Teenage Fanclub + The Vaselines, 9:30 Club, Washington DC

Saturday evening at the 9:30 was the Washington date on a one-month tour on this side of the pond featuring two legendary Scottish band greats, Teenage Fanclub and the Vaselines. Both bands have recently crawled out from hibernation to put out albums, so a tour of North America is appropriate, even if they are pretty much playing to the fans who discovered and fell in love with them in their late ’80s prime. If you are under the impression that being aged twee pop bands, they must be proper ladies and gentlemen, wipe that stereotype out of your mind. At least when it comes to Frances McKee and Eugene Kelly of the Vaselines.

In an indie red dress and cowboy boots, McKee was a firecracker, obviously having fun winding up the audience, suggesting that the Teenage Fanclub fans should go have a wank in the loo, but any of their fans are welcome to have a wank in public while in the audience. Widespread laughter. There is further talk on how underage wank has anti-aging properties. Further laughter. Sexual innuendo and punning continues all night between and her and Kelly, and one can only imagine what other snappy barbs the two will exchange as the tour goes on. Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub is invited onstage to play a bicycle horn with them for one song, and he thoroughly enjoys the attention, hamming it up.

The Vaselines’s most recent single, ‘Sex with an X’, is the naughtiest yet sweetest-sounding pop song since the 1976 hit ‘Afternoon Delight’ by the Starland Vocal Band, combining the sweet duetting vocals of McKee and Kelly, ‘it feels so good / it must be bad for me / so let’s do it / let’s do it again’. It’s as if your nursery school teacher was singing to you about relations; it’s naughty yet endearing.

‘I Hate the ‘80s’, another newish song with its funny chorus of ‘Duran Duran Duran Duran’, goes down a treat, but it’s the songs late in the set, like ‘No Hope’, ‘Ruined’, and a punter-demanded ‘Dum Dum’, that demonstrate that the Vaselines are not just a twee pop band, they’re certainly capable of rocking out. Forget that they started the band in 1986, they sound great. All of the Vaselines’s songs are compact little numbers, so it seems that they run through their set far too quickly.

Blake and company released their 10th album, ‘Shadows’, in May. In stark contrast to the Vaselines, Teenage Fanclub enjoy drawing out their pop songs with jammy outros. The outros are predictable and repetitive, so really, if you’re not a devoted Teenage Fanclub fan, you’d probably be bored with them. (If you were wondering, there were plenty of devoted at the 9:30 this night, with everyone in the audience singing along to every word and grinning, thoroughly enjoying themselves.) These outros notwithstanding, Teenage Fanclub know how to do a pop song just right. ‘Baby Lee’, a song the band recently played on a late night American telly programme hosted by Jimmy Fallon, sounds gorgeous, as does ‘When I Still Have Thee’, a song that has gotten airplay on Radio 2, and deservedly so.

Lyrically, Teenage Fanclub is very strong, as Blake, bassist Gerard Love, and guitarist Raymond McGinley all take turns at lead vocals and providing backing. Their guitar work is second to none; if only all current bands could play as well as this. But there aren’t any true standouts in their set, and they can’t rival the energy of their tourmates. This round goes to the Vaselines.