Sinister: Time is on our side

[Jeanette]

Howdy, kids.

Here's the Time article, in case some of you haven't seen it.
Not nearly as interesting as the Guardian write up. But, at least they
refer to B&S fans as "intelligent-looking." That's nice.

Swooning,
Jeanette


*****************************

The Belle Epoque
A quirky Scottish band’s throwback pop is making adults swoon

By Josh Tyrangiel

The release of Belle and Sebastian's fourth album was no 'N Sync affair.
Crowd control was not required. Traffic was not stopped. But when the
doors opened at New York City's downtown Tower Records store last
Tuesday morning, a steady procession of people — very
intelligent-looking adult people — headed to the racks, grabbed their
copies of Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant (Matador) and
tore out of the store, desperate to get to the first music-playing
implement they could lay their hands on. Soon the Belle and Sebastian
websites, and there are dozens of them, were humming: "I've got it!"
wrote one fan. "It's quite remarkable how beautiful it is. There is a
God!!!"

Devoted fans aren't unusual in the music world, but Belle and Sebastian
— not a duo, but a mixed-gender septet from Glasgow, Scotland — inspires
cultish adoration from folks too old and too smart to be hanging posters
on the wall. The group's votaries meet in coffee houses to pore over
lyrics. A couple proudly reported naming their children Belle and
Sebastian. There's even a website devoted to — no joke — original
fiction inspired by B&S songs. What artistic force could cause perfectly
normal adults to regress into thoroughly obsessed teens?

For the most part, it's old-fashioned pop music. Belle and Sebastian
blends guitars, pianos, violins, cellos, horns and whatever else is
lying around into the kind of sweet pop pioneered by the Beatles, Love
and Phil Spector. Lyrically, chief writer and singer Stuart Murdoch, 30,
favors mournful, Smiths-influenced rhymes about the adolescent
frustration that comes from desperately wanting to do something but not
knowing exactly what. He's clever, but it's Murdoch's quavering falsetto
that is the band's trademark. Earnest and prematurely wise, his vocals
mix angst and nostalgia with a hint of optimism. As he sings on B&S's
second album, If You're Feeling Sinister, "Get me away from here I'm
dying/ Play me a song to set me free/ Nobody writes 'em like they used
to/So it may as well be me."

As good as the music is, and all three previous records have found their
way into year-end critics polls, it's the group's resolve to do things
in its own flighty, boho way that has transformed it from a mere band
into a cosmology. Growing out of an experiment in a music-business class
at Glasgow's Stowe College in 1996, Belle and Sebastian was named after
an obscure French children's cartoon. The band turned down major labels
and big-money offers to sign with tiny London-based Jeepster (it's
distributed in the U.S. by Matador), and all seven members have kept
their day jobs, including Murdoch, who rather famously lives above the
annex of a church where he works as a caretaker and janitor. Their
videos are hilariously amateurish. They release unrelated EPs weeks
before their albums come out. They tour infrequently. And their media
shyness is pathological; the photo you see here of Murdoch is the first
he's ever posed for, and he has avoided interviews for years. In short,
they do everything so purposefully wrong, they just have to be right.

Murdoch, who interrupted his media blackout for a rare chat with TIME
while vacationing in the U.S., is aware that the band has an aura of
preciousness, and he dutifully tries to deflate it. "We get drunk and go
out to clubs and listen to deejays," he says in a quiet brogue. He likes
sports, and even checked out a Mets baseball game. His normal guyness is
impressive. Still, he lovingly refers to the band as "the people's
republic of Belle and Sebastian," and as he strolls through Manhattan's
Greenwich Village, he stops in his tracks in front of the Lucille Lortel
Theater's mini Walk of Fame. "Ring Lardner," he says, staring in wonder
at the satirist's little star in the cement. "Salinger mentions him in
The Catcher in the Rye, but I had no idea he was a real person until
just now." Perhaps precious fits just fine.

If there's a danger lurking for Belle and Sebastian, it's that the
members' capriciousness may one day do them in. Each seems to have an
individual musical side project in addition to his or her day job, and
while Murdoch likes to think the band is peaking, he recognizes that
trying to professionalize things would be a grave error. "Our lives
outside of music are who we are. If we thought of ourselves as strictly
professional musicians, it would probably take all the fun out of it."
And leave a gaping hole in the lives of countless adoring adults.
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 +-+  "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "tech-heads and students"  +-+
 +-+  "the cardie wearing biscuit nibbling belle & sebastian list"  +-+
 +-+       "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper        +-+
 +-+   "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000   +-+
 +-+       "peculiarly deranged fanbase" "frighteningly named       +-+
 +-+           Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000           +-+
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+