‘Inspiring, ramshackle, joyous’: 30 years of Belle And Sebastian
Indie-pop icons Belle And Sebastian celebrate 30 years of their classic If You’re Feeling Sinister album by performing it in full at Fringe By The Sea, followed by a set of fan favourites. Writer, broadcaster and mega fan Nicola Meighan looks back on her first encounter with their music and why she’s still smitten three decades on
For a band so lovingly woven into the fabric of Glasgow, it’s maybe strange that I first discovered Belle And Sebastian in London. I was living there in the late 1990s, and my office was on the floor below their record label, Jeepster, in a bygone chocolate factory in Ladbroke Grove. I was running a happy hardcore imprint and frequently had my windows flung open: all the better to hear the glorious music blaring out of Jeepster HQ and the sounds of a fabled collective who’d been making a stir back home in Scotland, thanks to an album called Tigermilk (released in 1996 via Stow College’s in-house hit factory, Electric Honey) and a formative glowing review in The List by the legendary Fiona Shepherd.
Belle And Sebastian later signed to Jeepster (as would fellow Electric Honey alumni Polar Bear aka Snow Patrol), and so it was that I first encountered the familiar/haunting fever-dreams of If You’re Feeling Sinister (1996) and the Dog On Wheels and Lazy Line Painter Jane EPs (1997), carried on the breeze via the acoustics of our shared courtyard by the canal. When I wasn’t importing helium-vocalled Rotterdam gabber (DJ Paul Elstak’s ‘Rainbow in the Sky’, anyone?), or promoting an improbable roster that included The Outhere Brothers, Living In A Box and Cora Bissett’s folk-punk trio Swelling Meg, I was otherwise engaged, quite literally, in that tiny London office.
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I was logging on constantly, via dial-up internet, to an early B&S message board called the Sinister Mailing List, wherein devotees shared guitar chords, arranged meet-ups, discussed the magic of Stuart David’s ‘Ink Polaroids’ prose portraits and swapped illicit cassette copies of an LP that everybody knew about but few of us could ever hear (the limited first-run of Tigermilk had long sold out). I used to write and post micro-stories anonymously on the Sinister board, never letting on that this smitten wordslinger was lurking underneath their record label, flogging rave tunes. What a creep.
Impassioned praise towards the band extended far beyond their virtual fan hub, however. An NME review of an early London date at Union Chapel in the summer of ’97 described B&S as a ‘phenomenon’ and, right enough, they put on an incredible show that night: inspiring, ramshackle, joyous. I couldn’t take my eyes off Stuart Murdoch and the gang onstage, which was really quite the feat, given that I was sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with Jarvis Cocker and he had the longest hands I have ever seen.
This was maybe a year or so after Jarvis’ Brit Awards controversy (gatecrashing Michael Jackson’s performance; dodging court on account of impromptu legal representation from Bob Mortimer), and it would be another 18 months before Belle And Sebastian had their own provocative Brits run-in, when they vanquished fellow nominees 5ive, Steps and Billie Piper, and were crowned 1999’s Best Breakthrough Act. Pete Waterman was raging. He accused B&S of staging a coup in the online vote, thus purloining the award from his beloved Steps. But the fans had spoken and our enigmatic Glasgow pop coterie quietly, brilliantly, got what they deserved, on their own terms. That’s been their hallmark ever since.
Three decades on from those strange and distant young/old days, Belle And Sebastian are celebrating If You’re Feeling Sinister at Fringe By The Sea. Thirty years! I wonder what I’d tell my homesick 20-year-old self in London about all this. I’d never buy the story that I’d end up working with the band on a Tramway all-dayer at Triptych once I’d moved back to Scotland, nor that I’d take my kids to see them light up the sky at Doune The Rabbit Hole, let alone that I’d chair an event with Stuart Murdoch and Michael Pedersen at Byres Road Book Festival, where Stuart would break into some Jeepster-era songs. I’d have laughed myself right out the window. But I might have believed… no, I would have believed that this beautifully inconceivable band just kept, and would keep, getting better.
Belle And Sebastian perform If You’re Feeling Sinister, Big Top, North Berwick, 6 August, 8pm.
Nicola Meighan presents her weekly Saturday Social at 2pm on Central FM while a live version of her Scottish culture podcast A Kick Up The Arts is at Edinburgh Futures Institute on Friday 25 August at 6pm.