Scottish rockers Trashcan Sinatras return to top the pop heap
By THOMAS BOND
Get Out

Scottsdale will always hold a special place in the hearts of Scottish pop band the Trashcan Sinatras.

“We played our very first American show there in February 1991,” says singer Frank Reader of a gig at Anderson’s Fifth Estate. “I remember the bad haircuts and awful clothing; me specifically, I remember wearing a Chicago Cubs shirt that I’d bought.”

Buoyed by the American college radio success of a pair of singles from their debut album, “Cake,” the Trashcan Sinatras seemed to have a promising career in front of them, but it never materialized.

“We had high ambitions from the start,” Reader says. “Like most bands, we thought that we made very commercial, poppy music, but it was never played in any sort of widespread fashion. It was a wee bit of a jolt.”

Though the band’s combination of strummy guitar pop and wry lyrics garnered much critical acclaim, record sales disappointed to the the point that their third album, 1996’s “A Happy Pocket” was not even released in America. Meanwhile, the band was falling apart.

“When you're bankrupt and you've lost your studio and you're back at your mom's, it seems that things in your life can't get any worse,” Reader says. “We had other problems, too, that come with getting to the age of 30 and not having established yourself in a field. We were feeling on edge and we were taking it out on each other, so we just scattered for a while.”

The singer took a night shift job at the post office.

“It was good exposure to be around people that weren't musicians,” Reader says.

Still, the pull of music was hard to resist, especially with a fervent online community of fans from around the globe clamoring for more material from the quintet.

“We were one of the first bands to use the Internet in that way and we gained a sort of familial relationship with some of the people on there,” Reader says. “We've been in each other's homes for quite a while now.”

Through the www.trashcansinatras.
com Web site, the band sold collections of live recordings, B-sides, demo material and videos to finance the creation of new studio album, “Weightlifting.”

“We were desperate to get back,” Reader says. “We were wondering if anybody would even want us to play any gigs or if they'd moved on to the next thing, Travis or whatever.”

But longtime fans have stuck by the band and the Sinatras are earning new converts as well.

“On this trip, we've been speaking to people who have been really excited to see us for the first time and there's also some older, fatter people who have seen us before and are coming again,” Reader says. “I met a couple in Chicago and the man said he overheard the woman saying our band's name at college and so he went up and spoke to her and they're married now.”