Do Belle and Sebastian have the most polite audience in pop? Normally when a pop singer leaves the stage to promenade through the audience, they are besieged. Even in seated venues most stars will make sure to take a security guard with them. I once saw bouncers drag women in red dresses away from Chris de Burgh at the Royal Albert Hall. Not with Belle and Sebastian.
When Stuart Murdoch stepped off the stage, barely anyone even stood up. One chap had a little dance with him but no one reached out for a touch of his hand. He climbed from the arena floor to the stalls that circle it, and made his way into a row, where everyone swivelled their seats to let him pass. Yet as soon as he gave them permission, dozens of them were up on stage dancing with this joyful band.
As soon as he gave them permission, dozens of them were up on stage dancing with this joyful band
B&S were at the hall to play their debut album Tigermilk in full. A record almost no one heard when it came out in 1996, as it was the outgrowth of a student project and only 1,000 copies were released on a college label. The oddity of its birth helped make the group, in effect, the first modern pop group – the first to exploit the internet to establish themselves; the first to be created and in turn defined by their own fans. (They had mobilised their devotees to vote for them for the best new artist award at the 1999 Brits to the fury of Pete Waterman who claimed vote-rigging had denied the trophy to his protégés, Steps.)
At that point, you wouldn’t ever have bet on them becoming a reliably great live band – mainly because they were a very unreliable live band. Murdoch suffered from ME, which made live performances infrequent, and was averse to good acoustics and decent amplification. But they inspired such devotion that they invented the trend for artist-curated festivals with their Bowlie Weekender in 1999 (‘bowlie’ referring to the distinctive haircut of the indie pop fan).
The opening line of the night – and of the group’s career – set the tone: ‘I was surprised/ I was happy for a day in 1975.’ Murdoch took the detached, wry tone of Morrissey (‘My Wandering Days Are Over’ felt almost a little too close to home), stirred in a lot of compassion and backed it with the faintest, wispiest music. It was as if the rhythmic chug of the Velvet Underground were being played by folkies who had retrained as classical musicians.
These days they’re less wispy, less ramshackle, more muscly. It could even be said that ‘You’re Just a Baby’ rocked. In the second half there was a rollicking version of the euphoric ‘Lazy Line Painter Jane’ and ‘The Boy With the Arab Strap’, which remains a ridiculously beguiling nursery melody, almost a parody of tweeness.
Over in Tufnell Park, two Australians in their sixties: one a veteran farmer who has lived on the same farm all his life, the other a former lawyer-cum-swimming instructor-cum-civil servant. They delivered a lesson in Antipodean culture: an hour of songs about drinking (their first song was called ‘Pub’, the second ‘Nice Day To Go To the Pub’), drink-driving (‘10 Can Trip’), roadkill (‘Dead Roo’) and sundry other matters, usually sung by the farmer, Ross Knight.
Cosmic Psychos are plainly not the idiots they’ve been pretending to be for more than 40 years, though the drinking was certainly real. Their visceral approach has long made them heroes to successive generations of fans of scuzzy, rude guitar music. It’s not something I need to experience very often – there’s not a lot of emotional nuance in ‘I Like Beer’ – but the noise of it is undeniably thrilling.
The lawyer, John McKeering, is a wonderful guitarist (he apparently has a master’s in musicology), even if he adopts only one tone – brutal rock’n’roll. He’s also disturbingly compelling: crop-headed, beer-bellied and wearing a vest, his mouth drooping open vacantly. If you saw him on the street, you’d be unsurprised if he told you he was without somewhere to sleep.
I was here to see them play one song: ‘Fuckwit City’, sung by McKeering. A song that doesn’t bother with chord changes because none are needed. A song so enjoyably primitive that I can listen to it on repeat. As soon as it ended, I wished they would play it again. I urge you to watch their video of it on YouTube. Almost all of you will be repulsed. A few of you will laugh and watch it again. And again.
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