hello, i don't think this has been sent yet, enjoy! :) ************************************************************************ Forget Jarvis Cocker waggling a derogatory arse at Michael Jackson or Chumbawamba emptying an icebucket over John Prescott, the Brits Upset 1999 was by far the most ludicrous. Miles away from the cocaine-encrusted celebrations at London Arena on February 16, the mild-mannered janitor of a Glasgow church - accustomed to polishing floors and setting out tables and chairs for pensioners' coffee mornings - was the author of an incident that would have The Sun up in arms within a week. Following the news that, four years into their existence, Belle & Sebastian had scooped the Best Newcomer Award - as voted for by the listeners of Radio 1 and accepted by bemused drummer Richard Colburn and trumpeter Mick Cooke - the band's songwriter/frontman Stuart Murdoch phoned his mum and then quietly broke out the champagne. As he has done throughout Belle & Sebastian's rise to prominence, the 30-year-old part-time ecclesiastical caretaker refused all requests for an interview. Meanwhile, in London, Pete Waterman alleged that vote-rigging had swindled his pop charges Steps out of their rightful award. Two days later, The Sun demanded a phone poll recount, deemed unnecessary by Radio 1 and the BPI. This faintly ridiculous affair added another surreal twist to the history of the Scottish octet. Media-shy and purposefully obtuse, the band have only been photographed on a handful of occasions. Furthermore, the bulk of their interviews are now conducted by their drummer or, for the purposes of European phone interviews, their manager impersonating their drummer. For the uninitiated, Belle & Sebastian offer a gossamer, hushed acoustic folk that at times echoes Nick Drake as captured on a four-track in a Kelvingrove bedroom. Fronted by the peculiarly Anglo-vowelled Murdoch, the songwriter's skewed lyrical observations regularly examine some form of pervy puritanism (sample line: "She was into S&M and Bible studies"). To generalise even more grossly, Belle & Sebastian followers are the bookish, boo-to-a-goose type last spotted in 1989 before "baggy" led the independent charge over the commercial horizon, leaving those with a fondness for duffle coats, lightly strummed guitars or twee lyrical conceits in their wake. As a result, B&S seemed destined for a life of Top 10 independent chart status while rarely troubling the "proper" rundown. But then, in September last year, the band's third album, The Boy With The Arab Strap, entered the chart at Number 12, only one position behind the aggressively marketed Hole. To date, it has chalked up 60,000 sales. And following the controversial Brit Award, even those who'd dismissed Belle & Sebastian as fey, awkward, underachieving, pretentious bastards were forced to sit up and take notice. On a sunny, pre-spring Monday afternoon in Glasgow, the B&S contingent democratically elected to receive Q - drummer Colburn (tea) and pixie-like keyboardist Chris Geddes (surprisingly rock Jack Daniels and coke) - sit in the basement of an organic café/bar around the corner from CaVa Studios where the group are recording their fourth album. While the former shares church lodgings and janitorial duties with Murdoch ("Especially at the moment, it helps you maintain some level of sanity"), the latter first encountered Murdoch at a string of Glasgow parties where the uniquely attired songwriter could often be found haranguing revellers with blunt look-at-me tactics. "He was always trying to play people his songs," Geddes recalls, "and having folk go, Look Stuart, just shut up. It was like, Get away you mad guy in silver trousers." As reluctant as he may now be to step into the spotlight, four years ago Stuart Murdoch was desperate for attention. While one apocryphal version of his pre-B&S past has him stopping potential band members in the street, it is known that he would regularly hitch south to London to drop tapes off at Broadcasting House for John Peel. Having become involved in Beatbox, a music workshop for the unemployed, he hooked up with bassist Stuart David ("Quite contemporary compared to us," jokes Geddes. "He's got a computer and a puffa jacket^Å") and the two began recording Murdoch's songs under the name Rhode Island. They answered a small ad placed by Alan Rankine, former Associates guitarist-turned-lecturer on Glasgow's Stow College music industry course. Rankine was searching for bands willing to become guinea pigs for the college's annual project - which involved students in every aspect of a record's release, from sound engineering to press and promotion. While previous years had yielded singles, when Rhode Island - now renamed Belle & Sebastian and expanded to a seven-piece - were selected, they used their five-day studio session to record an entire album, Tigermilk. Only 1,000 vinyl copies were pressed (now changing hands for up to £200), but the record created enough of a stir to prompt A&R excitement amongst the major labels. Instead, Belle & Sebastian signed to minuscule London-based label Jeepster, founded by former EMI publicist Mark Jones. The label boss recalls the first time he saw Murdoch play in a bedroom at a Glasgow party: "He just came in wearing a vest, a pair of shorts and Doc Martens, put his foot up on one of those white traffic bollards and started playing these incredible songs." Still, the band affected a half-arsed attitude towards Jones's initial advances. "It was really funny the first few times he came up," Colburn admits. "He sat there getting paranoid 'cause none of us would say a word." "They were unimpressed by anything I tried to say or offer them," Jones marvels. "Half the band would just bugger off and Stevie (Jackson, guitarist) would sit there playing with a teabag, dunking it on a plate for a half an hour. But I thought there was something completely magical about them. For three months afterwards, I still couldn't even really talk to Stuart because I was just so in awe of him." Q asks Murdoch's bandmates to sum up their colleagues in a sentence: cellist Isobel Campbell is deemed "totally fantastic^Å really talented"; trumpeter Mick Cooke "makes less mistakes musically than all the rest of us put together^Å and more mistakes personally"; violinist and "novelty instrumentalist" Sarah Martin is "the most indie out of us all"; and of Stevie Jackson we learn that "White Lines is his favourite tune". Yet they stall and stumble over their words in attempting to nail their frontman in a soundbite. "He's just^Å a guy who happens to be a really good songwriter," Geddes mumbles. "I wouldn't put up with anyone else phoning the house at the hours he does, but you let him get away with it because it's him." Becoming anxious that Belle & Sebastian were being increasingly viewed as a one-man operation, insiders claim that Stuart Murdoch tried to nip his burgeoning cult of personality in the bud. Of course, his subsequent refusal to do any interviews whatsoever has had the opposite effect, bathing the frontman in a more enigmatic light. "It's definitely been made a bigger deal out of than it should've been," reasons Geddes. "He'd done a few interviews, wasn't happy with the way they put the band across, so he decided not to do them. I don't see anything abnormal about that." "I think it was a lot to do with him being misquoted and stuff," Colburn offers. "He just wasn't happy with being interviewed and then reading it all jumbled up." (Q subsequently offers Murdoch an opportunity to tape any form of interview he might agree to, in an effort to assure him that he wouldn't be misquoted. He declines, relaying a message via his press officer that "he really doesn't like talking about himself".) Belle & Sebastian's attitude to promotional photographs of themselves has been weirder still. To date, these have included: album covers featuring shots of friends, one breast-feeding a toy tiger; a group painting with the supposed band members (more of their friends) posing in the background; cellist Campbell with her face obscured by a surgical mask and a re-enactment of The Last Supper featuring a smattering of B&S members and - hey - their pals. "We just want pictures to look good," Geddes insists, "and basically most snapshots of eight-piece bands look awful. I don't see why there's a problem. There are photos of everyone in the band. It's not like we're like (hides head under jacket). It's just not wanting to have too many crap-looking pictures. The Daily Mail took a photo of all of us backstage after a gig and we're just sat around looking awful." The consequent lack of a band identity gives the group's constituents plenty of room for manoeuvre. Less a band, more a confederation of independent states, most have other musical projects on the go. Stuart David's short stories-with-samplers project, Looper, is already attracting attention, while Isobel Campbell plays a major role on The Gentle Waves' debut album, The Green Fields Of Foreverland. Stevie Jackson helps out The Secret Goldfish. Colburn assists Camera Obscura. Colburn and Campbell played on Snow Patrol's Songs For Polar Bears and Chris Geddes, Murdoch and Campbell are on the first Arab Strap album. Geddes is in the dancey V-Twin and DJs as Twin Tub. And that's probably just the tip of the iceberg. So far it's Belle & Sebastian who have captured the public's imagination. Record buyers want to know about them, so isn't there a responsibility to communicate with the public, even via the press? "I disagree," argues Geddes. "If people have a right to demand anything of you, it's that you make good records. If you go out of your way to be a media pop star, then you will get to a point where people can legitimately say, Well this is the sphere you operate in, you do have these obligations. But, I mean, all we've ever set ourselves up as was a bunch of people making records and as far as I'm concerned, that's the only responsibility we've got^Å" oday, Belle & Sebastian are doing a bad impression of a "difficult" band. Rather than mystique-mongering, Colburn describes the artful troupe as basically comprising "six blokes and two birds". They're keen to explode certain other myths about themselves, including that they snubbed the offer of a support slot from Radiohead ("It was in South East Asia and we couldn't get the backing because we're on such a small label"), that when performing live they play ridiculously quietly to test the patience of the audience ("There's folk playing recorders and the cello^Å we're not AC/DC or The Who") and that they turned down Top Of The Pops for This Is Just A Modern Rock Song ("Top Of The Pops is definitely one of the few collective ambitions the band has^Å the record just didn't go in the charts high enough"). Even the suggestion that two members turning up at the Brits seemed like not-a-very-Belle-&-Sebastian-thing-to-do is roundly rebuffed by Colburn: "It would've been a fairly obvious thing not to go because of The Verve refusing and stuff. You get invited to a party, so you go." As regards Pete Waterman's vote-rigging allegations, Chris Geddes is keen to point out that B&S fans are highly Web-literate (their site averages 200,000 hits per week). "We've got 60,000 fans or something," he states, "and out of them, it's understandable that 10,000 bothered to vote. OK, Steps have got a fan club of half a million, but they couldn't be bothered to vote." For the record, then, the keyboardist did personally vote in The Sun's phone poll recount. "The whole thing was hilarious," he grins. "In the space of three days, we'd become household names without leaving the flat^Å" While that sentence alone seems to sum up Belle & Sebastian and everything might appear rosy in their world, an uncomfortable atmosphere descends when Q accompanies the pair back to CaVa Studios. Stuart Murdoch, it transpires, is working in the basement studio below our very feet. Ever-diplomatic, Colburn shrugs in explanation, "It'd be great to hang out, but y'know, the rest of the band are downstairs and stuff^Å" Hiding, effectively. Perhaps, in retreating further into the shadows, Stuart Murdoch is complicating matters for himself, with what appears to be a mediaphobia. Moreover, if Belle & Sebastian's profile and sales increase, it seems unlikely that anyone close to him will dare question his strategy. "Say if Paul Simon or Bob Dylan or one of those type of people turned up on your doorstep," Jeepster's Mark Jones offers, drawing mighty parallels. "You'd kind of have to think, You're absolutely amazing^Å you can do whatever you want." ************************************************************************ Q BackIssues are available either by calling the back issues line on 01858 435341 or write to them at Tower House, Sovereign Park, Market Harborough, Leicestershire, LE16 9EF, U.K. cheers, Katrina. -- ************************************************************************ jeepster recordings ltd. - mailto:a-and-r@jeepster.co.uk http://www.jeepster.co.uk/ ***we are moving on april 1st 1999!*** new postal address is po box 14153, london, sw11 4xu, u.k. tel: 0171 924 2324, fax: 0171 924 6161 +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the reborn Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail "sinister@majordomo.net". To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to "majordomo@majordomo.net". 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