“…I’m quite tempted to try it. My nephew says they also have a gentle slope, so if I stick to it I think I will be fine,” Trashcan Sinatras’ Frank Reader reassures me about his snowboarding session with his nephew, which should happen right after our chat. In a way, the career of Trashcan Sinatras can be compared to a roller coaster ride, rather than to snowboarding down a slope. Leaving behind the collapse of Go!Discs, their bankruptcy and the loss of Kilmarnock based recording studio Shabby Road, the Trashcans, John Douglas, Stephen Douglas, Davy Hughes, Paul Livingston and Francis Reader, affectionately supported throughout the years by their loyal fans, have recently released their new album, “Weightlifting” (out in Great Britain on the band’s own label Picnic Records and in the States on SpinART), their first since 1996. The feeling you get after listening to the album is that the pressures which were oppressing the band have been definitely lifted: indeed the title track is a delicate song about leaving the past behind you and looking forward. The album starts with what many thought is a prophetic song, “Welcome Back”, with the opening lyrics, “Welcome back, back to health…” yet, Reader doesn’t think they’re just ‘back’, “It has just taken us so long to record the new album,” he explains, “it’s not like we’re either coming back and staying or coming back and going away. We’re just carrying on doing things the way we do them, that means writing and writing and recording until we are happy and it sometimes can take a long time and in our case it also took us a long time to raise the money to record the album.” We are sitting in a flat somewhere in Glasgow’s West End, outside it’s unusually sunny and not too cold. Inside the sun is shining through the living room bow window; baskets of tangerines and nuts sit on the coffee table reminding us it’s actually autumn; a portrait of Robert Burns stares at us from a corner of the mantelpiece; music can be heard in the background. While we talk about “Weightlifting” Reader says the band didn’t expect the album to receive all the attention and the good reviews it got, “People seem to be a bit receptive towards us, maybe they just admire the fact that we’re so stubborn,” he shrugs.“We’ve been mentioned a lot in passing in diaries in the Guardian and in other papers and that’s nice and very helpful, especially now that we don’t have a lot of money behind us, because it makes people aware of the name. Of course good reviews are great as well, lots of people buy albums after reading good reviews, so that’s definitely helpful.”

Recorded in Glasgow, the Trashcans’ new album was mixed in New York by Ivy’s Andy Chase, “At the beginning we thought we were probably trying to mix it ourselves and we tried to do it with one or two songs, but it was becoming very messy, it was just getting into a cul-de-sac,” Reader remembers. “Then this guy phoned us up saying he wanted to do it, so we sent him the tape. He did one mix for free, we heard it and thought we didn’t like it at all. So we went back to mix it ourselves and then, just for fun, one night, after doing a mix of one of the songs, we put his mix on to compare it with ours and it really blew us away. We ended up phoning the guy, saying sorry and asking him if he would have liked to work on the album again. He did, so we sent him the music files on CD and later on we went to New York for a week to tidy things up. Originally we were trying to work on the album with him by email, but we realised we needed to be there. We had a great time, we stayed at the Chelsea Hotel and partied every night, it was fun and it was also very easy because Andy was doing all the work, while we had already done our part, so we only had to supervise the mixing. He was fantastic, opinionated and articulate. For us it was unusual to let go so much control and I’m glad we did it. It’s because we let go so much that ‘Weightlifting’ sounds like our most direct album, because we’re basically not embedded too much in it.”

The Trashcans promoted their album in the States throughout September and October, playing thirty gigs, but also appearing in record stores, “It was a blast, everybody responded to the new album really well,” Reader says, “we weren’t doing what I would call a hard job while touring, but towards the end we were getting a little bit tired since we were always up early and we were in the traffic all the time. I don’t want to moan, but you get tired when you’re touring especially if you’re a singer and you’re not very good at staying away from the parties afterwards. I had good intentions to go to bed every night and I did do that for a while, but parties were fun and I wanted to meet people and talk to them and stay up with the rest of the band. Americans are very fond of us, we must have done something right for them in the past, though I don’t know what it is!” Since we are still talking about the States, I remind Reader that he still has got to finish the band’s American tour diary on the trashcansinatras.com site, “I can’t, I’m stuck,” he claims in exhausted tones, raising his hands as if he were surrendering, “Our American tour manager has been writing me everyday telling me to finish the tour diary, but I can’t do it, I can’t remember what happened…”

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