Belle & Sebastian
"There is no cashflow, because all the money has gone into recording and touring commitments. I'm not saying there's no light on the horizon, just that it's fairly dim."
"Basically what you're saying is we're fucked."
So runs an exchange from a half-hour promotional film on the Belle And Sebastian website between Douglas D Cockfoster -- the imaginary svengali behind the Glasgow-based septet -- and Bob Kildea, a very real member of the group, posing alongside his colleagues as students taking instruction from their manager after a four and a half-year gap between albums and more than three years since their last tour. Cockfoster is trying to impress upon his charges the fact that during that interregnum the music business has lost its grip on the business side of affairs, and no artist is immune to the ruptured equation that once linked success to sales.
The film gathers various strands of the B&S ethos: pictorial interpretations of the title of the group's new album sent from fans around the globe, snapshots of the group's beloved Glasgow -- its streets, its parks, its youth -- in late summer, B&S performing songs from Write About Love amid a select audience of devotees and a seminar on the DIY approach between Stuart Murdoch ("It's the second big punk movement") and Chris Geddes from B&S plus members of emerging Glasgow-based bands. Then there's the aforementioned classroom scenario.
"If anyone believes there is a long-term future making music along traditional lines, bluntly there isn't. That went out in about 1999. The prospects of earning the kind of money you have done in the past are slim to negligible." -- Douglas D Cockfoster
So how do B&S respond? With Belle And Sebastian Write About Love. With Love. With love songs to love, to fall in love to and to fall in love with; 11 songs devoted to, enchanted by and imbued with the spirit of sweet, soulful pop music. Heavy-handed rockers dumbly equating love with anthemic grandeur B&S are not. In these hands, love translates as a deft, intricate, guileless, wide-eyed, faithful, vital, optimistic and hip-shaking signal from the heart.
Recorded in Los Angeles with producer Tony Hoffer and featuring vocal contributions from Norah Jones and Carey Mulligan, Belle And Sebastian Write About Love asks true believers to get on board and go forth with passion. While its predecessor, The Life Pursuit (released in January 2006), omitted orchestration in favour of raw boogie, and the last album but one, Dear Catastrophe Waitress (2003), arrived festooned with orchestral bunting and producer Trevor Horn's trademark flourishes, Write About Love finds a middle ground that jettisons the redundant themes of past endeavours, filters and sharpens what remains and augments this with a clarity of literate pop vision as purifying as it is revitalising. On Write About Love, B&S awake to a cloud-free sky and a warming sun that enlivens everything upon which it shines. Music business? What music business?
PAST: 2006-2009
"Every word is a whisper without you" -- I Didn't See It Coming
It was five years ago that B&S decamped to LA to record with Hoffer for the first time. The Life Pursuit, their second album for Rough Trade since signing in 2002, spawned three UK singles -- Funny Little Frog, The Blues Are Still Blue (a Faces/Status Quo-fuelled stomp) and White Collar Boy, each accompanied by a Top Of The Pops appearance -- and in the wake of its release the group embarked on almost 100 shows around the world, including a sell-out at the Hollywood Bowl with the LA Philharmonic providing orchestral accompaniment. The Life Pursuit reached the UK top 10 album chart and went on to sell more than a quarter of a million copies globally.
2003-2006
"Oooooo/Ooo/Ooo/Oooooo" -- I'm Not Living In The Real World
Similarly, Belle And Sebastian's first record with Rough Trade, Dear Catastrophe Waitress, was a critical (a Mercury prize nomination) and commercial hit (a gold disc in the UK). Now a seven-piece, having parted company with Isobel Campbell and recruited Bob Kildea on guitar, the band went to town on the record, working with Horn (Robbie Williams, Pet Shop Boys, Frankie Goes To Hollywood) at his SARM Studio in Notting Hill, London. Again, three singles were released (I'm A Cuckoo, Step Into My Office, Baby and Books/Your Cover's Blown), each making the UK top 20 singles chart. The band set forth on a hectic touring schedule throughout late 2003 and 2004, the highlights of which were outdoor shows at the Greek Theatres in Los Angeles and San Francisco and a free concert at the Botanic Gardens in Glasgow which drew an audience of 10,000. October 2003 also saw the release of Fans Only, a lovingly assembled DVD.
1996-1997
"I've seen God in the sun/ I've seen God in the street/ God before bed and the promise of sleep" -- The Ghost of Rockschool
It all began with a record called Tigermilk. In 1996 Stuart Murdoch was a daydreamer with a head full of songs and a penchant for Glasgow's public transport system. His band had been chosen as the guinea pigs for students on a music business course at Glasgow's Stow College, the project being to release and promote an album, which they duly did in a run of 1000 vinyl records. A lo-fi collection of enduring pop (The State I Am In, She's Losing It) and experimentalism (Electronic Renaissance), Tigermilk was the spark that lit the fire, an articulate and singular statement of intent that drew the group its first wave of devoted fans. It also earned the band a contract with independent label Jeepster.
"Make me dance/ I want to surrender" -- I Didn't See It Coming
In the wake of Tigermilk, which was impossible to get hold of due to the limited pressing, came If You're Feeling Sinister. Released in 1996 a few months after the group's debut, it stuck to its predecessor's template -- eclectic, literate pop with little regard for the music of the day -- and was the first to feature Sarah Martin. B&S remained a part-time pursuit at this point, Murdoch working as the caretaker of a church hall in Glasgow, and a low public profile (the group shunned interviews and photographs) allied to a lack of enthusiasm for touring did little to alter the status quo. In the meantime, the group's fanbase grew inexorably, fuelled by a triptych of EPs through 1997 -- Dog On Wheels, Lazy Line Painter Jane, 3, 6, 9 … Seconds Of Light.
1998-1999
"I get the midnight phone call/ I'm your captain for the long haul" -- Calculating Bimbo
The evidence for how deeply the group had penetrated the music business by this point came when the follow-up to Sinister, The Boy With The Arab Strap, reached number 12 in the UK album chart in its first week of release in September 1998. The record featured keyboard player Chris Geddes as its cover star, though the sleevenotes were at pains to point out that he is/was in no way connected to the title of the record. It would be the last B&S outing for bass player Stuart David (who left to pursue his band Looper) and the first as a member of the group for trumpet player Mick Cooke, who now arranges orchestral parts for B&S recordings. Buoyed by the December 1998 release of an EP, This Is Just Another Modern Rock Song, The Boy With The Arab Strap also propelled B&S on to win a Brit award for best newcomer in 1999, the year Jeepster re-released Tigermilk.
The group supported The Boy With The Arab Strap with their first major forays into touring, visiting continental Europe, Scandinavia and North America, and in 1999 they curated the Bowlie Weekender at the Pontins resort at Camber Sands on the coast of East Sussex, an event that featured such groups as Mercury Rev, Godspeed You Black Emperor and Teenage Fanclub among many, many others, besides DJ sets from the late John Peel and Jarvis Cocker. The festival sold out and paved the way for the successful All Tomorrow's Parties festivals that continue to enrich the live music scene in the UK, and now the US and Australia. In one of the few instances of revisiting their past, eleven years later, the band is curating Bowlie 2
2000-2001
"Love is like a novel/ Read the blessed pages/ Did I do my best, dear?/ That is all you ask" -- Read The Blessed Pages
After a long gestatory period and preceded by a non-album single, Legal Man, B&S released their fourth album, Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant, in June 2000 to commercial success -- it was their first top 10 UK album and remains their most successful US release -- if not critical. All this despite there being little promotional activity to support the record until 2001, the latter half of which was spent on the road in the UK, US, South America and Japan after the release of the EPs Jonathan David and I'm Waking Up To Us.
2002
"Whisky from the year you were born tastes like kidnap and ransom" -- Sunday's Pretty Icons
Spring 2002 was another busy spell of touring, seeing B&S visit Scandinavia and mainland Europe before the US and Canada. Shortly after the tour ended Jeepster released what would become the group's final studio album for the label, Storytelling. Originally conceived as the soundtrack for the Todd Solondz film of the same name, little more than six minutes of the group's music made the final cut. The group's pride in the songs, though, was all the momentum required to give them an official release in June 2002.
"Glueing an Airfix kit/Cigarettes at the gym/Had a pint of Special Brew/Won't do that again" -- I'm Not Living In The Real World
Belle And Sebastian's studio canon is augmented by Push Barman To Open Old Wounds, a 25-track collection of the group's Jeepster singles and EPs released in May 2005, and The BBC Sessions, a compilation of songs recorded for The John Peel Show, Steve Lamacq's Evening Session and The Mark Radcliffe Show, released in 2008. A download-only recording of the group playing If You're Feeling Sinister at the Barbican in London was also released through iTunes in December 2005.
Notable among the slew of collaborations and side projects featuring members of the band is God Help The Girl, a girl group helmed by Stuart Murdoch which released two singles, an EP and a self-titled album on Rough Trade in 2009. A film of the same name whose screenplay was written by Murdoch is in the pipeline, as is The Celestial Cafe, a book that gathers together his online diaries.
Back in 2010, the summer has been spent limbering up at festivals in Scandinavia, England, Europe and south-east Asia. Write About Love will be supported by shows in North and South America, rounding the year off with a UK tour.
FUTURE
Fucked or not, Belle And Sebastian are not giving up without a fight.
