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, teen-eyed 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 Ulysses to 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’ Bossanovaand 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 June 2024
