by Jake Cline
Since forming in 1996, Scottish band Belle & Sebastian have never gone more than a couple of years without releasing a new recording, embarking on a tour or making a one-off festival appearance. Even at the height of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, when the group's seven members couldn't be in the same room together, let alone gather in a recording studio or a concert hall, they released a 23-track, 100-minute live album culled from the previous year's tour. In 2024, the band created a fan site to which they post exclusive demos, rehearsal recordings, casual video check-ins and concert footage. To be a Belle & Sebastian fan is to be rewarded often with new ways of connecting to the band and their music.
This steady output of material is matched by a committed pursuit of artistic growth. Across Belle & Sebastian's three decades and 12 studio albums, the songwriting has only gotten more adventurous. While nearly every one of their songs sounds born of a love of melody and classic pop songcraft, with narrative lyrics that ignore genre tropes when not subverting them, each album harbors a distinct mood and a more expansive approach than its predecessors. The group's most recent studio album, 2023's Late Developers, deepens the keyboard-driven, electro-pop style the musicians first embraced on 2015's aptly titled Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance.
This is all to say that Belle & Sebastian have spent much more time looking forward than back over the years. Which is why the band's announcement last year of a 30th anniversary tour came as a mild surprise. That they want to celebrate themselves in this way is understandable. Most pop acts don't survive their first decade. Few are still making essential music on the cusp of their fourth. Even fewer can boast having recorded and issued two full-length albums in their first year, as Belle & Sebastian did in 1996 with Tigermilk, released that June, and If You're Feeling Sinister, which followed in November.
Still, as the band's Sarah Martin says in a recent Zoom interview from her home in Glasgow, Belle & Sebastian's decision to perform both albums in their entirety over the course of two nights in cities across Europe and North America even amazed people within the group's own camp.
"Our manager was kind of a bit surprised by it," Martin says, "obviously pleasantly surprised. Because we've been asked to do it many times."
While the tour does not mark the first time Belle & Sebastian have performed a complete album in concert—they played If You're Feeling Sinister at the 2019 Pitchfork Festival in Chicago and 2000's Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant on a band-hosted Mediterranean Sea cruise the following month—Martin and her bandmates have turned down the majority of invitations to do so. This time, however, she says it was a unanimous decision.
"It's been better than I imagined it would be, actually," she admits of the tour, whose European leg ran from February 4 through April 12. "But, yeah, I think it is odd." (The tour resumes May 12-13 in Mexico City and arrives May 17 at the Adrienne Arsht Center, where the band will perform If You're Feeling Sinister and a second set of songs from other Belle & Sebastian albums. It's the only one-night, non-Tigermilk stop on the tour.)
In 1996, Belle & Sebastian released their second album, If You're Feeling Sinister, just five months after debuting with Tigermilk.
Singer-songwriter Stuart Murdoch was 27 when he led a group of Glasgow musicians through three 12-hour days of recording at a local studio to create his new band's debut album. A collection of folk-adjacent, Northern Soul-influenced, anti-rock pop songs, Tigermilk announced Murdoch as a serious, hyperliterate songwriter and a singer whose gentle vocals relate tales of iniquity and violence. He has a distinct manner of making confessions sound like boasts.
That impression was confirmed by If You're Feeling Sinister, whose songs about young Glaswegians wrestling with lust, sex and faith Murdoch had begun writing even before Tigermilk was released. Jesus appears as a character on the album, as do a teenage rebel who "wrote the saddest song," a girl experiencing "the pain of being a hopeless unbeliever" and a boy who, while crossing through a park alone, is urged (in the album's most clever line), "Don't look back like Dylan in the movies."
Martin met Murdoch during her senior year of college through his then girlfriend, who would be immortalized on the cover of Tigermilk pretending to nurse a stuffed animal. A singer who plays multiple instruments, including violin, piano and recorder, Martin was not looking to join a band when Murdoch invited her to become a member of Belle & Sebastian.
"I knew a few of the songs on Tigermilk before the album came out," Martin recalls, "because Stuart was persuading the guy I shared a flat with to do some music with him. So I heard 'The State I Am In' and, I think, 'My Wandering Days Are Over' and a couple of others, as well. And it made me think, 'Well, actually, this is a band I want to be in. Everybody was in a band at that point, and if you played something, people would try and get you into the studio with them. It was quite tiresome, really. But then, I was like, 'These are great songs. This is something where I feel like I would fit.' "
"We couldn't really [play a lot of shows], because Chris [Geddes, keyboardist] and Isobel [Campbell, a singer and cellist who left the group in 2002] were both at university," Martin recalls, "and the premise of it was that everybody had a veto. If it was something anybody didn't want to do, then it wouldn't get done. It felt like we spent a lot more time dreaming dreams than doing anything."
Copies of If You're Feeling Sinister were also difficult to come by at first. But after the album made its way through Europe and into the United States, it became one of the most critically acclaimed and influential albums of the era. Rolling Stone placed If You're Feeling Sinister at No. 481 on the magazine's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time." Pitchfork, meanwhile, put Sinister at No. 14, between Radiohead's The Bends and Nirvana's In Utero, on its "Top 100 Albums of the 1990s" list.
Belle & Sebastian are, from left, Stevie Jackson, Dave McGowan, Bobby Kildea, Chris Geddes, Sarah Martin, Richard Colburn and Stuart Murdoch. Photo courtesy of the band.
Murdoch recently posted a video to The Herbaceous Border, Belle & Sebastian's official fan-club site, in which he admits to experiencing nostalgia for the year of Tigermilk and If You're Feeling Sinister. Certainly, Belle & Sebastian's 30th anniversary and its attendant tour have also put Martin in a wistful state?
"Actually, I think it's more the opposite," she says. "It's more like a reconsidering of the songs and how much more inhabited they feel now. Thirty years on, we can all play up, you know? Richard [Colburn] can really hit the drums and people can sing louder, and we're able to hold ourselves above electric guitars and drums and things. [In 1996,] we were trying to do something that was quite difficult, and we were such rookies. Even if we'd been who we are now, it's still a thing that takes some time and thinking to get everything to sit together. And so to do that in less than a week, when you don't know what you're doing, was probably never gonna go that well."
For Martin, If You're Feeling Sinister offers a snapshot not just of Belle & Sebastian's first year, but also of mid-1990s Glasgow, where the English-born musician has lived since she was 18. The opportunity to "take Glasgow around the world" was one of the primary reasons she agreed to the anniversary tour.
"Sinister is such a geographically placed thing," she says. "It's all very rooted here. It's very settled, and it's a record of how we were and how the city was and the city that we inhabited. It's kind of lovely."
Belle & Sebastian will perform Sunday, May 17, at the Adrienne Arsht Center's Knight Concert Hall. New York-based singer-songwriter Joanna Sternberg will open the show. Tickets are available here.
Top: Photo by Anna Crolla.