Private pleasures

On the inside with Belle & Sebastian

by Franklin Bruno

In the opening scene of the film High Fidelity, we see shy, music-obsessed record-store clerk Dick (Todd Louiso) put on a tape -- all acoustic guitars, shimmering strings, and Donovanesque vocals -- as the workday begins. Enter obnoxious music-obsessed record-store clerk Barry (Jack Black), a few minutes late. "What is this?" he asks suspiciously before ripping out the tape and declaring, "I don't want to hear any of your sad bastard music."

The "sad bastard music" in question? Belle & Sebastian -- an advance track from the Scottish pop septet's fourth album, Fold Your Hands, Child, You Walk like a Peasant (Matador). The filmmakers' choice may be the result of an indie-rock in-joke, or perhaps music-supervisor machinations, but it's telling nonetheless: B&S divide listeners. For the extroverted Barrys of the world, the band's elaborately low-key arrangements and wispy boy-girl vocals are the antithesis of rock and roll, and chief B&S writer Stuart Murdoch's seemingly passive point of view is no better. (A sample from the new album: "I don't care if you hear this/I don't care if I'm alone here, singing songs to myself.") But for the world's oh-so-sensitive Dicks, the songs' melodic sweep more than compensates for their lack of volume, and Murdoch's references to lonely bus rides and barely acknowledged crushes make B&S akin to a secret handshake, a sign that other people also spend their days on the inside looking out.

Stateside, this sort of smart, unapologetically not-for-everyone music rarely rises above respectable cultdom (think of the Smiths). But back in Great Britain, the worshippers seem to be winning the day: the band's latest single entered the charts at #15 and earned them an appearance on BBC's Top of the Pops. Of course, "Legal Man" isn't typically wan B&S fare -- enjoyable but slight, it's a self-consciously chart-aimed nugget that opens with a burst of sitar and congas and closes with a summery sing-along chant: "Get out of the office and into the sunshine." The B-side, "Judy Is a Dickslap" (a play on the earlier "Judy and the Dream of Horses"), is a departure as well -- the band's first instrumental, it passes a roller-rink melody around from organ to trumpet to guitar. In contrast to their other between-album EPs (the most essential being the Matador releases Lazy Line Painter Jane and This Is Just a Modern Rock Song), you could hear either of these songs and not understand why B&S are loved (and loathed) by so many.

No such problem with the new album, which takes up where their 1997 debut, Tigermilk (initially released as a class project by a Glasgow business school before being re-released by Matador), and the breakthrough follow-up, If You're Feeling Sinister (the band's US debut when it came out in 1997 on the now defunct EMI offshoot the Enclave), left off. Most songs begin with Murdoch alone at guitar or piano before marshaling the troops: Isobel Campbell's cello, Sarah Martin's violin, Chris Geddes's keyboards, Mick Cooke's trumpet. "The Model" and "Family Tree" swell with baroque-pop majesty; the elegiac "Don't Leave the Light On, Baby" sports slow-jam electric piano and the most dramatic strings this side of I Am Shelby Lynne.

Fold Your Hands also makes good on Murdoch's attempts to integrate other members' material into B&S's idiosyncratic vision. Last year's The Boy with the Arab Strap (Matador) included substandard tracks like "Seymour Stein" and "Spaceboy Dream #1," tunes that made it painfully clear who the band's real songwriter is. But this time, the effort pays off: Campbell's "Beyond the Sunrise" recalls Leonard Cohen circa Songs of Love and Hate, both in its Biblical imagery ("Joseph was traveling with a heavy load") and in guitarist Stevie Jackson's subterranean vocal. And Jackson's own Northern-soul nugget "The Wrong Girl" is a welcome breather from Murdoch's more elaborate edifices.

According to Mick Cooke, these outside contributions come at Murdoch's prodding. "After the first two records, Stuart really started saying that other people should be writing songs and giving input," Cooke points out during our brief transatlantic phone conversation. "On The Boy with the Arab Strap, it was him encouraging the other members, and with the new album, he was quite guarded about showing us his own songs. By the end of the day, we had 22 songs, and the ones on the record are the ones that hang together best, whoever wrote them."

This insistence on not being seen as "The Stuart Murdoch Show" also explains why I'm talking to Cooke; B&S's songwriting contingent routinely refuse interview requests, leaving the public relations to less visible members Cooke and drummer Stevie Jackson. It's not shyness so much as being chary of the hype-'em-and-hurl-'em tactics of the British music press. But Cooke turns out to be friendly and forthcoming, defying the image of B&S as moony isolationists like the characters in Murdoch's songs. "We're quite gregarious, we like to go out. We're not leading the rock-and-roll lifestyle -- we lead quiet lives in Glasgow, but we're definitely not quiet."

Cooke's elegant horn lines have graced B&S records since Tigermilk, but he only recently became a full-fledged member. With the departure of Stuart David for Looper, Cooke will be doubling on bass when the band visits America later this year. "I suppose I get paid more, and I used to miss the occasional gig, but that's the only difference. Right from the start, the band made a conscious decision not to take up everyone's time 100 percent -- we never wanted to make it seem too much like a job. When we're recording, we'll do two or three weeks at a time, but the rest of the time we're free to do what we want."

Still, despite their admirably democratic attitude, it's Stuart Murdoch's gift as a songwriter that distinguishes B&S from the legions of twee janglers that have come before. His best songs tack prosaic lines ("Tossing a coin to decide whether you should tell your mum about a dose of thrush you get while you were licking railings") onto memorable chord progressions, the better to create a self-sustaining pop universe full of teasing androgyny ("I'm in a mess/I'm in a dress") and private iconography. (Just how private? The new album's "Nice Day for a Sulk" alludes to minor British Invasion hitmaker Manfred Mann over Chris Geddes's "Blinded by the Light" organ swirl -- this after a pre-Tigermilk band bio depicted a cartoon Murdoch wearing a Mann T-shirt.)

But Murdoch is slowly wiping the steam from the bus-station windows and turning his vision outward. Last year's "This Is Just a Modern Rock Song" begins in typically unrequited territory ("I put my arm around her waist/She put me on the ground with judo") before becoming a pointed dig at Oasis/Blur-style bloke rock: "We're four boys in corduroy/We're not terrific but we're competent." Fold Your Hands goes farther. If the album has a theme, it's the collision between the public and the private, the individual and the social. The opening "I Fought in a War" casts Murdoch's hapless narrator as an unwilling soldier, "with a corpse that just fell into me/And the bullets flying 'round," though he's also singing about the band's attempt to negotiate the minefields of a pop career: "The sickness there ahead of me/Went beyond the bedsit infamy of the decade come before." "The Chalet Lines" is a pretty piano ballad, but scratch the surface and you'll find the story of a rape and its aftermath told by the woman. The scenario ends with the narrator boarding yet another bus for parts unknown; Murdoch's sustained act of imagination here is far less exploitive than many explicitly "political" songs.

Fold Your Hands ends with two of the band's best numbers to date. "Family Tree," penned by Murdoch but sung by Campbell, declares independence from fashion ("I'd rather be fat than be confused") and education ("I swore at all the teachers/Because they never teach us") over a playground melody that belies the song's antisocial anger: "Me in a cage/With a bottle of rage/And a family like the mafia." According to Cooke, the song dates from the band's pre-history: "The first time I met Stuart, he came up to the apartment to play me some songs. He left a tape and a short story called `Belle and Sebastian.' And the lyrics to `Family Tree' were in the story, as a song that the character Belle had written." The closing "There's Too Much Love," another piano-driven near-rave-up, finds Murdoch singing as himself, drawing his battle lines in no uncertain terms ("And when I come to blows/When I am numbering my foes/Just hope that you are on my side, my dear") and offering his clearest statement of emotional intent yet: "I'm brutal, honest, and afraid of you."

The "you" that Murdoch fears may include some of the band's early fans. Just as the album's characters strain against institutional limits, the band have come in for criticism over recent decisions that seem to compromise their indie ethic of invisibility, such as the relatively slick video for "Legal Man." (Previous videos were composed of indifferently synched Super-8 footage of the band's friends.) True believers needn't worry: the single may be public pop, but the pleasures of Fold Your Hands are as private (and, yes, sad) as those of If You're Feeling Sinister, the band's previous peak. Acknowledging the nay-sayers, Cooke gives B&S's side of the story: "We made a big-budget video to see what it was like, that's all there was to it, really. But we've turned down million-dollar record deals and offers to use songs in commercials, so it hurts a bit to be told you've sold out."

On the side

Born of a loose affiliation of music-loving school chums and indie-pop scenesters, Belle & Sebastian have spun off several side projects and maintained a number of close affiliations among Glasglow's close-knit community of pop bands. Here are a few of the important friends and family:

* Arab Strap. Scottish duo whose pub-crawling lyrics make Stuart Murdoch's melancholia sound like Katrina & the Waves. Several B&Sers play on their albums, the latest of which is Elephant Shoe (Jetset).

* Looper. Former side project and current main activity of departed B&S bassist Stuart Davis, featuring Tinkertoy electronica, whimsical spoken-word vignettes, and a multimedia live show. Latest album: The Geometrid (Sub-Pop).

* The Gentle Waves. Isobel Campbell's outlet for songs that don't make the B&S cut. The one album out so far -- The Green Fields of Foreverland (Never) -- features Campbell's timorous vocals and instrumental assists from B&Sers.

* The Pastels. Venerable godparents of the Glaswegian pop underground, last heard from on 1997's Illumination (Up). Key Pastel member Katrina Mitchell runs B&S's mail-order merchandising and appears as cover star of B&S's Legal Man (Matador) EP.