Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake, Love And Money frontman James Grant and former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler have recorded an album

Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake, Love and Money singer-songwriter James Grant former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler have joined forces to release a new album. The self-titled Butler, Blake And Grant record is due on 28th March.

The scene is being set by a new single titled ‘Bring An End’ that was released yesterday with a music video. The indie music supergroup will embark on their first tour of the UK during June, playing shows in Cambridge, Norwich, Leeds, London, Gateshead, Liverpool and Glasgow.

“We recorded these songs over various sojourns in Norman’s living room last year each time adding a song each and then mixing in London,” Bernard Butler explained.

On the song, Grant said via Classic Pop: “Norman wrote the tune and sent me it and I had a feeling about it right away. Honestly, I just opened a notebook and it was pretty much all there and I had absolutely no recollection of having written any of it. I spent an afternoon honing it and that was it. ‘Bring an end to this ugliness…’ has a universality about it. Maybe it can be our Mull of Kintyre.”

Norman Blake said: “Bring An End was one of the many musical fragments that live on my phone. When I was looking for something that might work for BBG, this tune sprang to mind.

“It was a musical idea without a lyric and it occurred to me that James might have something in one of his notebooks that would work. I sent the phone recording off to him and the very next day we had a finished song.”

The new songs and tour has grown from initial shows in Strathaven, organised by label boss Douglas MacIntyre under the Frets banner. The three musicians explained their collaboration in a debut interview with Uncut magazine: “Me and James had tentatively talked about doing something together,” said Blake. “And I’ve known Bernard from way back.”

“Bandwagonesque was my courting record with my wife,” Butler says. “We’ve always kept in touch with Norman. James I didn’t know until recently, but I knew what a fantastic songwriter he was.”

“We didn’t plan to record it,” Bernard Butler says of the new record. “We were just sitting in Norman’s living room in front of the fire. There’s a couple of sofas and we were facing each other. James had a song. Norman wrote and finished something really quickly, and then I wrote something. As the first song came out, I said to Norman, ‘Have you got any recording equipment?’ He appeared with some mics and a computer and we set it up on the table. We weren’t really listening back to anything. We just thought, ‘We’ll record everything that happens.’”

“It’s definitely a 1970s-type sketch,” James says of the album. “There’s a track called ‘Bring An End’ – Bernard played a solo and he was like, ‘I think I’ve gone a bit Brian May here.’ There’s fuck all wrong with that! When you’re working with Norman and Bernard, it’s like having Ray Davies and David Gilmour in your band. They just do things that you like.”