Hi there all. I've just read this in the Sunday Times, and thought that y'all might be interested. This Cairns character seems alright after all, and it's nice to see the Sunday Times name-check us lot as a link to look at. Hurrah indeed. That'll be another 200 additions to the list then..... Belle & Sebastian are a pop enigma. Dan Cairns tries to crack the code There can be little doubt that things are shifting up a gear for the Scottish septet Belle & Sebastian. First OK! magazine picked their latest offering, Legal Man, as its single of the week, then Pete Waterman, patron saint of teenyboppers, branded them "cheesy pop stars". Ouch. It's a jungle out there, and nobody familiar with the reclusive group will be in the least surprised if they feel tempted to scurry back inside their Glasgow shell and play their Beatles-meets-the-Smiths indie pop exclusively to each other, never to venture forth again. Yet, with their sitar-drenched single heading for the Top 10 and their most commercial (and finest) album to date, Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant, out tomorrow, there are signs of an unstoppable momentum that will deny the band any say in the matter. This impetus began at last year's Brit awards, when B&S controversially took the best-newcomer prize from under the noses of Steps, whom Waterman, of course, produces. At the time, the man who gave us Rick Astley cried foul, claiming he'd been tipped off by organisers that his act had won, and accusing B&S of rigging the internet vote with the help of their tech-savvy army of fans. Stuart Murdoch, the group's lead singer and chief songwriter, isn't going to let this lie. "They're sort of freaks," he says now of Steps. "They're not like teenyboppers, they're like a strange holiday-camp group." Murdoch is talking in the incongruous, purple-plush surroundings of the 10 Rooms in London, where journalists and fans have gathered for B&S's first-ever Q&A. It's a strangely stilted affair that, far from shedding light on a notoriously media-shy group, serves instead to confirm suspicions and deepen confusion. The slightly unreal atmosphere is reinforced by the physical gulf between audience and band. One of the things that seems to have enraged people about B&S is what they perceive as the band's cliqueyness; that feeling, as a new listener, of intruding on a private gathering between firm friends. Seeing the band sitting behind their raised table, seven talking heads conferring and sniggering like contestants on University Challenge, clearly reopens old wounds for some. Two questioners, in particular, become increasingly worked up, and it is interesting to observe the effect this has on the band dynamic. In what may be a foretaste of the ordeals their imminent celebrity will bring, there are moments when conferral shades into disagreement, while at other times they close ranks in a display of petulance seemingly at odds with their customary serenity. In the process, the door on the private world of Belle & Sebastian is opened just a crack. When accused of dodging the responsibilities afforded them by their fame and status and opting instead for fey, apolitical detachment, the hitherto slightly self-satisfied smile is wiped off Murdoch's face and a fresh diatribe launched, against Primal Scream. Soon afterwards, the event is brought abruptly to a halt. So why on earth are a band who don't give interviews and do their best to avoid being photographed together suddenly volunteering to meet the media? Isobel Campbell, B&S's cellist and co-vocalist, and, with Murdoch, arguably the most watchful guardian of their indie chastity, is blunt. "We thought if we did this, people wouldn't come looking for us when the next album comes out." "We wouldn't get away with this in Scotland," Murdoch adds. "Everyone would be like, who the f*** do they think they are?" Hardly a charm offensive, then, but refreshingly honest all the same. In any case, the band's most important relationship is not with the press but with their fans, the very same people who turned out in such force to upset Waterman. Fiercely loyal and, perhaps inevitably, with a touch of the anorak about them, they march in step with the band they follow. At their own true-believers' get- togethers, which have names such as 200 Troubled Teenagers, they trade tales of how much someone has just paid for a copy of the band's 1996 debut album, Tigermilk, of which only 1,000 copies were originally pressed. And if, as has happened more than once, B&S choose to spend most of a concert either tuning up or chatting with each other, that's fine by the fans. The enraged ticket-buyer who shouted "You'd better be f***ing good" when the band finally took to the stage hours late at a show in London last year was rounded on; not physically, you understand, but with impassioned, hand-wringingly earnest counterblasts of terrifying fervour. The arguments continued, long and loud, throughout the performance. Hang on a minute, you think, this is a pop group we're talking about, not the continuing dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Why are people so exercised by Belle & Sebastian? And what is the band's attitude to their detractors? "F*** 'em," is guitarist Stevie Jackson's succinct riposte. He rebuts critics' claims that the band's coyness is a marketing tactic. "We don't have a manifesto, we don't sit down in a room trying to work out how to intrigue people or piss them off." There seems no reason to dis- believe him, though the choirboy-voiced one-time boxer Murdoch is an altogether more complex creature. Combining a self-consciously ironic demeanour with the look of a pugil- istic puer eternus, this is the man who can just as easily bang on, in his internet diary, about which fish he bought at M&S as write new songs as stark and unflinching as The Chalet Lines - an account of a woman's rape - or as poetic and haunting as I Fought in a War, and Don't Leave the Light on Baby. But maybe that's our problem, not his. Just because he spends his days practising his craft as one of the most gifted and original songwriters in Britain, it doesn't mean he has to go without a nice piece of fish for his tea. Or stop telling us about it on the B&S website. What it may mean now, though, is that he will never be able to push his trolley around the aisles unrecognised. www.missprint.org/sinister (Unofficial) website where B&S fans come out to play Well, it's coverage at least.... love, Sam.x "Caught my brain in my zip, let my intelligence slip" - Stephen Jones ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the undead 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. 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