The band’s former bassist chronicles their rise from a world of greasy spoons and community music courses in a moving, amusing account
Sometimes we listen to bands that we truly love. And sometimes, if we’re lucky, or at strange and vulnerable periods of our life, it seems as if the bands we love are listening to us. That’s certainly how it felt to me when, like many thousands of young men and women across the country, I became smitten with Belle and Sebastian at the tail end of the 90s. I was living in a small university town, broke and convinced that my best days were already behind me, ploughing through indigestible scholarly tracts, pining hopelessly for someone who didn’t love me, breakfasting on vodka, falling off my bicycle into oncoming traffic at lunchtimes.
I had long assumed music could never mean as much to me as it had done when I was an adolescent. And then one night, breathless and bewildered, I heard “The State I Am In”, the opening song from the band’s debut album, Tigermilk. “I was surprised, I was happy for a day in 1975 / I was puzzled by a dream, stayed with me all day in 1995 / My brother had confessed that he was gay / It took the heat off me for a while.” Confessional yet mysterious, telling stories without being storytelling stool-rockers, rekindling half-forgotten memories that could puncture the present: all this and tunes that channelled early Velvet Underground, Love and 1970s children’s television.
Related: Morrissey and me: how an ordinary Asian fell in love with the Smiths
Continue reading... Reported by guardian.co.uk 5 hours ago.
Sometimes we listen to bands that we truly love. And sometimes, if we’re lucky, or at strange and vulnerable periods of our life, it seems as if the bands we love are listening to us. That’s certainly how it felt to me when, like many thousands of young men and women across the country, I became smitten with Belle and Sebastian at the tail end of the 90s. I was living in a small university town, broke and convinced that my best days were already behind me, ploughing through indigestible scholarly tracts, pining hopelessly for someone who didn’t love me, breakfasting on vodka, falling off my bicycle into oncoming traffic at lunchtimes.
I had long assumed music could never mean as much to me as it had done when I was an adolescent. And then one night, breathless and bewildered, I heard “The State I Am In”, the opening song from the band’s debut album, Tigermilk. “I was surprised, I was happy for a day in 1975 / I was puzzled by a dream, stayed with me all day in 1995 / My brother had confessed that he was gay / It took the heat off me for a while.” Confessional yet mysterious, telling stories without being storytelling stool-rockers, rekindling half-forgotten memories that could puncture the present: all this and tunes that channelled early Velvet Underground, Love and 1970s children’s television.
Related: Morrissey and me: how an ordinary Asian fell in love with the Smiths
Continue reading... Reported by guardian.co.uk 5 hours ago.