Z’s Music Monday: Belle & Sebastian
“And the head said that you always were a queer one from the start
For careers you say you went to be remembered for your art
Your obsessions get you known throughout the school for being strange
Making life-size models of the Velvet Underground in clay…”
-Belle and Sebastian - “Expectations”
There are a number of British bands that it took me moving to England to be able to appreciate. Blur is an excellent example - I could always recognize that they were a pretty decent band but I never really enjoyed their music until I experienced the culture that they satirized so nimbly. I don’t think that you can really appreciate a song like “Bank Holiday” until you’ve had one rained off. It took me a couple of years of figuring out the local dialect to figure out what the hell was going on in “Parklife”: “John’s got brewer’s droop he gets intimidated by the dirty pigeons/They love a bit of it…”
And it took this shared experience (well not this shared experience) for me to learn to really love a number of great bands from Blighty - Pulp, Franz Ferdinand, The Kaiser Chiefs, The Charlatans and Belle and Sebastian. You have to be able to relate to a band’s sense of place - a reason I’ve always been partial to bands from the South - in order to really get them.
The latter act, Glaswegian indie popsters Belle and Sebastian have become one of my favorite British acts during my time in Oxford. Formed by Stuart David and Stuart Murdoch in the mid 90’s, Belle and Sebastian received critical acclaim for their 1996 releases “Tigermilk” and “If You’re Feeling Sinister”. They hit the UK charts a couple of years later with the masterful “The Boy With the Arab Strap” and it was this album that caught my attention. Belle and Sebastian were like nothing I had heard before - lolloping, folk tinged, lo-fi but with the occasional ecstatic horn outburst. There is a joyfulness to their music that sometimes verges on artificial (twee pop is a term that is sometimes used to describe the band). But what makes Belle and Sebastian great is the incongruity between their sunshine drenched music and their often darkly introverted, and cleverly narrative, lyrics. Obscured under Murdoch’s murmuring Scottish burr are wonderful stories of “String Bean Jean”, the “stars of track and field” or the “boy with the filthy laugh”.
“Its something to speak of the way you are feeling
To crowds there assembled
Do you ever feel you have gone too far?
Everyone suffers in silence a burden
The man who drives minicabs down in old Compton
The Asian man
With his love hate affair
With his racist clientele…”
Z’s started to take the bottle with a minimum of fuss, though I think some good music in the background makes things go much more smoothly. So, when I was ejected from our warm bed before dawn on Sunday morning to demonstrate my new found feeding prowess, I opted for efficiency and combined feeding and musical appreciation times. Something about the misty gray morning light demanded a British artist. Z’s always displayed a penchant for horns, so why not Belle and Sebastian.
My only conundrum was which album to listen to - they all have their strengths and weaknesses. The production and musicianship improve on later albums but the wittiest and often musically simplest songs are on the older records. I don’t have a favorite Bellen and Sebastian album and depending on my mood can dig their obscure debut “Tigermilk” as much as their much maligned (unfairly) 2006 release “The Life Pursuit”. Z was losing interest, so I settled on letting the iPod make the call and shuffled through my Belle and Sebastian. Good choice - Z enjoyed the almost forced cheerfulness of Belle and Sebastian and since he doesn’t understand the lyrics, missed out on the rather dark tales that they tell. He ate like a champ and cooed along to “The State I Am In”…
“The priest in the booth had a photographic memory
For all he had heard
He took all of my sins and he wrote a pocket novel called
‘The State I Am In’
So I gave myself to God
There was a pregnant pause before he said ‘OK’
Now I spend my day turning tables round In Marks & Spencer’s
They don’t seem to mind…”
Enjoy one of my favorite tracks, “Expectations”. If you like what you hear then Belle and Sebastian’s records are available from your local independent record shop, 
, Amazon
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Very cool. Thoroughly agree that sense of ‘place’ adds a lot to one’s enjoyment of a band.
Pulp and Blur……not to mention Oasis (Champagne Supernova) are all markers of my time in the UK and as you say, need to be lived to be enjoyed.
Glad to hear you are now the ‘bottle king’ although your swift change of subject* in your post left me wondering which member of Belle and Sebastian had become an alcoholic?
*(Zach’s started to take the bottle with a minimum of fuss…….)
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29 Jan 2008 at 1:12 pm