Review: Belle and Sebastian at Astor Theatre

Belle and Sebastian at Astor Theatre
w/ Badly Drawn Boy
Tuesday, August 27, 2024

What about requited love? What if things actually worked out?

Stuart Murdoch posed this question ahead of his band Belle and Sebastian’s popular Piazza, New York Catcher on Tuesday night, a song about romancing future wife Marisa Privitera in the Big Apple circa 2003 (yes, they’re still together).

Indeed, much of Belle and Sebastian’s past 20 years have focused on love, as well as dancing and an awkward kind of happiness that’s uniquely theirs. Live, they have formed a miniature orchestra of sorts, with eight nerdy Scots rotating through strings, synths, horns and percussion. Despite sinister beginnings, in 2024, their life pursuit is about joy as much as anything. This is a band, after all, who released an album called Write About Love in 2010.

That record’s opener, I Didn’t See It Coming, was a highlight at the pointy end of Tuesday’s set. Following on from signature banger The Boy With the Arab Strap, both songs saw audience members invited on stage and had the rest of us dancing up a euphoric storm.

Murdoch, meanwhile, was making his way through the crowd, chatting with overwhelmed fans and generally looking like he was having a blast. “This is the noisy section, isn’t it?” he jested with a particularly rowdy set of youths. “The dancers, good on you.”

Librarian chic was in vogue for both the gals and guys, with plenty of introverted girls and bookish boys (and genderqueer queens) dancing in op-shop threads and stylish spectacles. As if to labour the point, Murdoch announced that their song “about behaving badly” was called, wait for it, Wrapped Up in Books.

He also used the word “badly” to segue into thanking opener Badly Drawn Boy, aka Manchester’s Damon Gough. WA redemption has been a long time coming for Gough, whose 2003 visit to Kings Park was an infamous downer in the lush surrounds.

But solo in support at the Astor, Gough’s Mancunian drawl and gentle indie folk was a pleasure. His lo-fi looped guitar arrangements on What Is It Now? might have been clunky, but his piano playing was lovely on a cover of Richie Havens’ I Can’t Make It Anymore. He even turned sex with Madonna down on the excellent You Were Right and warmed himself to the crowd with familiar numbers from Mercury Prize-winning debut The Hour of Bewilderbeast. The Shining, in particular, was an early highlight, while the wah-wah guitar of Once Around the Block closed his set.

It was a perfect night of folk pop, and like Badly Drawn Boy, Belle and Sebastian weren’t afraid to dip back into their earliest 90s releases to please dedicated disciples.

From opening on first EP title track, Dog on Wheels, to 1996 debut Tigermilk’s The State I Am In and She’s Losing It, to Seeing Other People, The Boy Done Wrong Again, and Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying from the same year’s benchmark classic If You’re Feeling Sinister, it was nothing short of a love letter to fans. And a requited one, at that.

HARVEY RAE

Photos by Linda Dunjey