I came home today, opened my front door, and picked up the post on our doormat. Top of the pile: tickets to see Belle & Sebastian. Now, there was a time when I'd have known weeks beforehand that B&S were planning a tour. I'd have been down my local ticket emporium the very morning they go on sale - in fact, I can remember that happening a few times. This time, though, we were lazing about on the sofa surfing the net, when K - my partner - spotted B&S in the upcoming acts playing the Colston Hall. She gets a discount at the bar there, so we were rather tempted. And by the wonders of the internet: today, we open the door, and B&S tickets are waiting on the doormat. (Sadly, the other thing we bought at the same time - the new, final, Scott Pilgrim comic book, was not there too. Which was a shame, as I was looking forward to seeing how the plot ended. But I'm digressing) I spent tea-time today telling K about some of the B&S gigs I've been to in the past, before I met her, and the various different things that made them special. The gig at Carnegie Hall where Stuart played the first two lines of "Fox In The Snow" then froze cold. The gig at the QMU where Richard sang "Cool For Cats", disguising the lyric sheet by hiding it inside a porn mag. The Barrowlands gig where Stuart pretended to get himself arrested; the tiny political benefit gig at Nice'n'Sleazy's where "Suspicious Minds" was the encore; the Red Cross benefit with an anti-war speech from Alasdair "Scotland's greatest living writer" Gray which most of the audience ignored. "You're such a fanboy," said K. "Actually, you're a lapsed fanboy. They're worse." (Digressing again, am I the only person who thinks it's funny that Nice'n'Sleazy's, the bar, with a name like that, is directly opposite a "dungeon" where perverted-but-well-off middle-class men pay perverted-and-like-the-cash middle-aged dominatrixes (dominatrices?) to tie them up and beat them? You have to admit, the coincidence of names is a happy one. I say "dungeon" in scare quotes because it's on the second floor, and, well, to my mind a dungeon isn't a dungeon unless it's under a castle, or a mansion at the very least. If you stand outside Nice'n'Sleazy's on the right nights, you can see the dominatrices (dominatrixes?) hanging out of the window, puffing on their cigarettes, watching the Glasgow nightlife below.) I tried to make my name as a B&S fanboy, a year or so back. There's a game show on the telly here, called Mastermind, a very simple idea with few tactics, where contestants are grilled on subjects of their choice in the manner - explicitly - of a prisoner-of-war interrogation. I had nothing to do one day, and K had seen an advert for an audition. I turned up, proposing the few subjects that I'd managed to think up on my walk to the TV studios. "There's a band I'd like to do, Belle & Sebastian. They're not *that* well known, but they've been around over a decade now, they've released six full-length albums, and they've got a pretty big cult following." "That sounds good - there should be plenty of material to do questions on" said the researcher interviewing me. Better mug up on lyrics and tour schedules, I thought. When the producer phoned me a couple of weeks later, to tell me I'd got on the show, they still sounded very enthusiastic about "that band you mentioned, Belle & Sebastian." But when the BBC called back again a while after that, to tell me what I'd be answering questions about: no B&S. They'd been quietly dropped - presumably they already had enough band-themed subjects to feature, and as I'd suggested other things, my band were the one to get dropped from the series. So I never got the chance to prove my fanboy (or otherwise) status on TV - instead, I appeared to know startling amounts about French Revolutionary history and 1930s steam trains; and I would have answered questions about my favourite misguided poet, Robert Graves, if I hadn't been beaten by a shrewish woman who enters every quiz show going (according to my mother, who watches every quiz show going). Shame. (It's all a trick, incidentally. The questions aren't nearly as deep as you, not knowing the subject at all, might think.) Do B&S still do a cover in the middle of each set to let Stuart's (Struan's?) voice rest? Do they still have the same eclectic taste in support acts - I'm slightly sad that I never got to see any of the shows supported by Graham Fellowes. Do they still take requests? All this, and more, will be answered in December, in our little local concert hall that's a cross between, well, a concert hall, and the device Archimedes invented to destroy the Roman naval fleet. And I'll be the chap standing near the front, alternately saying "how much for a pint of Stowford Press? Are you sure they gave you the discount?" and shouting "PLAY HURLEY'S HAVING DREAMS! I'LL TELL YOU THE LYRICS IF YOU CAN'T REMEMBER THEM!" All together now ... "Hurley's having dreams / Little Hurley's having dreams / And he kicks and then he screams / And I can't get to sleep / Oh Hurley, I could weep" -- http://www.symbolicforest.com/blog/ http://www.twitter.com/forestpines http://www.flickr.com/photos/forest_pines +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-+ Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+