Sinister: nme review of manchester

[Andrew.Dean at xxx.NET]

Nicely jumpered skinny students suck feverishly on
white-pack Silk Cut surrogate tits and titter tweely at
every feeble onstage witticism. Oh! It's all so oh-so coy
and warm and happy-clappy cosy! This ever-so-slappable crowd
of shit-eating indie-schmindie sheep are apparently not even
slightly pissed off that they've had to queue outside in the
freezing rain for over an hour (while a B&S employee tossed
them compensatory ice-creams).

"Integrity seems to be the key word," mumbles singer Stuart
Murdoch (apropos absolutely f-ing nothing) to general
laughter and a smattering of clapping. "Wanky, half-arsed,
cackhanded and utterly insulting amateurism," would be
closer to the f-ing mark (don't piss on me and tell me it's
raining, twat).

This is the matinee show. Belle & Sebastian have sold out
Manchester's amazing Victorian town hall twice in one day.
The perform in the round, the stage a speaker-stacked black
modernist slab slapped in the exact centre of a stunning
gothic-arched and gold-leafed beige-stone Christmas cake.
The acoustics are thus totally f-ed and the insultingly
desultory attempts at audience communication (during the
frequent equipment breakdowns) reduced to mere whispered
mumblings.

And yet, despite the fact that Belle & Sebastian's sole
trick is to combine piss-poor sub-Don McLean lyrics with
nicked Kirsty MacColl riffs, there is the merest whiff of
real magic here. Even the most cynical folkophobic would
find it hard not to twitch and shudder with near sexual
pleasure at the throbbing muscle layered upon tracks like
"The Stars Of Track And Field" and "The Fox In The Snow"
(the recorded versions of which remain puke-inducingly
whimsical and twee). But it's never enough to overcome the
overwhelming stench of smug, cutesy-wutesy, mumsy-wumsy,
Jack Straw-approved suburban shite.

Manchester Town Hall is an over-the-top, totally
in-your-face and utterly awesome shrine to late-Victorian
bourgeois triumphalism. Today it showcases a band who, more
than any other, epitomise the tediously understated,
wilfully inadequate and teeth-grindingly irritating school
of aesthetically neutered and ideologically castrated
middle-class, too-thick-for-art-school Blair Rock.

A punter, seeing a hack scribble furiously, approaches and
demands that NME doesn't compare Belle & Sebastian to "Felt,
Nick Cave, The Smiths..." and a whole load of shit
anti--rock bands because "that would be lazy".

OK, how about The Carpenters without the camp? Burt
Bacharach without the balls? Jonathan Richman without th
jokes? Crowded House without the incisive lyrical insights?
Or maybe The Velvet Underground without the tunes, looks,
attitude, politics, style, asthetics, vision, talent,
charisma, sunglasses, black turtle-neck sweaters or f-ing
drugs? That do you? I mean, you seem so easily pleased.

Steven Wells

(andy clutches his handbag in front of him and goes
"oooooooo-ooooooooooooo")


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