Belle & Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister

Scott Plagenhoef

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781441189882
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musikgeschichte & -kritik

If You're Feeling Sinister shows how Belle & Sebastian transformed themselves over the space of a decade, from a slightly shambolic cult secret into a polished, highly entertaining, mainstream pop group. Along the way, the book shows how the internet has revolutionized how we discover new music-often at the cost of romance and mystery.

Three
I Could Only Make You Cry
with These Words

Almost a decade after being striken with M.E., Murdoch was still filtering his art through adolescence, writing many of his early, narrative songs from the point of view of or about schoolchildren. Unlike his cuddlecore contemporaries, however, Murdoch wasn’t simply escaping into a fantasy world of lazy summers and bike rides (though his songs had those as well); his examination of emotions through the lens of childhood is less about nostalgia or escapism as it is exploring core human emotions without the distractions, compromises, and obligations of adulthood.

Murdoch himself has received a fair bit of criticism for what can be seen as an odd fixation on characters much younger than himself, which he brushed off in an interview for Just a Modern Rock Story. “I tend to base quite a lot of these characters on young people, people younger than me or in the school environment,” said Murdoch. “And that comes from having these feelings as an adult, but when you put them in a school environment people can relate to them straight away. It was something everyone went through. Everyone was contained within that world so you can play out these little stories and fantasies.”

Indie music in the mid-90s seemed to regard childhood as a playground for winks and nods, most exemplified by Bis, a Chemikal Underground group who led a self-proclaimed Teen-C Revolution. The band, a trio of teens either in or just out of secondary school, adopted cutesy nicknames Manda Rin, Sci-Fi Steven, and John Disco and created shouty, bratty records that borrowed the infantilism of mid-1980s guitar pop and the personal politics of riot grrrl. Bis aimed to empower youth by embracing its most escapist trappings. Their approach to childhood featured fleeting references to school but they were more inclined to embrace comic-book fantasies. The early DIY art of their record sleeves were reminiscent of xeroxed punk fliers; by the time they were ready to record full-lengths, they pictured themselves as full-color superheroes. It should have been a surprise to no one when they provided the end credits theme to cult cartoon “The Powerpuff Girls,” superhero cartoons named Blossom, Bubble, and Buttercup who were drawn with exaggeratedly “cute” features such as oversized, puppydog eyes.

Unlike Bis and other American ironists and/or intertexualists—notably the Beastie Boys, who signed Bis to Grand Royal, Quentin Tarantino, and the writers and creators of “The Simpsons”—Murdoch rarely used the pop culture of his youth as a shared thread between his characters and audience. Instead, his very specific adoption of cultural references befits his personal, narrow writing style and foretold the generation behind him, which has had its shared cultural references limited by a massive splintering of entertainment choices. When he does drop in a cultural reference it often comes across as a sympathetic nod to something warm and nostalgic, such as the mentions of “Man About the House” (remade in the US as “Three’s Company”) in “Photo Jenny” or Sid James in “Put the Book Back on the Shelf.”

Murdoch attempts to seek kinship with his own childhood, particularly Britain’s “angry young man” films of the early 1960s, with his tweaking of the title of the Tony Richardson movie The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. In the film, a young Tom Courtenay portrays a juvenile delinquent sentenced to a borstal, where he finds solace and comfort in running and uses it to gain a measure of self-esteem, despite a risk to his own personal safety and place within the school.

Fittingly, Murdoch’s teenage characters are complex and fully drawn, curious about sex, worried about faith, and equally capable of eliciting sympathy or scorn from a listener. In the jaunty “She’s Losing It” from Tigermilk, the song kicks off with an almost matter-of-fact mention of sexual abuse before cataloging the fallout of that incident—anger management issues, a distrust of men, lesbianism.

“Expectations,” from the same album, paints a rather complete portrait of what seems like a teen misfit and her negotiation of school and work. The nameless character suffers the indignation of being “known throughout the school for being strange,” is rumored to “never go with boys,” and is “tight.” A supposed typical day at school also features her fellow students jabbing her until she drops her lunch tray, having a teacher look up her skirt, and a failed attempt to hide in a room and enjoy some solitude. At home, mother offers little sympathy; at work, her ambition is to move to ladies wear, where a coworker’d likely feel her up.

It hardly sounds like nostalgia, and yet Murdoch told NPR that this was a character he “would have felt was pretty hip at the time.” Clouding things further, his protagonist repeats her cycle of abuse, singling out an even weaker and less socially acceptable student, “a fat girl with a lisp,” to wow with ego-stroking lies and stoke into standing up for her against the scorn of their classmates.

Murdoch is drawn to the character because “she wanted to be remembered for her art” and made “life-size models of the Velvet Underground in clay”: “You are looking up towards the people in your class or in your school that are obviously way cooler than you, and you are wondering what goes on in their mind,” he said of the song. “And I just imagined this figure who was modeling the Velvet Underground, and I didn’t know who the Velvet Underground were.”

(Oddly, after the song was written Isobel Campbell would tell Chickfactor that, at fourteen, “she didn’t have any friends. People used to go to school desk halls and I didn’t go, I used to stay home and paint and listen to the Beatles and fret. I used to worry all the time and be really paranoid and self-conscious,” all of which is coincidental, since Murdoch wrote the song before meeting his former bandmate.)

Belle and Sebastian’s position as poet laureates for the outcast liberal arts set drew connections to 80s indie pop stars—particularly the Smiths—more for the intensity with which the group was loved and the way they fit into their fan’s lives than the way in which it sounded. On a BBC broadcast they dedicated “We Rule the School” to a young, smalltown girl “because life isn’t easy for a sixteen-year-old in the middle of nowhere.”

When Belle and Sebastian began distributing badges, crude drawings of boys and girls with striped jumpers riding bicycles were among the most popular; similar cartoon cutouts adorned a child’s mobile in a promo clip for “I Could Be Dreaming.” Murdoch also wrote about finding solace and friendship with a toy dog, he pretended to duet with a toy fox in the “Dreaming” clip, and, of course, the group itself is named for a series of children’s books and a subsequent BBC cartoon. It’s easy to why the band’s world sometime seemed a celebration of wide-eyed innocence populated by boys and girls steeped in perpetual adolescence.

This impression, more than anything else, has tied the band to the Smiths. Murdoch picked up the baton of the sensitive yet charming adult articulating the awkwardness and hopelessness of growing up. Crucially, he did so with wit and verve, and his band proved adept at accompanying his words with buoyant, sparkling pop, just as the Smiths’ Johnny Marr, Andy Rourke, and Mike Joyce had the decade before. “What the Smiths returned to the charts was something that pop had seemingly left behind—adolescence,” wrote Simon Reynolds in Melody Maker. “New pop had rapidly lost its mischief and settled down into a post-rock, post-teenage maturity, peddling naïf fantasies of sophistication to a new generation of moneyed teeny-boppers whose only desire was to grow up as soon as possible. The Smiths, on the other hand, provided fantasies of innocence to those in the process of leaving behind their adolescence.”

Later when Murdoch wanted to arrange a special festival-style show he again turned to his childhood for inspiration, booking the April 1999 Bowlie Weekender as a sort of celebration of resisting “the process of leaving behind adolescence.” Held at a Butlins Holiday Camp—an old-fashioned, affordable holiday resort—the event was a music festival by night and a games-and-boozing playground by day, with attendees bunking in chalets, lounging on beaches, and playing five-a-side soccer. Among the artists who performed were B&S satellites or labelmates Looper, Amphetameanies, V-Twin, and Salako; fellow Scots the Pastels, the Delgados, Camera Obscura, and Teenage Fanclub; likeminded contemporaries Broadcast, the Divine Comedy, and Jarvis Cocker (DJ set); and spiritual godfathers Vic Godard and John Peel (DJ set). From North America, participants included the Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, Sleater-Kinney, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. This was summer camp for indie kids.

The weekend was a wild success, and provided the blueprint for the All Tomorrow’s Parties events that still go on today. The Belles closed the proceedings and did so with a rollicking version of the Who’s “The Kids Are Alright,” and it seems, with hindsight, like the entire thing was the last throwback to the private world of Belle and Sebastian, the group that belonged only to those who understood them, as Murdoch would insist to the NME’s Steven Wells the following year.

In his adolescence, Murdoch himself held a summer job at a Butlins camp in Ayr, Scotland, working as a cashier and a supervisor. Like his characters, however, nostalgia for childhood was cloaked in sour memories as well as positive ones, and when a song called “The Chalet Lines” appeared on the band’s first post-Bowlie album, Fold Your Hands, it turned out not to be a celebration of the festival but a bitter, post-rape song by Murdoch in the first person.

Unlike “She’s Losing It,” “The Chalet Lines” and its tale of sexual abuse aren’t cloaked in raucous, jagged guitar. Also unlike that other song, this was based on real events, with Murdoch vocalizing the anguish, bitterness, and hopelessness of the victim. (In “She’s Losing It,” the victim is not only a secondary character in the song, but she channels her posttraumatic stress into attraction for someone her own sex.)

Upon its release, “The Chalet Lines” was criticized for Murdoch’s inhabiting the victim’s skin, a move some called exploitative—particularly because the song’s narrator refuses to get a pregnancy test or call the police. Expecting some sort of how-to, however, would have been glib and dismissive, and with distance the song remains difficult-to-hear but brutally honest, refusing to solicit easy sympathy from the listener. The frustration one could have with the narrator’s refusal to act is transformed by an almost desperate empathy by Murdoch’s numb, matter-of-fact delivery, expressing his character’s pain and hopelessness as one in the same.

Other delicate subjects in Murdoch’s songbook are expressed with more distance from their subject: The suicide lament “Ease Your Feet Into the Sea” barely does—it’s a before-and-after-the-fact attempt to rectify a friend’s suicide. Male emotional and physical abuse song “Slow Graffiti,” written for the film adaptation of a story in Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh’s The Acid House, was much better received, particularly for its Dorian Gray–like wish to fast forward and erase decades of one’s life: “Show me please how I will look in twenty years / And let me please interpret history in every line and scar that’s painted there in front of me.”

Murdoch’s own attraction to the freedom and pitfalls of youth may have been heightened because his social school experience was cut short by M.E. Murdoch was a longtime music fan but hadn’t realized he wanted to be in a band until he became ill. He spent years isolated from friends—from himself—and eventually found himself at the piano, first as a diversion and eventually out of necessity.

When Murdoch wrote songs, he often wrote from the point of view of characters, narratives rooted in childhood and school, his most recent communal experiences, so it was no surprise that he hoped others would flesh these songs out. They’d for so long been a means of escape from his collapsed, inward-looking existence that it was only natural he hoped they’d double as a means to reconnect with the world. “I didn’t have to share; if I had wanted, I could have stayed shut up in my room, and one day someone might have suggested I record a solo album,” he told Melody Maker. “But this group—that’s what I wanted; I went out to find people and it came together little by little, like a group of friends.”

After Murdoch met the last of those individuals, Isobel Campbell, he went home that day and penned “My Wandering Days Are Over.” A ramshackle, deliberately paced tale of the completion of the group, the song hinted at just how important Campbell was felt to be to the band, as her journey from “doing it for business men on the piano” to the group itself shares space within the song with Stuart’s own tale. She’s even painted here as the one who talked him into forming the group in the first place: “It’s gotta be fate that’s doing it / A spooky witch in a sexy dress has been bugging me with the story of the way it should be / The story of Sebastian and Belle, the singer.”

“My one-man band is over / I hit the drum for the final time and I walked away,” Murdoch presciently and defiantly claimed. This would be the final piece of the Tigermilk puzzle. Like the titular character in Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle—a passage of which is read on Tigermilk’s “I Could Be Dreaming”—Murdoch had awoken from his seven-year, M.E.-caused slumber with his band, his songs, and an opportunity to record.

Murdoch not only wrote his own myths, he also wrote his own apologies as well, tacking the hidden “Songs for Children” at the end of the 3 … 6 … 9 EP. A lo-fi acoustic ballad, Murdoch fills the hollow production with a tongue-in-cheek description of the band’s practice (“Belle and Sebastian, on the radio / Playing songs for children”) followed by an apology for the confusion and heartbreak they’d given the press (“We’re really sorry for all the trouble we caused”).

The song before it, “Put the Book Back on the Shelf” also seems to snipe at Murdoch’s new place of pride in the indie community: “Sebastian you’re in a mess / You had a dream, they called you king of all the hipsters / Is it true or are you still the queen?” Murdoch was, after all, supposedly soft and something so terrible as sensitive. This sort of wallflower asexuality and fluid gender roles recalled the Smiths and C86 and recalled the almost total absence of lust and sexual desire in early 1980s indie.

At the start of that decade—and at the height of his New Pop powers—Adam Ant complained to The Face about what he felt was a “new Puritanism” in UK music. Not enough sex, he reasoned, which at the tail end of post-punk was probably true. Early indie was much the same way, redefining punk with beauty and femininity rather than ugliness and masculinity wielded as confrontational weapons. Orange Juice and Dexys Midnight Runners set this in motion by embracing the fey and the asexual, respectively—the combination of which would eventually find its form in Morrissey.

Orange Juice were favorites not only of Campbell (she sang their “In a Nutshell” at one of the group’s earliest shows), but Murdoch as well, and he made numerous references to the band throughout its career. One of the first songs Murdoch wrote was the 1992-penned “Let Orange Juice Into Your Life.” Later he’d reference Postcard in “I Know Where the Summer Goes” and its ambitious young founder, Alan Horne, in the 3 … 6 … 9 EP sleeve notes, romanticizing the burgeoning early 80s DIY scene in Glasgow and Postcard’s famous, precious logo: “Photocopying was all the rage that year and there was quite a queue of young trendies and h_____s.… he recognized another boy at the copy shop. He watched in a trance as the boy’s illustration of a cat banging a drum got bigger and bigger.”

Young and delicate, some of who didn’t drink, Orange Juice gave themselves a cornball name in order to separate them as much as possible from their serious, dour post-punk contemporaries. Relishing in their amateurishness and self-deprecation, they practically created the mold for C86 and, as a result, are often cited as the first indie band. “Leapt onstage, though we couldn’t play / Furthermore, we had nothing to say,” was how they summed up their appeal; “Falling and laughing / Because I want to take the pleasure with the pain,” was how they summed their lives.

Of course, they were fantastic. Weaving the droll wit atop jangly guitars and chunky Chic-like bass lines, Orange Juice were, at their start, practically a blueprint for doing indie pop right: they not only wore their bruised hearts on their sleeves, but their humor as well; they were intelligent but not overly clever; they sung of heartbreak, heartache, and longing without wallowing or sounding wispy or shrinking; and they were fey and effete without being twee. Most of this was lost on C86ers but regarded as gospel by Belle and Sebastian.

Murdoch called their You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever his fourth favorite album of all time in a piece for The Observer, summing the record up by writing:

Still the only fun in town. In my time they were the four young lads you wanted to be. Floppy, spoilt babies with all the best-looking girls around. They posed like aristocracy. They were aristocracy! They had the records to back it up; this spectacular first LP for instance. I wasn’t around to see it come out. I pulled my copy out of a bargain bin for a quid. It was signed by Edwyn! In my mind their myth grew and grew!

Naturally, the press assumed such an effete group had no interest in girls, and instead needled them, a response that mirrored the treatment received by the so-called “sensitivity machines” in B...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One Make a New Cult Every Day
• Two They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To
• Three I Could Only Make You Cry with These Words
• Copyright