Teenage Fanclub have quite a lot of songs that really should have been singles. The issue over the years is the fact they have tried to be democratic about things, splitting things up between the three main songwriters – Norman Blake, Gerry Love and Raymond McGinley.
1995 was the year that the album Grand Prix was released. The first indication of the quality of the new material was the advance single, Mellow Doubt, which appeared in March. A Norman Blake number, it was a lovely, acoustic almost-ballad like effort which reached #34, which wasn’t too shabby for a band whose best position in the singles chart up to now had been two years previously when Radio reached #31.
Next up was an absolute classic, one that is well up among the all-time favourites of anyone who has ever had an interest in the band. Sparky’s Dream, written by Gerry Love, is a fantastic piece of pop music, one that surely sounded great coming out over the airwaves, but for whatever reason, it didn’t chime with the general populace, entering the charts at #40 in late May and then disappearing from view.
Grand Prix was released a week after Sparky’s Dream. It went in at #7, giving Teenage Fanclub their first ever Top 10 album , so it might have been the case, in an era when CD singles weren’t cheap, that a few fans held on to their cash to buy the album.
The third single to be lifted from the album came in August, and was Neil Jung, another of the Norman Blake-penned songs (he had 5 on the album while Gerry and Raymond each had 4). It’s another exquisite number that should have had daytime radio producers screaming out to have it included on playlists, but it wasn’t to be. It barely dented the charts, coming in at #62, but its release did help tease Grand Prix back into the lower end of the albums charts, as it had dropped out after in mid-July after just five weeks.
It was now a pointless exercise to go with any fourth single from the album, given that there was clearly an aversion of some sort to play Teenage Fanclub outside the evening slots on Radio 1. I don’t know if there were any plans in place if any of the three previous singles had been hits, and it may well have been that it was Raymond’s turn to have a single, in which case album opener About You was the likely contender.
All of which means that this, another of the Gerry Love songs, was never given the honour of being a stand-alone 45 (or whatever the phrase would be in the era of CD singles):-
mp3: Teenage Fanclub – Don’t Look Back
Actually, that’s not quite 100% the case.
In December 1993, to round off what had been a triumphant year as far as the critics were concerned, it was decided to release Teenage Fanclub Have Lost It, an EP containing acoustic versions of four songs, one from each of the albums released on Creation Records, with the lead track being this:-
mp3: Teenage Fanclub – Don’t Look Back (acoustic)
Somehow, in a week when Christmas songs were selling plenty of copies, the EP did enough to reach #53. A quiet sort of triumph for good music.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 
Any other band and this would be the greatest song they ever produced… to not be a lead single is a crime… Mike
Yesterday I started a Scotland mix. Strictly limited to 16 songs. Teenage Fanclub is set, but I think I’ll take a song from “Bandwagonesque”. Even though “Don’t look back” is really nice.
The first track I added is quite new: “It’s so easy” by Get Wrong. I had to because I’m a [silly kisser]. But I assume that they won’t be able to defend their place in the long term. There are simply too many excellent Scottish bands and musicians for that.
This song is head and shoulders above anything any of their Creation labelmates from the same time. So good.