the duke wrote: what i do mind is people who will only endlessly consume the facts of belle and sebastian, that are concerned with hearing only about product and what songs they played at such and such a show and what did stuart say between songs? all interesting stuff, perhaps (but only perhaps), but for me, what REALLY makes me smile and gush about the appeal of belle and sebastian is the way in which people are here openly displaying to us something of THEIR lives, of the ways in which this Pop has touched them, moved them, informed and deformed the ways in which their moments pass.

In a pub once Tim suggested that all Great Pop is written from the perspective of being 16. Not

[HopkinsT] It's pop's great unsolved paradox. Those amongst us whose lives are tied up and turned inside out by pop, who love it for itself and for what it does on a personal level and who use it as some kind of abstract yardstick to judge what's right and wrong in the wider world (and there are those of us who do), those amongst us know the power of pop. But we also know that we are consumers and customers, that pop is there as a part of, and because of (and also in spite of) what makes the world such a crap place so much of the time. That pop can turn us against what it draws us into. And that it tells us what it's doing. I'm not saying pop can replace politics. Plainly it can't. But my politics are, and have always been, informed by pop. By the rush of freedom and expression which I felt when I was sixteen and which even now Belle and Sebastian give me... that all Great Pop was ABOUT being 16, but rather that it encompassed a certain sense of excitement and tremulous anticipation that the IDEA of being 16 conjures in us. [HopkinsT] Ah, the pub conversation, the highest form of discourse known to humanity, eh duke? One of my hobbies has long been to draw up definitions of what is pop and what is rock. This is one of my favourites. If it doesn't address (in some way) the matter of being, feeling, sixteen, it ain't pop. It's something else. Rock, often, but not always. Because pop opens for us such a sense of possibility, such an opportuntiy for re-inventing and re-understanding ourselves, and sixteen is (arbitrarily) an age when those possibilities are (should be?) there in our lives, before we get tied down too far into personal history and so on. At sixteen, I felt life whistling along at an amazing pace, wanted to catch it in my hands just for a moment, like you want to catch a popsong, when shit's proper. Excuse me, enough confessionals. Anyone travelling further than me to see a game of football this weekend? I'm going 300-350 miles for Exeter vs Northampton. Yep, duke, some early Wolfhounds records were sleeved by the Meerkats (and 'Cruelty' had another cute big-eared beastie on it, didn't it?), and very lovely they were. Cheerio all who've had the endurance to get this far. 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