Music - Belle And Sebastian

Led by Stuart Murdoch, the seven-piece band has an intimate, majestic sound that is equal parts folk-rock and '60s pop, bur Murdoch's gift for not only whimsy and surrealism, but also for odd, unsettling lyrical detail keeps the songs grounded in a tangible reality. Based in Glasgow, Scotland, Belle & Sebastian released their first two albums in 1996 at the peak of the chamber-pop movement. At first, some critics in Britain's music weeklies tied the band into the subgenre, yet the group was too pretty, too delicate, to bear that label. Through their first two years of public existence, the band shielded their personalities, submitting their publicity photos featuring a girl that wasn't in the band and reluctantly posing for photo shoots. Furthermore, they performed in odd venues, playing not only the standard coffeehouses and cafes, but also homes, church halls and libraries.

The idiosyncratic approach to building their career isn't surprising given Murdoch's approach toward beginning a band. A longtime fan of Felt, Murdoch left Glasgow for London in the early '90s in hopes of finding the group's leader Lawrence, but he never found his idol. Upon his return to Glasgow he enrolled in university and he began writing songs and short stories. While at school, he took a music business course where he decided to form a band and release a record for his final project. For the project, he assembled the seven-piece Belle & Sebastian, choosing and recruiting members by instinct in a local all-night cafe in late 1995. All seven members were college students, and all agreed that the idea behind the band was to stay on a small scale, to keep it as a project and not let the band run their lives; they even assumed they would release two albums and break up. In May of 1996, they self-released their debut album Tigermilk on Electric Honey Records. Only 1,000 copies of the album, which was only pressed on vinyl, were released, but it unexpectedly became a sensation, earning terrific word of mouth throughout England. As a result, the band became slightly more than a school project - it became an actual band. If You're Feeling Sinister, released on the independent Jeepster label, followed in November of 1996. By the time the album was released in America on the EMI subsidiary the Enclave, it had earned considerable critical acclaim in the UK - not only from music weeklies, but from newspapers like The Sunday Times and magazines like The Face - and a large cult following. Over the course of 1997, word-of-mouth continued to grow in America, even as the band pulled out of an American tour because the Enclave went bankrupt and closed.

As the band cult continued to build in 1997, Belle & Sebastian released three EPs - Dog On Wheels, Lazy Line Painter Jane, and 3, 6, 9 Seconds Of Light. Each subsequent EP placed higher on the indie charts and received great critical acclaim. By the end of the year, the group finalized on American deal with Matador Records, issuing The Boy With The Arab Strap in September 1998. The following year saw the eagerly anticipated wide re-release of Tigermilk, the album that started it all. Following completion of 2000's Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant, Stuart David left Belle & Sebastian to focus full-time on his solo project, Looper.

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