrity hailed as manna, gimmickry twisted into innovation. The next day, mind, I was mortified. Ach well.

PS - Sober again, I checked this week on their plans: a hoped-for grant from the Scottish Arts Council to record the big bunch of new songs they have. Let the good times roll again …

Originally appeared in the Scotsman.