Sinister: Race With the Devil

[Joe Christmas]

Then there was this one night years ago when we were running away from Hyndland Church Hall, this girl and me. It was ten past eleven and we'd just been to see Sodastream. We were trying to get to Queen Street to get the half past train. She was off to Falkirk, I was going back to the capital. It was the first time I'd met the girl that night, and I'd never see her again in all them years since. For weeks after I wondered what would have happened if we'd never made that train.
 
The last time I wrote on here I was thinking about why I couldn't listen to Belle and Sebastian any more without getting a wee bit miserable, or maudlin at least, cause it made me think of the times gone by when I used to listen to them.  So then a few weeks back I went into the His Master's Voice shop for something to do at lunchtime, cause there's fuck all point in sitting in the office all day.  And I seen that they were doing a two CDs for a tenner deal, like they do sometimes in these places.  I was looking around these CDs and the Belle and Sebastian BBC sessions CD was one of them.  And I thought there was a couple of songs on there I'd not heard for years, so I decided to get it.  And I'd never got round to buying Dear Catastrophe Waitress at the time, so I got that too.
 
Thing was, at first Belle and Sebastian was all about me listening to them on the bus, on tapes on my old walkman, going back and forward up the town.  And there was something special about that.  Then after a while of that it became very special to meet other folks who were into that too.  But then it became about people and it felt like all them that I got in touch with through listening to this band became too cool to talk about listening to this band with.  I got fed up with that, so I stopped listening to them.  I couldn't be fucked with all this coolness, all this daft Glasgow shit.  I'd moved to Glasgow because of meeting these folk, but the way it turned out pissed me off.  And the way they'd made their own cliques, these folk who were all about not being cool, pissed me off even more.
 
So I picked up the BBC Sessions thing and Dear Catasptrophe Waitress.  The missus had already bought The Life Pursuit when it came out, but I'd never listened to it.  The BBC thing was all just nostalgia again.  Oddly enough, that was especially how I felt on the last few tracks, the ones from 2001.  I hadn't heard them since that time, maybe even since the Barrowlands.  But Dear Catatstrophe Waitress sounded new to me.  And it felt like them old times.  It sounded like fantastic music that I'd never heard before.  I'd heard bits of it at the time and thought it was shit, but maybe that was how I was then.  But this made me feel a wee bit like I'd felt all them year back when I'd listened to the old albums.  And that was odd.  But it made me think that there was maybe something good about that band.  It was nice to feel like that again. 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Have more than one Hotmail account? Link them together to easily access both
 http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/186394591/direct/01/
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
        +---+  Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list  +---+
     To send to the list mail sinister at missprint.org. To unsubscribe
     send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to
     majordomo at missprint.org.  WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister
 +-+       "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper           +-+
 +-+  "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+
 +-+    "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000     +-+
 +-+  "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000  +-+
 +-+  "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001   +-+
 +-+               Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa                 +-+
 +-+               Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut!                +-+
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+