Music

Belle and Sebastian going relatively gently into that good night

The band's singer Stuart Murdoch on vulnerability, empathy and their potential last album

Stuart Murdoch with Belle and Sebastian: ‘When I wasn’t well and when the band started, I had absolutely nothing to lose. I was 100 per cent honest in my songwriting.’ Photograph: Hollie Fernando

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Ed Power
Tue May 3 2022 - 00:00

This might be Belle and Sebastian’s final album , says frontman Stuart Murdoch, talking to The Irish Times down a selfie stick as he strolls through an overcast park in central Glasgow.

“You never know what’s around the corner,” shrugs the singer who, across the past three decades, has led the cult alternative band through a series of breathless adventures in pop. “It was seven years since our previous record. Extrapolate forward another seven years and I’m 60. Maybe I want to do something else.”

If A Bit of Previous, released May 6th is to be Belle and Sebastian’s swansong then it is a fitting farewell. Brimming with bittersweet melodies and plaintive strings, it harks back to the classic LPs Murdoch and bandmates released in the late 1990s, when Belle and Sebastian were a byword for dewy-eyed indie earnestness.

What’s different is that, where they once sang from the perspective of angst-festooned 20-somethings, Murdoch and company are now in the trenches of middle age, as acknowledged by yearning recent single Young and Stupid. “Now we’re old with creaking bones/ Some with partners, some alone,” he sings. “Some with kids and some with dogs/Getting through the nightly slog”.

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It’s a funny, wry teaser for A Bit of Previous. And that streak of pained winsomeness locates it firmly within the spectrum of everyday angst that has been a Belle and Sebastian calling card all the way back to Tigermilk (1996) and the Boy with the Arab Strap (1998).

Brittle and serious-minded, these records positioned the group as folksier heirs to bijou janglers such as the The Field Mice and Orange Juice. Surfacing in the lairy heyday of Britpop, Belle and Sebastian also served the crucial secondary function of reminding us rock music didn’t have to be all over-sized cagoules and mockney swagger.

Shadow of time

That Belle and Sebastian will forever have one foot in the past is something Murdoch acknowledges and with which he has made peace. As far as their fans are concerned, the best version of the group is the one that coalesced around Tigermilk. And which dissolved when Murdoch’s then girlfriend Isobel Campbell left in 2002 (shortly after the departure of guitarist Stuart David, who founded Looper and then became a novelist). Is it a struggle to escape the shadow of that time?

“I think you’ve hit the nail on the head, actually. That happens to a lot of groups. They have a time they’re synonymous with. And you can’t break out of it. Even if you make make the best record you’ve ever made, nobody cares.

The brutal truth is that a new album by a band that has been around for a while is simply deemed “not interesting” by the world. “It gets a little bit existential. There’s plenty of other things I could be doing with my time, with my life. It is hard to break out of the shadow of those early records.”

‘There’s plenty of other things I could be doing with my time, with my life. It is hard to break out of the shadow of those early records.’

A Bit of Previous was recorded – when else? – during the pandemic. Murdoch, however, is adamant about it not being a lockdown LP. Having struggled on and off with chronic fatigue syndrome since his 20s, the idea of staying in all day to preserve your bodily sanctity was in no way a novelty for him, he says. The life we all lived through with Covid was one with which he was already all too familiar.

“I had a ‘bit of previous’,” he acknowledges. “A history with being trapped, being in a room, not being able to see people. I’d learned how to deal with that over the years.”

Belle and Sebastian are one of those bands that have come to stand for something larger than their music. Just as Coldplay embody a kind of beige stadium vastness and Adele is the soundtrack to the eternal dinner party, Murdoch and his bandmates seemed to catalyse a sense of vulnerability and emotional honesty of which rock music has long been suspicious. Was Murdoch surprised their essentially unfashionable indie sound caught on so quickly?

‘A particular audience’

“In the long run, I have been surprised,” he says. “I must say that right at the start, I had an inkling that if these songs that I was writing ever got out and found their audience . . . I knew it was going to be a particular audience. I felt that way. The songs I was writing, they were empathetic. And that there was people like me, in small rooms, waiting for a band with a particular . . . not a message. A style or a tone. When I wasn’t well and when the band started, I had absolutely nothing to lose. I was 100 per cent honest in my songwriting. I’m not sure if there was many bands around at that point, who had had that same sensibility.”

That opening chapter of the Belle and Sebastian story reached its climactic conclusion in 1999 when they saw off 5ive and Steps to win “Best Newcomer” at the Brits. With the award decided by public vote, Belle and Sebastian fans had mobilised en masse – and completely independently of the band – to ensure they carried the day.

Their victory surprised Murdoch and bandmates as much as anyone and, on the night, only two of them turned up. But things soon turned ugly with Pete Waterman, of hit factory Stock Aitken and Waterman – and producer of Steps – demanding an inquiry into the voting process.

“We won a Brit by mistake,” says Murdoch, referencing Richard E Grant’s famous line from Withnail and I, ‘We’ve gone on holiday by mistake’.

“The tickets to go to the Brits were £500 or a thousand pound a pop. To me, that was ridiculous. I didn’t like the Brits away. I didn’t bother. Only two people from the band went down. The rest of us were still working away in the studio. We won the prize and immediately the Sun newspaper said that it was a fix and that we’d cheated it. We were on the front page of the Scottish Sun. It was the big headline. I was very naive, I didn’t know what to do. Are the police going to turn up?”

They became “paranoid”. “We were thinking of going down to the Sun newspaper building and wrapping the Brit up in newspaper and chucking it through a glass door. Then we read the article – it was saying ‘they make yoghurt, they sit around knitting cardigans’. It was so funny. That was the only moment the tabloids ever got interested in us. You had to chuckle.”

A Bit of Previous is released on May 6th