Statistics lie, the camera lies, governments and rugs lie, and no matter how much you'd like it otherwise, your best friends never tell you the truth.
Best-of albums, on the other hand, give the straight-up news, good or bad, every time. You could drive a truckload of wilful self-deception between what most bands think they are and plain-as-daylight reality, but even Stalin's spin doctors couldn't compile twenty-odd tracks from one back catalogue without the musical truth leaking out.
And in the case of Norman Blake's West (Hibernian) Coast pop obsessives Teenage Fanclub - who've been together for about six times as long as the Alex Chilton-led band that gave them their guiding 'Star - the musical truth is as simple as it is joyous. Standing far back enough for 'this producer hassle' or 'that slightly sub-par outing' to fade into perspective, and for this or that 'oughta-been-a-hit' to take its rightful place on your own hi-fi's hit parade, what's here is as warm and wonderful as what you remember. And then some.
It's Big Star, basically. Big Star, Byrds, Beach Boys, Badfinger and more Big Star, and some Neil Young allowed in on a non-B-act amnesty programme. Lovingly, indefensibly, irresistibly homage-laden chiming guitars (the heartstopping ring of 'Neil Jung'), scrawling feedback and wit ('The Concept'), handclaps and harmonies (a heaven-bound 'Sparky's Dream'), preternaturally pristine hooks ('What You Do To Me'), and that effortless blend of the melancholy and the breathlessly soaraway (pretty much everywhere). What more could you want? What else is there?
The band that 93 per cent of boys with the same record collection and heartaches would've come up with if they could have, essentially. The band whose sprawling, giddy, fuzz-exhilaration masterpiece 'Everything Flows' (1990, 'A Catholic Education') stacks up against the blissful groove of 'My Upright Life' (2001, 'Howdy') with neither found wanting. Whatever the Fannies have done that sucks - and surely it's out there somewhere - is impossible to spot on this evidence, bless 'em. The ropiest here is merely charming - 'Radio' bubbling like a transplanted Fountains of Wayne, 'I Need Direction' a bit of ba-ba-ba McGuinn sugar overdose - while the most glorious gleams like a burst of improbable sunshine on Greenock.
They didn't invent the sound themselves, you know. But you might as well dismiss snogging on the same grounds.
