MUSIC | Belle and Sebastian
THE MAGIC NUMBERS
It’s been 20 years since the release of Belle & Sebastian’s
Tigermilk and If You’re Feeling Sinister. As the band prepare for some summer dates, Malcolm Jack analyses the scientifi c make up of these groundbreaking albums
R E A K L O S N E R O S
TIGERMILK 25% – on the rock’n’roll Oddly we can probably thank the government for Belle & Sebastian. Founder members Stuart Murdoch and Stuart David met on a training- for-work course for unemployed musicians in Glasgow, which they were attending partly to earn an extra tenner of dole money. Murdoch spent the time honing some songs he’d written, which they eventually got to demo, Tigermilk’s majestic soon-to- be opener ‘The State I Am In’ included. The die was cast.
remarkable feat by any measure, but especially when you consider that the fledgling band’s members had all only recently met: Murdoch and David recruited guitarist Stevie Jackson via an open mic night at The Halt Bar; drummer Richard Colburn was David’s flatmate; cellist / vocalist Isobel Campbell, keyboardist Chris Geddes and trumpeter Mick Cooke were found through friends. For a bunch of relative rookies their playing is remarkable, wrapping Murdoch’s poetic Dylanesque strums in warm baroque-pop à la The Left Banke.
25% – we formed a band Tigermilk was recorded and mixed at Glasgow’s CaVa studios in just five days in March 1996 and released three months later. A
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TIGERMILK
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30% – ‘do something pretty while you can, don’t fall asleep’ From ‘Expectations’ to the gorgeous ‘We Rule the School’ (from which the above lyric derives), youth fantasies are a recurring theme on Tigermilk and most subsequent B&S records. Murdoch has chronic fatigue syndrome and spent parts of his late teens and early 20s barely able to get out of bed. His songs come from a place where everyday events and experiences of a boy’s formative years take on a near mythical significance. 15% – whimsical girls From the titular ditz whose first cup of coffee tastes like dishwater in ‘She’s Losing It’ to ‘Mary Jo’, who only wants ‘a cigarette and a thespian with a caravanette in Hull’, women with more than a whiff of whimsy about them populate the album like characters from a kitchen-sink comic book.
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20% IF YOU’RE FEELING SINISTER
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80 THE LIST 2 Jun–1 Sep 2016