THE SKINNY
Come On Home Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch and Chris Geddes on A Bit of Previous, their first album since 2000 to see them reconnect with the city that made them
May 2022 – Feature
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s a rule, Belle and Sebastian don’t look back. Stuart Murdoch could, if he’d chosen to, have solely retained the songwriting reins after penning the entirety of Tigermilk and If You’re Feeling Sinister alone; justifiably so, as well, given that those albums are now seminal. Instead, he opened up the process to the rest of the group on 1998’s The Boy with the Arab Strap and, accordingly, the records that followed have found room for the influence of everything from Stevie Jackson’s love of 60s pop and rock to Sarah Martin’s preoccupations with synth, among myriad other diversions. Their last full-length album proper, 2015’s Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, slalomed through styles at breakneck speed, winding its way through the pulsating dance-pop stomp of The Party Line, the orchestral sweep of The Cat with the Cream, and the jazz-inflected The Everlasting Muse on its way to its closer Today (This Army’s for Peace), the closest the band have ever gotten to dreampop. And yet, now, their first LP in seven years threatens to be a disarmingly nostalgic affair at first glance; A Bit of Previous, which would make a good title for a best-of, opens with Young and Stupid, on which Murdoch yearns for his youth. Add to that the fact that it was recorded entirely in their hometown of Glasgow, a city you can practically hear living and breathing on their early work, and that no touring was in prospect due to the coronavirus pandemic – just like in their formative years, when they seldom appeared live – and you begin to wonder whether an amble down memory lane was on the cards, when we might have had a record informed by California sunshine. Their best-laid plans to fly to Los Angeles to make this ninth studio album were nixed by COVID. Instead, Belle and Sebastian remain the band we’ve come to know, with A Bit of Previous the kind of gleefully diverse grab-bag that’s elevated them to the status of elder statespeople of indie pop over the past 25 years. Those longing for the Jeepster years will be sated by Murdoch’s melodic turns on Do It for Your Country and Come On Home, but new ground continues to be broken with the quiet drama of Sea of Sorrow, the freewheeling Unnecessary Drama and deft electropop of Reclaim the Night. Perhaps we’d have gotten a similarly diffuse album if the pandemic had never happened; fresh off their glorious traversing of the Mediterranean on The Boaty Weekender in August 2019, the band began work late that year on an album they’d planned to have finished as soon as April 2020.
Photo: Hollie Fernando
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Interview: Joe Goggins
Instead, with flights booked and accommodation sorted, lockdown meant that their west coast jaunt was off. “You know when you see a line of ants, and they come up against a stick or a stone?” asks Murdoch over Zoom from Glasgow. “They just turn left, which is kind of what we did. Lockdown started, and we didn’t even entertain the notion of taking the record forwards. I went back to writing my book, which is a sort of biographical novel about the wilderness years between 1991 and 1993 for my best friend and I, when our ME meant that we couldn’t do much. It’s a document of the funny Last of the Summer Wine relationship we had.” “I didn’t do much during that lockdown towards Belle and Sebastian, either,” agrees keyboardist Chris Geddes on a later call. “I didn’t do much of anything but practise piano and work with the local mutual aid group.” The uncertainty was such that it would be another six months until they’d finally concede defeat on the idea of heading to America, instead deciding to have Geddes, who — 32 —
admits to being “probably the techiest member” of the band, reconfigure their rehearsal space into a makeshift studio. Glasgow, not Los Angeles, would be the backdrop for album 10. It makes A Bit of Previous the first Belle and Sebastian album made at home since 2000’s Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant. Perhaps surprisingly, this is something that seemed to suit Murdoch, whose lyrics are often scored through with wanderlust, just fine. It led to a reconnection with the city, one that had begun in that first lockdown with their Protecting the Hive project, which saw drone footage of the city’s deserted streets backed by lyrics and music written in collaboration with fans. It was not new territory for Murdoch; many of Belle and Sebastian’s earliest tracks were informed by a sort of childlike wonder about everyday minutiae, like riding around on city buses or strolling through Kelvingrove Park, because he was writing them at a time when his ME (or
