Next year, Belle and Sebastian will celebrate their 20-year anniversary. That cuddly toy blithely nursing on the cover of Tigermilk, the band’s limited-release 1996 debut, is now at university, worrying about its employment propects. Fittingly for empty-nesters, Belle and Sebastian are enjoying something of a new lease on life. Their ninth album, Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, is their most acclaimed and successful in some years (having charted, with pleasing symmetry at No 9 on its release in January). Belle and Sebastian’s US audience is burgeoning, their long UK tour sold out. They are not always the band you thought you knew either.
A few songs into this election-night stopover in Cambridge, singer Stuart Murdoch leaps up raffishly and stalks along a line of monitors marking the lip of the stage. It’s quite a rock’n’roll gesture for a man who is soon to mark two decades of posturing against rock’n’roll posturing.
Murdoch is held aloft not by security staff or roadies, but by solid, willing arms in the front row. B&S shows remain intimate and warm affairs, with audience members invited onstage to dance. Murdoch wobbles, is righted; he carries on singing Piazza, New York Catcher, a song about baseball from 2003’s Dear Catastrophe Waitress. A couple of songs previously, Nobody’s Empire, a new track from Girls in Peacetime, laid bare the physical frailty at the heart of Murdoch’s songwriting.
Though most Belle and Sebastian fans have long known where Murdoch’s art came from, the autobiographical Nobody’s Empire recounts for the first time the singer’s history of chronic fatigue syndrome. It first laid him low at 19; the seeds for a band of like-minded souls were sown during that illness, as were his references to disability. (At least that’s the kindest way to read the sleeve art for Girls in Peacetime, which is probably supposed to suggest a more war-torn, poliomyelitic past where every fifth young person was afflicted by some physical reduction, rather than the specialist adult entertainment tastes it actually does suggest.)
When Murdoch recovered, he signed up for music college and convened the band that made Tigermilk, a project that married a dedication to gentleness with a steely force of will. Since then, his best songs have combined empathy with the keen observations of a sidelined non-participant. Witness next single Allie, a compassionate but bleak song they rollick through tonight. Belle and Sebastian’s music has skewed hard towards a childlike prettiness, alive to folk and the 60s, but deaf to most everything else – until just recently.
Belle and Sebastian have always had a penchant for melodicas; this tour, Murdoch is strapping on a keytar. Disco is one of tonight’s innovations – specifically, the songs on Girls in Peacetime that draw from Daft Punk and Abba. (In their execution, though, it’s more Pulp or Metronomy.) All pumping rhythms, The Party Line finds the six-strong core band, plus auxiliary live members, reshuffling until it seems like half of them are playing keyboards. Being election night, Murdoch and Jackson are full of banter about their many political songs (“We have… one”), before B&S guitar lieutenant Stevie Jackson confides, with real feeling, how much he misses the late Labour figurehead Tony Benn.
Murdoch is particularly happy to be in Cambridge, collecting a consignment of B&S collegiate scarves from their local suppliers for the merchandise stall. The band have even prepared a little video celebrating Gonville and Caius college’s recent victory on University Challenge, intercut with the famous Young Ones sketch; the string section join in with the University Challenge theme tune.
There is no denying the warmth and charm of an evening spent with this latest incarnation of the band (stable now, more than a decade since losing Stuart David and Isobel Campbell). Equally, it’s hard to square the concerns of the boys and girls who still populate Murdoch’s most recent lyrics with the concerns of the grownups on stage, who have partners and, indeed, boys and girls of their own. (Murdoch, one of pop’s more Peter Pan figures – in the sense of Beck, rather than Michael Jackson – is a married father of one.)
Curiously, though, Belle and Sebastian’s late-life conversion to 70s disco is not actually the night’s biggest revelation. It’s a song by Jackson called Perfect Couples, which sounds startlingly like Talking Heads. Full of guitar washes, hand drums, cowbell and something that approaches wigging out, it is most unlike Belle and Sebastian, in the best possible way.
