Frank Black is delighted to announce a series of shows for 2025, where he will be performing the ‘Teenager Of The Year’ album in full. The Teenager Of The Year Tour starts on 15th January at the legendary Fillmore in San Francisco and includes 11 US and Canadian shows before going over to perform in Paris and the iconic London Palladium Originally released in May 1994, Teenager of the Year, is now widely regarded as the defining statement of his solo career and the best album the Pixies never made. Pitchfork placed Teenager Of The Year in their Top 100 albums of the 90’s saying “beneath its veneer lie the moments brilliant enough to rival any of the Pixies’ 1990’s work, and Black’s greatest lyrical achievement.” The album is also included in the book “ 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die”, while the Quietus in 2014 said “Teenager Of The Year feels like a lost Pixies album in the way Ram feels like a lost Beatles album. It’s colossal, it teems with innovation.”
Frank Black on Teenager Of The Year "Sometime in the early 80s, I'd have to look up the date, I matriculated high school. This school held an awards banquet for some of the departing students at the school. I received an award called the TEENAGER OF THE YEAR award; my brother received the same award the following year. Our award was a 50 dollar credit for textbooks, a TEENAGER OF THE YEAR medallion (my mother still has this), and also the banquet hall dinner, soup to nuts. My brother and I had no complaint about the award (it was given for being all-around-good-guy as best as we could determine). But for such a grand title to be given as TEENAGER OF THE YEAR, I felt the glory had not been amplified enough.In 1993, I was doing “solo recording” sessions with Eric Drew Feldman in Los Angeles.We had settled on a core band with Nick Vincent and Lyle Workman, occasionally augmented by Joey Santiago and Moris Tepper. Though we had to change studios numerous times for actual forest fires and earthquakes, the whole process was such an addictive musical buffet that Eric and I couldn't stop. We did some vocals at a studio rumored to be owned by Sergio Mendes; in the control room was a wall of television screens broadcasting the brush fire which crept toward us. We eventually evacuated to someplace else. We never met Sergio but we saw him perform a few weeks later when we vacated to Las Vegas after the Northridge earthquake, which had trapped the TEENAGER OF THE YEAR tapes in a studio vault for some time. Our zeal plus empathy from our financiers, they safely observing our travails from London, was enough to keep the money flowing until Eric and I relented and declared “Consummatum est”.We tried to make it grand. 22 in 62. I called it TEENAGER OF THE YEAR. It is 30 years old now,and the original band will perform the record at various venues in early 2025. 4AD has remastered the LP for a fresh printing. Enjoy" |
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Cast Of Characters:
Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV
Eric Drew Feldman
Al Clay
Nick Vincent
Lyle Workman
Joey Santiago
Moris Tepper
David Bianco
How The Recordings Came To Be:
The principal musicians and Al met up in the greater San Fernando Valley. Sweating craniums...Charlie writing chord changes on a dry erase board Nick, Lyle, myself writing them on scraps of paper. Lyle was segregated into an iso room because he was new and I just wanted to hear what Nick, Charles, and I were playing. When I eventually heard what he was doing, I was very grateful he had been invited. Al always had tape (perhaps DATs) running for reference in case we did something especially good or bad. Empty gyoza boxes were abound in the room. Initially 14 basics recorded in three days. At that point, Charles was often sitting in a corner, staring off into space composing lyrics, looking anxious. Joey and Moris were invited to do what they do. Initially it was a 14-song album. It was mixed. Eric Idle was staying nearby. He kept telling me to change the songs around. Al had to run off and go to his next project. We weren’t completely happy with what we had. The solution: record more songs. Eight more were born. Whole she bang was remixed by David Bianco. The day before we were to start the remix, the 1994 Northridge earthquake occurred. Charles, Jean (Charles’ first wife) and I escaped to Las Vegas, ate many shrimp cocktails, and we saw Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and Sergio Mendes and Brazil ’99 perform. Sergio was especially good. After about five days we returned to the mixing studio and the deed was done.
A new re-mastered version of Teenager Of The Year will be released by 4AD later this year. Along with Frank Black, the band for the tour features Eric Feldman, Lyle Workman and Nick Vincent who originally appeared on the Teenager Of the Year album. The band is:
Frank Black on guitar and vocals
Eric Feldman on bass and keys
Lyle Workman on guitar
Nick Vincent on drums
Rob Laufer - keys, bass and guitar Tickets for the Teenager Of The Year Tour are available HERE |
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About The Album
"His undersized crown askew, arms full of celebratory roses, the Teenager of the Year 1994 stepped up to accept his award. The judges, dazzled at first, were ultimately unanimous. Over the 22 songs and 63 minutes of his landmark second solo album – every one charged with the widescreen imagination and roaring vitality of youth – Frank Black had, more than any other alt-rock legend before him, explored the fears, pleasures and fascinations of adolescence with an arch and intricate poetry.
There were songs about the thrill of classic arcade machines, the vaudevillian art of The Three Stooges and the eerie allure of Sixties sci-fi shows. Songs of young love and punk pride, mingled with visions of UFO paranoia, time travel, climate apocalypse, space exploration and a ruined future LA. From above, secret overseers watched on; from below, the oceans plotted revenge. Teenager of the Year was a vivid, teeneyed Twilight Zone of sounds and ideas.
After all Frank Black – aka Charles Thompson III, aka (at the time) former Pixies singer Black Francis – was a man-child reborn. Released from the stressful creative confines of Pixies, he charged headlong into a wide-open solo career. Accompanied by producer and friend Eric Drew Feldman - previously of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band and Pere Ubu - who had played keyboards on Pixies’ 1991 fourth album Trompe Le Monde, he wrote late into the night, burning both ends of the candle to the wick, addicted to chasing the buzz of spontaneous melodic genius. “I felt like if I did it long enough into the night that once in a while, bam, I would stumble onto this really great thing,” he said.
In the months after Pixies’ split, Thompson ran up $100,000 of studio costs developing ideas for his solo debut Frank Black (1993) before completing it all in a two-day coffee bender because his record label, 4AD, were keen to hear rough takes. Frank Black was a phenomenal showcase of Thompson’s post-Pixies potential, an expansive amalgam of celestial space pop, driving alt-rock and his trademark schizophrenic flamenco punk. But Teenager of the Year was where he fully explored, expanded and made good on the debut’s promise, the Ulyssesto its Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and now widely considered his greatest solo work.
Driven by pleasure rather than ambition now, Thompson rid himself of any stylistic hang-ups that might have hemmed in his previous records. “I relaxed a little bit and said ‘you know what, I'm not going to worry about if something is too pop or too country, or too traditional or whatever’.” What came out was his inimitable take on a broad plethora of musics; scabrous surf rock, dub reggae, rock trip rock’n’roll, indiepop anthems, country laments, synthetic dramas and pure punk rampages.
From a distance, Teenager… catches him at an exploratory midpoint between Pixies and The Catholics, gleefully flitting around all points in between. Hone in on details within its vast and busy tapestry, though, and you find some of the most imaginative songwriting of his entire career. Three Stooges tribute ‘Two Reelers’ (“don’t you know they speak vaudevillian?”) expands on the structure of Pixies’ ‘The Sad Punk’ and Frank Black’s opening track ‘Los Angeles’, shifting from a Tex-Mex punk verse to a euphoric chorus, then a Beatledelic psych rock wig-out. ‘Olé Mulholland’ - honouring William Mulholland, the civil engineer who oversaw construction of the Owens Valley Aquaduct that brought water to LA and allowed it to prosper – cashes in the stylistic credit owed to Thompson by Pavement. ‘Fiddle Riddle’, an album stand-out, updates the ska pop of Madness and The Specials into an ultra-melodic blueprint for Gorillaz. ‘Superabound’ drifts from husky country waltz to carnival rock reminiscent of The Stones’ ‘She’s a Rainbow’, while ‘Big Red’ turns from bouncing blues to space pop as its protagonist flees a drowning earth for a terraformed Mars, leaving their partner behind “a long way across all this black”.
Lyrically too, Teenager… was a profound evolution for Thompson. His previous albums had been broadly themed as mythological or sci-fi, and Frank Black had continued the stargazing concerns of Pixies’ Bossanova and Trompe Le Monde. Some space echoes certainly remained. Besides ‘Big Red’, ‘The Vanishing Spies’, concerned the 1993 Mars probe which lost contact as it entered the red planet’s orbit, and Thompson’s sense of loneliness that there may be nothing but infinite lifeless black out there. ‘Bad, Wicked World’ was a homage to 1960s sci-fi TV show The Invaders and ‘Pie in the Sky’ a public order to “desert your quarters” and witness a craft capable of intergalactic travel. But rather than Thompson fantasising about getting lost in the cosmos, ‘Space Is Gonna Do Me Good’ – set on “the islands of Phoenix in 2016” – was about leaving Hollywood for a more big-sky life and – when it wasn’t eulogising old Pong machines on ‘Whatever Happened to Pong?’ - the rest of the album delved far deeper into the questing intellect at work.
‘Calistan’ acted as a dystopian semi-sequel to ‘Los Angeles’, picturing Thompson’s adopted home city some years into a climate-wracked future, clogged with junk and smog. ‘Thalassocracy’ riffed further on the idea of the sea god being choked in ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven’ - here angry undersea beings plotted their revenge on mankind. ‘White Noise Maker’ put us in the tortured mind of a man picking up interference babble from the Telstar communications satellite in his head. Even the album’s most accessible moments came lashed to brain-melting ideas: ‘(I Want to Live on an) Abstract Plain’ pictured a surreal life beyond our known dimensions and ‘Headache’ – Thompson’s most famous solo hit once described as “one of the greatest pop songs ever written” – had a hookline inspired by Madeleine L'Engle’s 1962 time travel novel A Wrinkle In Time.
There were moments of simple romance here too: the gorgeous country sparkle of ‘Sir Rockaby’, say, or the way that the first letter of each line from the final verses of ‘Speedy Marie’ spelt out the name of the old girlfriend Thompson wrote it about. But ultimately Teenager of the Year became celebrated as Frank Black’s finest hour thanks to its boundless imagination, limitless invention and intricately layered depths. An ascendent adolescent." Mark Beaumont |
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2025 Teenager Of The Year Tour Dates:
January
15th San Francisco, CA The Fillmore
16th San Francisco, CA The Fillmore
18th LA, CA The Orpheum
19th El Cajon, CA The Magnolia
22nd Denver, CO The Paramount
24th Minneapolis, MN TBA
25th Chicago, IL The Metro
26th Chicago, IL The Metro
28th Detroit, MI St Andrews Hall
29th Toronto, ON History
31st Boston, MA Citizens House Of Blues
February
01st Brooklyn, NY Brooklyn Steel
04th Paris, France Le Trianon
06th London, UK The Palladium |
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