In March 2020, when the world went into lockdown, Belle and Sebastian asked fans to share their self-isolation experiences. These responses became the lyrics to an audio-visual piece featuring aerial footage of an empty Glasgow and partly narrated by the Scottish band’s chief songwriter, Stuart Murdoch. The result is understated, serene, and heart-ripping: At one point, a father says goodbye to his high-risk son, who was already hospitalized before the COVID-19 pandemic. “If this is God’s experiment,” recites a friend of the band Alessandra Lupo, who co-narrates, “aren’t the good guys supposed to come through this?”
Although a departure in form, the project was a welcome reminder of qualities and themes that have helped define Belle and Sebastian for almost 25 years. From mailing lists, club nights, and a shock victory in an online popularity contest to that viral moment when they forgot their drummer in his pajamas outside a North Dakota Walmart, participatory culture has always been a big part of the band’s story. Their songs are often quiet and serious, their characters full of life yet cast out by a cruel and rapacious human society, their presentation fragile yet unafraid of old-fashioned beauty. The tale of the band’s rise is so unusual that it’s difficult to separate the music from the myth, like a used book you treasure as much for the smell of the paper and the scrawls in the margins as the words on the page. And it starts with Belle and Sebastian’s immaculate oddball of a debut album, 1996’s Tigermilk.
One of the most important myths about the group involves Murdoch’s own period of unwanted isolation. The second of three children born to a merchant navy officer and a midwife, Murdoch grew up in a home in coastal Ayr that still had an outhouse; he did well at school, played soccer, and gravitated toward loud rock bands like AC/DC, Thin Lizzy, and Yes. By his third year studying physics at the University of Glasgow, he’d run a marathon, tried amateur boxing, and amassed an alternate musical knowledge of northern Britain’s robust indie guitar-pop legacy while working as a DJ, roadie, and record store employee. Then, in his early 20s, he was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome. “It came along and took seven years out of my life,” he told a biographer.
Murdoch quit school, stopped working, and moved back in with his parents, bedridden. Severe fatigue, muscle aches, and unrefreshing sleep would trouble him for decades. “It’s never abated,” he told an interviewer in 2018. But while trapped alone with his thoughts, he began dreaming up snippets of melody. “I started writing songs because I had to,” he has said. As Murdoch felt better, he tried and failed to resume university, then stayed in Glasgow, supported by government disability aid. He sang at occasional open mic nights, hoping to follow in the footsteps of his cult heroes, like Lawrence of the ingeniously askew ’80s band Felt. Murdoch also spent a great deal of time on public transportation, observing and imagining the lives of all the “normal” people.
Improbably enough, the band and album were born out of two educational programs. One was a Scottish welfare initiative called Beatbox, a course for out-of-work musicians where Murdoch met founding Belle and Sebastian bassist Stuart David—who’d only enrolled to hold onto his unemployment assistance. The other was a music business class at what is now Glasgow Kelvin College, where one of David’s flatmates, Richard Colburn—the drummer who would, years later, spend hours stranded in a parking lot between U.S. gigs—had enrolled. A four-song demo recorded at the Beatbox by Murdoch, David, and others built a steady local buzz and soon caught Colburn’s attention. Every year, the music course at Colburn’s college picked a single to record, release, and promote. In 1996, it was an album: Tigermilk.
Except that Belle and Sebastian didn’t exist yet. The band name on the demo tape was Rhode Island, and their lineup was in flux. Along with David and Colburn, Murdoch was soon able to enlist guitarist Stevie Jackson, a seasoned ’60s-style rhythm-and-blues player who periodically hosted a Glasgow open mic night. One of the songs from the Beatbox demo was “Belle and Sebastian”; in late 1995, when Murdoch showed David a short story he’d written about a “boy” named Sebastian teaching guitar to a younger “girl” who was still in school, the band had a new name. At a New Year’s party, when Murdoch met cellist, singer, and songwriter Isobel Campbell—a local university student, “Bel” to her friends—their boozy introduction must’ve felt like stars aligning. With the addition of another younger member, keyboardist Chris Geddes, Belle and Sebastian’s Tigermilk-era roster was complete. The full six-piece played only a couple of shaky live shows before recording.
Tigermilk is one-in-a-million in part because of these one-in-a-million circumstances. Tracked in three long days at a proper studio, CaVa Sound, under the expert guidance of in-house engineer Gregor Reid, the album is a vibrant snapshot of a band coming into existence while the tape was rolling. “It was like the first flushes of romance,” Campbell has said. Without even so much as an indie label boss to answer to—Electronic Honey, which originally released Tigermilk, was affiliated with the university course—the album was also an unusual opportunity for Murdoch to realize the musical vision that had been floating through his brain since his years of solitary illness.
Inspired by ’60s chamber-pop like the Left Banke, the Zombies, and Love, the sound was lush and loose: Murdoch insisted on recording his acoustic guitar and scratch vocal first, leaving his newbie group to catch up with his racing tempos. Lyrically, Murdoch’s songs were like great short stories, fast-moving and richly detailed, often about school-age characters (a school setting was universally relatable, he argued, and besides, school was the 27-year-old’s last major source of memories before getting sick) and yet there were usually darker currents beneath the superficial lightness. He delivered all of this nonchalantly, in a wispy yet commanding lilt, with rippling melodic runs and soaring choruses: The tunes were as catchy as his meanings were enigmatic.
Tigermilk’s first track, “The State I Am In,” can be heard as a salvo of artistic intent that carries across Belle and Sebastian’s entire career. The title suggests an earnest confession, the unaccompanied vocal that opens the song furthers that impression. But as the full band gallops in, the song becomes something else, almost like a Trainspotting-era Glaswegian’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” a statement of self that seeks to encapsulate the human condition. Singing about 1975 and 1995, his brother’s coming-out and his sister’s simultaneous wedding day, Murdoch collapses past and present, fictional and personal—“Riding around city buses as a hobby is sad,” opines the fatigue-hobbled bus-riding hobbyist—from the perspective of a witty raconteur who ricochets around all sides of morality. He’s self-obsessed yet fitfully altruistic, variously rescuing and mistreating his “child bride” and, in quasi-biblical parlance, “crippled friend.” The coup de grâce: All of these tangled tales become grist for a priest who turns his parishioner’s confidences into a trashy novel, also titled The State I Am In. When Murdoch gives himself to God, the Almighty hesitates. It all ends with an “oh yeah,” the way a prayer might with an “amen”; the only higher power worth surrendering to, it seems, is song.
The rest of the 10-track, 42-minute album colors in and around the ideas presented in the opening track, like delving into J.D. Salinger’s short stories after reading The Catcher in the Rye. “I Could Be Dreaming” is similarly abundant, as upbeat surf-rock gives way to broader paranoia about workaday life (“They’ve got a knife for every time you take the same train into work”). Before the song is over, the dream Murdoch sings about seems to become a fantasy about murdering a female friend’s abusive lover; he dismisses the violence with the pop fan’s “la la la,” and then Campbell twists the narrative blade with a cleverly selected reading from Rip Van Winkle.
The subjects of Murdoch’s songs, usually women, are as complex and compelling as his first-person narrators. “Expectations” follows a lower-income student whose life-size models of the Velvet Underground earn her a schoolyard rep as a weirdo (although in a 2006 NPR interview, Murdoch described her as “someone I would have thought was pretty hip at the time”). Harassed in the lunchroom, she suffers a teacher looking up her skirt, and her mother remembers having little choice but to endure groping at her department store job. The cycle of aggression continues when our heroine finds someone apparently even lower in the social pecking order, Veronica—“a fat girl with a lisp”—who’ll take the heat for her. Despite all of this, there’s a hook so dainty, so optimistic—“You’re on top of the world ag-aih-ehn”—that it hints at a way of transcending the world’s brutality.
Similarly, “She’s Losing It,” a meditation on a couple, Lisa and Chelsea, who are haunted by past abuse, has a jaunty chorus that sounds like a Folgers coffee jingle. Delicate finale “Mary Jo,” with tender backing vocals from Campbell, focuses on a lonesome character who always reminds me of Eleanor Rigby—though in how she comes fully alive in her dreams, she could be a stand-in for Murdoch. The book she reads: The State I Am In. It fails to satisfy.
By this time, Murdoch was working as a live-in janitor at the Protestant church he had been attending, but the softness of these songs shouldn’t be misread as puritanical. “Drop a pill and then say hello,” Murdoch proposes on “Electronic Renaissance,” a synth-pop reclamation as skin-tingling as the Magnetic Fields’ “Take Ecstasy With Me” a couple of years earlier. “You’re playing with something/You’re playing with yourself,” Murdoch teases over the chugging power-pop of “I Don’t Love Anyone.” He’s always a bit funny, but sometimes he’s funny haha.
Tigermilk also leaves room for a bit of self-mythologizing. Murdoch wrote “My Wandering Days Are Over” after meeting Campbell, and the lyrics contain direct references to Campbell’s job serving drinks to tired businessmen at a piano bar, as well as “the story of Sebastian and Belle the singer.” The moment when Murdoch sings, “I said, ‘My one-man band is over/I hit the drum for the final time and I walked away,’” it’s as if Belle and Sebastian becomes no longer his solo project but a true unit.
After two days of mixing, all that was left to decide was an album title and artwork. Murdoch settled on a photo he had taken of a then-girlfriend, Joanne Kenney, naked in a bathtub pretending to nurse a stuffed tiger. Claiming inspiration from venerable jazz label Blue Note but more often compared to their melancholic UK poet-laureate predecessors the Smiths, Murdoch presented the image in monochrome, a tradition that, with a few exceptions, has carried across Belle and Sebastian’s discography. With its mix of sensuality and childlike whimsy, the shot could hardly have been more strikingly appropriate, and the title, Tigermilk, naturally followed.
Electric Honey manufactured only 1,000 vinyl copies. At Tigermilk’s release party, attendees threw the records like Frisbees. At least one was spotted at a shop the next day. Murdoch continued his job at the church; Campbell’s bartending days weren’t over. The album received just a single review on its initial release, with Scottish arts magazine The List favorably opining, “Let’s hope Belle and Sebastian reach the size of audience they have the potential to seduce.”
But the students at the music business course remembered to send the record to BBC DJs John Peel and Mark Radcliffe, who began to champion the group. The mystique of Tigermilk spread when Belle and Sebastian released their masterpiece If You’re Feeling Sinister later in 1996 via London indie Jeepster, with U.S. distribution via now-defunct imprint The Enclave. They dropped three more EPs, including the demo with the original “The State I Am In,” and a third album, The Boy With the Arab Strap, which brought Campbell and Jackson to the fore on vocals for the first time, before Tigermilk finally received its first widespread release, in 1999. By then, copies of the original vinyl were selling for as much as £850; cassette dubs circulated, but few people could’ve heard the album.
From the beginning, in January 1996, Murdoch had written in response to an offer from Jeepster of his desire to “draw in my audience, instead of bombasting them.” Because the band was averse to interviews, traditional publicity photos, or touring, it’s appealing to think that fans had to find out about Belle and Sebastian for themselves, through word of mouth, hearing them on the radio, or in my case, downloading “The State I Am In” in my first week of college after hearing a classmate name-check them as her favorite band. No music exists in a vacuum, of course—purposefully mysterious 21st-century acts from Burial to Jungle can attest how a lack of information can sometimes be a media angle in its own right—but Belle and Sebastian left space for the already-formidable songs on Tigermilk to grow into listeners’ lives.
When it was made, the album was a pointedly melodic, anti-machismo rejoinder to Britpop’s increasingly lunkheaded swagger and the post-grunge bluster of American alt-rock radio. “There’s no sex in your violence,” Gavin Rossdale grunted on Bush’s “Everything Zen”; “There must be a reason for all the looks we gave/And all the things we never said before,” Murdoch chirps atop a hand-clappy T. Rex stomp on “You’re Just a Baby.” Tigermilk was also a worthy successor to the “oppose all rock’n’roll” ethos of early UK punks Subway Sect, the droll yearning of Glasgow indie pioneers Orange Juice, and the confrontational tenderness of Kurt Cobain’s beloved K Records. By the time of Tigermilk’s 1999 re-release, critics either sneered or swooned accordingly. “Do you want to know how much I hate them? Even their name raises my blood pressure,” a mid-tier Scottish pop singer told The Guardian, amid juvenile complaints about “wussiness.” In those lad-mag, anti-“P.C.” years, it was still acceptable for an otherwise-approving Rolling Stone review to use the disparaging slang term “swish” (Pitchfork’s gonzo original assessment was also positive).
These days, Tigermilk’s radicalism may be harder to perceive, but it’s no less essential. In recent decades, as Belle and Sebastian have became reluctant elder statesmen of a twee movement in music and film, the early caricatures of them have also spread—a 2015 review on this website cast them as “the most sensitive band in indie rock, patron saints for daydreaming boys and girls”—but to buy into that overlooks the depth in these songs. As keyboardist Chris Geddes felt forced to complain to the NME as far back as 1997, “We’re human beings, not sensitivity machines.” And while the notion of male un-macho-ness has been hijacked by a basket of deplorables I’d rather not talk about here, you need look no further than the White House to know what type of man is still truly in power in 2020. Tigermilk might not preach revolution; with its low-key insistence on the notion of art as a source of personal epiphany, it feels revolutionary nevertheless.
