“Welcome back, back to here, back from the edge…”
Eight years after they went away, The Trashcan Sinatras have come back. Not that they went far. They still live in Glasgow and on Scotland’s west coast. Nor did they moulder in inactivity. They kept playing, popping up on stages and in bars and at festivals, in Scotland, London and the Far East. In March, their long-standing cult status in America resulted in a slot at the prestigious South By Southwest music industry festival in Austin, Texas. Most recently, they supported Belle & Sebastian at a big, free, open-air concert in Glasgow, at the personal request of B&S singer Stuart Murdoch.
There were CDs, too. In 1999, three years after the release of their third album A Happy Pocket, they assuaged their enthusiastic Japanese fanbase with an EP, Snow. In 2003, messages on their heavily-trafficked website (www.trashcansinatras.com) called for the release of some of the band’s copious demos, rarities and obscurities, so they put out the internet-only compilation Zebra Of The Family. On A B Road – a collection of b-sides – followed, thick with the band’s customary attention to detail: beautiful cover art, detailed sleevenotes, and songs rich with sublime melodies and lyrical invention. B-sides are special too, you know.
All well and good. But it wasn’t a new album. Frank, Paul, John, Davy and Stephen were known to be constant, and consummate, writers. So where was the fourth album?
The Trashcan Sinatras are not dafties, or fibbers. They’ve had a few knocks, but which band hasn’t? They understand that being a pure, imaginative outfit with three talented vocalists and a thing for meaningful lyrics and perfectly-wrought tunes, doesn’t mean someone’s going to give you money to record those songs. That having an ‘underground’, rabid following is also a way of saying that you’re not a commercial or mainstream artist.
Yes, they’ve had a bit of bad luck in their time. The collapse of Go! Discs, the supportive and likeminded label that released Cake (1990), I’ve Seen Everything (1993) and A Happy Pocket (1996), hit them like a brick through a window. Business got in the way of art. The Trashcan Sinatras were forced to sell their Shabby Road studios. Times were hard. When the taxman comes knocking, inspiration often ducks out the back door. It took a while to get back in the saddle.
‘When we came out of bankruptcy, a bit of the pressure or the feeling that we hated the Trashcans had been lifted,’ Frank told Rolling Stone earlier this summer. ‘All the while we had been building little pieces of songs, and we felt it was our duty to them to finish them off – even if it turned out to be the last hurrah. There was something liberating about that.’
Hi! Thanks for adding me. I just wanted to say I got to see you play at SXSW last March (trade show day stage, I believe), and I thought you were really great!
