Stuart Murdoch spent the heart of his 20s suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, engaging his intellect with music, film, and literature while daydreaming about being in a band. Indoors and alone for seven years from the end of the ’80s into the early ’90s in his native Scotland, he found comfort in piano and guitar and began to shape delicate character studies and cultural references into song. By the time he recovered enough to re-engage with the world, he had amassed a cache of evocative songs, often set in childhood or schoolyard settings where he was found absent. This is Belle and Sebastian’s second-most-well-known origin story, but it’s the key to understanding why one of the most gifted songwriters of his generation decided that he wanted to be an ensemble player rather than a star.
Most famously, the group itself started in a Scottish university music business classroom, when a ramshackle collection of friends and acquaintances conspired to flesh out and record a backlog of Murdoch’s songs for a class project which they would call Tigermilk. Sixteen months later, Murdoch’s treasure trove had fueled another album, If You’re Feeling Sinister, and three more EPs. This early work was gossamer and beautiful, coaxing and charming listeners at a time when the major strains of ’90s indie and alternative music—Britpop, grunge, and alternative rock—were either completing their transformations into leaden knuckle-dragging or confusing rote quirk for real charm. Murdoch’s songs were instead a welcome embrace of classicism and craft, recalling ’60s pop and homespun ’80s indie but locating something more intimate than either.
By the time of their third album, 1998’s The Boy With the Arab Strap, Belle and Sebastian truly became a full band, kicking off what would be a tumultuous half-decade or so transforming from a vehicle for Murdoch’s voice to something more democratic and professional. True to Murdoch’s vision of a gang of musicians, four different songwriters and voices appeared on The Boy With the Arab Strap, creating a patchwork effort that at the time frustrated a portion of their audience, disappointed that after a year without any new Murdoch compositions, he had given one-third of this album to other songwriters. Only one song on the album dated back to Murdoch’s long-suffering early days—”Sleep the Clock Around” naturally; on Arab Strap, Murdoch’s characters finally grew up and into adulthood. Fatalism and missed opportunities color the record, with Murdoch grappling with his quick ride from bedridden isolation to notoriety. Mortality even rears its head: “He had a stroke at the age of 24/It could have been a brilliant career,” Murdoch sings on the record’s opening line. Three songs later, on “Ease Your Feet in the Sea,” Murdoch is reflecting on a friend’s suicide.
As a live act, they were still trying just to put one foot in front the other, but the band’s arrangements also began to demonstrate true ensemble playing, taking on more lived-in qualities and highlighted by the addition of Chris Geddes’ Fender Rhodes and his love of Northern soul. Bagpipes close the exquisite “Sleep the Clock Around” and bassist Stuart David’s sluggish story song “A Spaceboy Dream” is redeemed by its jazz-exotica outro and, in particular, the contrast it provides to the punch and force of the organ-led stomp of “Dirty Dream #2.”
Arab Strap and its follow-up, 2000’s Fold Your Hand Child, You Walk Like A Peasant, feature some of Murdoch’s darkest songwriting, but the band itself was nevertheless tagged heavily with the lighthearted “twee” tag—in large part due to the wan vocals of other three songwriters. On top of David’s contribution came cellist Isobel Campbell’s whispered and lovely “Is It Wicked Not to Care?” and a pair of meta-indie narratives from guitarist Stevie Jackson—one documenting a missed opportunity to meet a legendary record executive and one about a day out with an American fanzine writer. Oddly then for many new listeners, their introductions to the band were these second-stage songs. To the uninitiated, it was these tracks that crystallized the idea that B&S were effete and too precious, a reaction most clearly articulated by Jack Black’s acerbic record store clerk Barry in High Fidelity, whose biting reaction to hearing a few seconds of the album was that it was “sad bastard music” that “sucks ass.” (Pitchfork’s original pan came to similar conclusions.)
The band started out as literal students of music and this dialogue with the past is baked into what they do. Soon, though, it would become outmoded. Arab Strap came out the year before Napster was developed, just before a golden age of deep discovery in which the initial mind-blowing concept that all music was now effectively available. This threw the experience of being a Belle and Sebastian fan into stark relief. To date, the band had been more discussed than heard, a secret once passed on primitive message boards and dubbed cassettes. Early records were difficult to find in the U.S. in particular and Tigermilk, restricted at the time to 1,000 vinyl copies, became in effect the last sought-after newly released album that was impossible to hear until Martin Shkreli wrote a seven-figure check to the Wu-Tang Clan.
Most egregious—or delightful depending on your opinion of the band—was that the members refused to do interviews, letting the music do the speaking for them. It takes an almost perverse amount of effort for an eight-piece band to feel reclusive, but the sense of anonymity magnified the intensity of praise around them. The mystery fueled the cult-like following that wound up chasing them into the spotlight by voting them Best Newcomer at the 1999 Brit Awards over prohibitive favorite Steps. (If you wanted a clear idea of who was on the internet in 1999, it’s this: The indie band beat the teen pop band in a nationwide popularity contest.)
Stuart Murdoch was in some ways the last old-school indie star. The late ’90s featured a group of talented, fringe singer-songwriters—Elliott Smith, Cat Power, Stephin Merritt, Will Oldham—but Murdoch still felt like he was crafting his own world with its own internal logic. The sound of Arab Strap is a little slipstream in which the more precious end of Gen X indiedom thrived, a petri dish that would eventually spawn everything from the core Etsy aesthetic to sensitive-couple films like (500) Days of Summer. (Summer Finn’s yearbook quote—”Color my life with the chaos of trouble”—is from the title track and highlight of Arab Strap.) This record arrived at a turning point for the band and in many ways the group became to be defined by it. The quiet confidence of songs such as “The Rollercoaster Ride” or “Ease Your Feet in the Sea” would eventually be discarded for more overt flourishes and the happy-clappy, feel-good pop of later Belle and Sebastian albums. This is, instead, the sound of a very reluctant step into the spotlight.
The central truth of music in the digital era is that while it’s easier than ever to locate an audience, it’s more difficult to maintain one, and more difficult still to foster an intensity of admiration from a fanbase if they don’t have to put in the effort to seek out and experience shared secrets such as an indie band with difficult-to-find records. It’s a type of IRL-only fanaticism that the social media era doesn’t allow for; the economy of likes is a volume-play and the slot machine of swiping up or down your feed demands scannable content and recognizable names. Waving your arms frantically to get people to pay attention to your private obsessions isn’t a game with many rewards, let alone one that many people play. There aren’t hot takes about nobodies. The Boy With the Arab Strap is one of the more context-laden records of its era but it doesn’t suffer from the lack of noise around it, and in many ways is better off without it. The stakes of having to be a proper band clearly weighed on Murdoch and his cohorts in subsequent years and much of the music the group made between Arab Strap and 2003’s Dear Catastrophe Waitress sounds oddly labored. Here they sound like promise and hope; a gang of misfits so comfortable being out of step with the world that they created their own.
