BELLE & SEBASTIAN Songs from the twee of life

Since their inception in 1996, Belle & Sebastian have been winning over legions of fans with their bookish charms. Although the seven-piece band consider themselves to be late bloomers, their early works are held in as high regard as their recent saccharine doses of pop splendour. CHRIS HAVERCROFT speaks to keyboardist Chris Geddes in the lead up to their performance at the Perth Concert Hall on Wednesday, June 7.

Championed by cardigan-wearing, spectacled kids the world over, Belle & Sebastian have been the strawberries in the cream of fey pop lovers everywhere, and yet in their early years shied away from many of rock’s conventions.

In recent times, and with a shift to a new record label, the band’s ethos and work ethic has evolved as they are now playing more live shows than ever, releasing singles (as opposed to the less conventional, chart-inhospitable EP) and granting promotional interviews.

“It is a game that we have decided to play to some extent because we have had some moderate chart success,” keyboardist Chris Geddes considers. “So I guess if you are playing the game you can’t complain too much about the rules. We do have a populist streak in us and we’d like to hear the songs on the radio, or have a taxi driver recognise the band name when it does come up in conversation. We can’t complain too much.”

Embraced since their first recording (the result of a student project in Stow), the band have released a collection of consistently hummable yet introspective albums and EPs that have been lapped up by the faithful. As Belle & Sebastian have grown as musicians, those albums have become more bold, with the latest album The Life Pursuit going one step further to capturing the band’s love of ‘old’ soul and Motown.

Geddes attributes the album’s producer, Tony Hoffer, as being responsible for fostering this streak in the band as “he wasn’t shy of sticking on iTunes and listening to a couple of old records,” for production ideas.

The Life Pursuit depicts a band who are coming to terms with a bigger studio sound without disposing of their passion for music’s past.

“I think that it was a natural step for the records to get bigger and bolder sounding just because we did start playing live more. Because the older records did achieve some degree of success, and seeing as we were touring — we were playing medium-sized venues and playing festivals — so it just seemed natural to try and make music that came across well to that size of audience.

“There maybe has been a delicacy that has been lost, or that we don’t try to capture so often on record, and I suppose it has been affected by the line-up changes in the band as well. I think that Isobel (Campbell, vocalist/cellist) leaving and Bob (Kildea, guitar/bass) joining has shifted the middle ground of the band in a certain direction — into a more sort of upbeat direction.

“There are some people that don’t like it and there are probably even more people that do. It seems like from some quarters we get criticised for having changed too much and from some — especially British journalists — we get criticised for not having changed enough. You can’t please everyone.”

An indication of the band’s feverish fans is that despite not being a household name, their career has already been documented in a pretty comprehensive book, Just A Modern Rock Story. The band describe the author of the biography, Paul Whitelaw, as being an ‘acquaintance more than a friend’, but there is no doubting the author’s passion for the band (and therefore his reluctance to put them under too critical a microscope, or delve too deeply into the skeletons in the band’s closet).

Besides broad-stroking over some of the more interesting dynamics within the band, the book does put forward some entertaining text from interviews with band members to make it an engaging enough read for Belle & Sebastian fans, although one in which Geddes can see the limitations.

“At the end of the day I think it is immensely flattering that Paul is bothered enough about the band to put the amount of time that he did into doing the book, and he has obviously done it from the perspective of a fan. I think that it just needed a bit more distance or objectivity to be a more interesting book.

“I think the most interesting books about bands are the ones where the music is connected to wider social change or social movements, like the way reggae music connected with post-independent Jamaica or soul music with the civil rights movements in the ’60s. I suppose that we don’t really have that connection with a wider movement.

“I did try to persuade Paul that there was a case to be made for presenting the band as one of the first bands where the internet was one of the most important aspects, but by the time I got to that stage of the interview I was probably too pissed to put it into a sentence anyway.”

The forthcoming shows in Australia are likely to see the band exercise the right to play tunes from the depth and breadth of their entire catalogue, a stark contrast to one of the band’s performances at the start of the year.

Since its release and still today, many consider Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister to be their tour de force — in fact many consider it to be one of modern music’s masterpieces, full stop. The band was commissioned to perform the album in its entirety as part of a showcase put on by the uber-credible All Tomorrow’s Parties franchise.

“It’s funny because we probably don’t hold If You’re Feeling Sinister in the same esteem as some people do,” Geddes says. “For most of us it is probably not our favourite album by the band, but it is probably most people’s favourite collection of songs, so in that respect I think it held up. I think we like the songs now just as much as we did, and we are able to play them better now than we could then, so we were glad of the opportunity to present the songs in a way that we think maybe is an improvement on the way that they were when we recorded them.

“We managed to make the ones that should be upbeat, a bit more upbeat but hopefully without losing the intimacy or delicacy of those moments as well.”

This excerpt originally appeared in Issue 1006 of X-Press Magazine, published on Thursday, May 25, 2006. Share your memories of this and other classic X-Press content by joining the Rewind Facebook group. Rewind: 40 Years of X-Press Magazine by Bob Gordon is on sale now in hardcover and softcover.