Sinister: xpress article

[yellow bananas]

hello all of you.

xpress, a free entertainment weekly here in rainy perth, carried an rather 
cliched article of belle and sebastian this week, where they interviewed 
mick cooke. there were a few interesting things though... stuart murdoch is 
apparently 'the most revered grump since morrissey'. stuart's a grump?

In four years, with eight members, Scotland's Belle and Sebastian have 
issued four albums and five EPs.

They make music that is oft described as 'fey', an apparent put-down from 
purveyors groomed on a dripped-fed diet of masculine rock and/or roll. It’s 
pop music far from the maddening crowds, assembling it far from the pap 
production line, and they make it with a sense of mystery. Their names don’t 
appear on the records, they don’t pose for press photos, they make 
charmingly cheap promo-videos, and, most famous, their main songwriter, 
Stuart Murdoch, doesn’t do interviews.

He’s relented recently, at least on a couple of occasions, the phenomenal 
gathered success of the latest Belle and Sebastian longplayer, Fold Your 
Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant, making the likes of Time Magazine 
interested in the Scot combo, but, still, Murdoch remains a figure at large. 
And, still, Murdoch remains the most revered grump since Morrissey.

“Stuart stopped doing interviews because he didn’t like doing them, he found 
that he was misrepresented all the time,” states Mick Cooke, Belle and 
Sebastian’s trumpeter and keyboard hand, speaking from Glasgow. Belle and 
Sebastian have largely shunned doing interviews at all. Cooke offers: “From 
the start there’s always been the idea that we want to avoid the celebrity 
thing.”

It’s a scenario that has found glossy, well-credentialed magazines 
scrambling to talk to other people about the B & S phenomena: record-label 
types, folk from other bands, popcultural theorists. With this latest album, 
the band have found it important, however, to speak for themselves. Cooke 
has therefore been doing a lot of talking on the side of their rock ‘n’ roll 
union. “We’ve found that when you don’t do much speaking, then people step 
in and speak for you.”

“I think it’s good that we haven’t layed the normal press game up until 
now,” Cooke continues, “because we’re sort of seeing that now, NME and 
Melody Maker are trying to knock the band down. But since they didn’t build 
us up in the first place, there’s not much they can do about it.”

By shunning the normal avenues of promotion that other pop bands scramble 
over lustily, Belle and Sebastian have stepped out of the carefully 
structured niches of music-marketing. Even now, as their popularity has 
soared, fans of the band still feel as if they have ‘discovered’ something, 
as opposed to submitting to whatever heavily-hyped band is being thrust down 
the collective gullet. And, their fans, a reverent clique often compared to 
the army of The Smiths, love that autonomous feeling.

Since their earliest days, Belle and Sebastian have stated that they wish 
the band to be a reflection of their lives, not their lives themselves. As 
such, there’s a charming obscurity.

“At the start there was an unwritten agreement between everyone that the 
band wouldn’t take over everyone’s lives completely,” he says. “And I think, 
to be honest, if it hadn’t been like that, the band wouldn’t have lasted 
even as long as this.”

Not taking over everyone’s lives completely also means, simply, no touring. 
Cooke chuckles that he could count the bands total live shows on two hands. 
“I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that we don’t have a record 
company telling us what to do, either. We’ve got a very strange record 
contract. Most bands sign a contract saying that they have to do a certain 
amount of promotion. We don’t have that clause in our contract. Which is, 
possibly, a bit of a band thing.”

I think that it’s band that this band has got to the stage where people are 
happy with what they get. I don’t think that’s a good thing, there’s a risk 
of getting complacent.”

On the occasions B & S have played live, there’s been a reverence at these 
rare shows that has, most often, outweighed the significance of the band’s 
own performance. “Sometimes we’d play gigs and the loudest applause would be 
when we got on stage,” laugh Cooke. “And, then, the applause would kind of 
diminish with every song. It was almost like the biggest achievement was for 
the band to make it on stage, with everyone there.”

So, the question begs to be asked, is there a chance that Belle and 
Sebastian will, indeed, one day go out on the road and undertake a genuine 
‘tour’? Possibly, but unlikely. It’s a case of factionism.

“Being a seven-piece band, you can’t please everyone,” says Cooke. “So, 
really, we’ve got about half the band that would love to go out on tour, and 
then half the band that would rather just stay at home.”

thank you for reading. all proceeds go to the clogs in the brain foundation.

HY



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