BELLE AND SEBASTIAN – LIVE: REVIEW
BELLE AND SEBASTIAN
Enmore Theatre, September 13
IN THE ORIGINAL INCARNATION, when their second album of 1996, If You’re Feeling Sinister, was released, Belle And Sebastian were if not exactly the opposite of competency porn (that odd but timely construct in the age of Trump, Truss, Seibold and West Tigers, which sees us instead watching and celebrating people actually good at their jobs) then certainly leaning into awkward porn.
The characters in Stuart Murdoch’s songs, and the people in the band he put together to play them – not least, by any means, him – were unassuming, uncertain, uncomfortable when in focus. “Though I’m photogenic/You know we don’t stand a chance.”
They were the schoolboy misreading the signs and the girl who dreamed of stealing horses, the singers with the limited range and the bandmates still grappling with an instrument, the lonely boy watching from his sick bed a girl maybe being stalked by louts and the school friends with troubled pasts who “left the place for another school/Where the boys go with boys and the girls with girls”.
Awkwardness, physical and social, was their calling card, as it was for many who became fans around this time – not least, by any means, me – who may or may not have lived in bedsits and student accommodation, who may or may not have had unrequited loves and hidden ambitions, but who could sing these thinly surrounded, softly arriving, warmly leaving songs with recognition and affection. They were like having another Bill Forsyth movie, but set to music, and who could resist that?
Thirty years on (and a bit more than 20 years since their first Australian tour where they played this same room), marking that anniversary by playing …Sinister in full, awkwardness is not really applicable for band or audience who now, reflecting the longevity of the band, are multi-generational. Not in the first hour of the album played in sequence, nor in the near hour that followed of career-wide songs that closed with The Blues Are Still Blue, the international symbol of the launderette lover. Sexy!
“You liberated a boy I never rated/Now he’s doing the business.” Bobby Kildea is a lovely bassplayer and Richard Colburn a rocksteady drummer, Stevie Jackson thoroughly owns the look of knock-kneed Elvis Costello circa 1978 mixed with a less manic Wilko Johnson while his harmonica playing is a punchy rip into the atmosphere and Sarah Martin on violin, keys and vocals is even calmer. There was even a dual melodica solo. It was positively porn-worthy competence.
And as unlikely as it might once have seemed, B&S – the anti-Oasis if ever there was – legitimately have a song you can imagine being sung in the terraces, or the dress circle of the Enmore, in I Didn’t See It Coming. Meanwhile, just like how Murdoch long ago embraced the skipping, dancing, chatting, teasing frontman role, we have embraced the freedom to just be and inhabit the space. Including, of course, the many “invading” the stage to dance through Boy With the Arab Strap. “She’s a waitress and she’s got style.”
But absent the awkward and post-what passes for maturity, we still had the songs. Dylan In The Movies is the most British of French ephemera, making romance out of nothing at all but yet painfully real and touching. Me And The Major spins like exuberant kinds on a sherbet high. Fox In The Snow makes wan rather wonderful and Judy And The Dream Of Horses comes with the zest of a parish dance after the punch was spiked. Then Dress Up In You sent Murdoch into the audience (not crowd surfing of course, more crowd strolling) and To Be Myself Completely sent the audience into Jackson’s head.
The pleasures are nostalgic, sure, but there’s also a lovely sweet energy, a community spirit, and a gathering around the unalloyed joys of gorgeous melody after gorgeous melody. Not everybody’s cup of tea, I would admit to you, but like someone into S&M and bible studies, strange bedfellows are nonetheless in bed together, and that is no bad thing ever but especially right now.
More than competence. Better than porn.
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Belle And Sebastian play:
Fortitude Music Hall, Brisbane, September 15
Astor Theatre, Perth, September 17 (playing Tigermilk in full) and September 18 (If You’re Feeling Sinister in full).
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