How Dance Music Saved Belle and Sebastian
Dancing in clubs isn’t necessarily the first thing that comes to mind when most people think of Belle and Sebastian, the Scottish masters of wistful melody and wry lyrical asides. So it’s a bit of a surprise to hear lead singer Stuart Murdoch, calling from his Glasgow apartment on a rainy winter evening, describe his youth as a string of late-night revels. “I danced all the way through the Eighties and Nineties,” says the singer, 46.
It wasn’t always easy: In the late Eighties, while he was at college, Murdoch fell ill with a serious case of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. He spent the next seven years too weak to finish school or hold down a steady job – but he still hit the local clubs whenever he could. “Even when I was too ill to work, if I had any energy at all, I would head out on a Saturday night on my own and dance at a club called Divine,” he says. “I’d have to spend the rest of the week recovering. It was kind of stupid.”
Now, nearly 20 years after Murdoch’s health returned and he co-founded Belle and Sebastian, he’s gone back to that early influence. Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, the band’s aptly named ninth LP, is studded with glittering synths and pulsing backbeats – a sharp curve away from the warm, cozy indie-pop that B&S is best known for. “So many of our older songs were written around a strummed guitar or some chords on the piano,” says Murdoch. “This one is all about the rhythm. It starts with the kick drum, and the tune dances around that.”
The road to Peacetime is a long one, full of unexpected twists and last-minute miracles. It starts in the mid-Nineties, by which point an ailing Murdoch had moved back into his parents’ home in Alloway, a sleepy suburb about 30 miles from Glasgow. “I had spent time in hospitals, and by the time I came out I didn’t really have any friends,” he says. “It really set the clock back to zero. But I started working on some music, and over the years, I made a life by myself. I moved back to the city, and just sort of cracked around for a while – wrote songs, observed people’s lives.”
Back in Glasgow at last, Murdoch recruited friends and acquaintances to start Belle and Sebastian in 1996. He was the newly formed group’s dominant songwriter on their limited-release LP Tigermilk and their proper debut, If You’re Feeling Sinister — a pair of tender, funny indie-pop landmarks, both released that first year. “It was our honeymoon period,” Murdoch says. “Everybody liked hanging out with each other, and there were some nights when all eight members of the group would be out dancing at Divine or a Northern Soul night somewhere.”
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