Late Developers: Belle & Sebastian Are Back

Vocalist and violinist Sarah Martin reflects on the group’s surprise eleventh studio album...

Whether they’re feeling experimental, wistful or lead singer Stuart Murdoch is dabbling in the introspective pop stylings that first made the Scottish indie septet so compelling almost three decades ago, a new Belle & Sebastian record is always something worth celebrating.

Time was that the gaps between studio albums were growing ever longer, yet here we are at the beginning of 2023, just a few months on from the release of last year’s A Bit Of Previous’, graced once again with the release of a new Belle & Sebastian record, ‘Late Developers‘. 

Not since 1996, which saw the release of the beloved ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister‘ hot on the heels of their debut ‘Tigermilk’, have the group found themselves quite so prolific. Recorded during the same sessions as ‘A Bit of Previous‘, their latest work finds the group in fine, celebratory form, building on familiar sounds and themes in ways that feel distinctly Belle & Sebastian, yet fresh, new and exciting.

Paul Weedon caught up with Sarah Martin for a chat in the run up to the album’s surprise launch to discuss their first recording sessions in Glasgow in over 20 years and the joys of dipping into their extensive discography.

Well, this was a lovely surprise, Sarah. At what point during the sessions for ‘A Bit of Previous’ did you go, “We’ve got two albums worth of material here”?

Really early actually. I think because of the way COVID was, we realised that the best thing we could do was just to carry on in the studio. We were in a fairly fertile furrow, I suppose. We’d had tons of songs before COVID, ready to go to America. We probably had like three albums worth, or more if we’d if we’d carried on, but I guess at some point you just have to draw a line and say, “Right, we should probably put some of this out.” 

You’ve never struck me as a band lacking in ideas.

There are loads of us as well. It’s not as if it falls off to one person. And the more people there are, the more ideas that might seem flimsy to one person, get seized upon and worked up into something proper by somebody else. 

I was going to ask you about that. Back in the early days it wasn’t quite ‘The Stuart Show’, but…

It was!

Was it quite dictatorial?

No, it wasn’t really dictatorial, but it was a project that coalesced around him. I mean, he needed people to realise his thing, but the thing was his. I suppose it didn’t really start as a band. It started as a project and there were people that I think grew into a band. It was quite a special thing.

What’s the process like now in terms of sort of bringing ideas to the table? During COVID you had time to work things up on your own. How does that work when you eventually come back together? Is it a case of “Well, I’ve got this…”?

It basically works just like that. We had to rig up our rehearsal space as a recording studio, because there was no way we were gonna get away to America as the plan had been… I would have bitten your hand off if you’d booked a studio just somewhere away from Britain that we could go to and just live in the studio for a couple of months… I think COVID has changed everybody, you know? A lot of them have kids and felt like leaving the country was not the right thing to do. I mean, I would have, but I was probably in the minority at that stage. And actually, if we’d gone away to a studio, we would have done maybe 15 songs, whereas we did closer to 30.

A Bit of Previous was the first album you’d worked on at home in Glasgow since Fold Your Hands Child… in 2000. What was it that drew you away to America initially?

There came a point where the people who didn’t really want to be in the band had left – the people that were a bit harder to draw into the studio when we were there. It kind of felt as though the ones of us that were left just wanted to kind of go full immersion with it. There is something amazing about being away when the only thing you’re there to do is to make music. It’s as important shouting ideas from the sofa at the back of the control room as it is actually playing the drums or whatever, but if you’re at home and you’re on the sofa at the back of the studio, you can sometimes get drawn into your domestic life. So actually, just to have seven people fully committed to what the project is 12-14 hours a day, that’s quite addictive. I think we went away to make a record with Trevor Horn in 2003 and after that it seemed like there was no going back. We went to Los Angeles a couple of times and then Atlanta. It’s such a great thing to do. The only thing you’re getting up for is to go to the studio. It’s brilliant.

With so many of you involved, at what stage is a song done for you guys? 

Each song is usually done a couple of ways and there will maybe be a couple of different approaches and different mixes or something. I think Stuart’s probably more likely to reopen the box than most of us. For most of us, once you’ve kind of been around the houses a few times with it, we’re circling ever-incrementally closer to something and there’s a danger of getting further away from it again.

It’s always kind of a joy when you hear a song like Piazza, New York Catcher played live and it hasn’t really changed, but it’s also sort of evolved a little bit. Does that just happen naturally as part of the process of playing live?

Nothing gets switched up for the sake of it, but when you’re playing things live, that’s when that’s when the singer will be like, “This isn’t kind of standing up… There’s something missing… We need to change something.” It’s usually when you’re actually in front of an audience and you realise something isn’t quite connecting. You’re not quite able to take the thing and be the bridge between the music and the audience. When that happens, that’s when you’re like, “Right, can we try something? You play that instead and maybe play that guitar instead of that guitar”. It’s always like that. I mean, it’s not like we’ve gone back and re-recorded. The old songs kind of change because they maybe don’t quite fit the reality of playing live.

Was it kind of difficult having all this material in the bank, going out on tour last year and not being able to play it live?

[Sarah nods]

Yeah, I imagine it was. This is a really poppy record. What will it mean for you to finally be able to get out and play some of these songs? 

Really poppy! Yep. I think it will be fun… We didn’t kind of go, “Well, the songs that are like this go on that album. Songs that are like that…”  I think any song could have been on either record, but yeah, there are some that will be fun to play live. Some will be a challenge, I think. You have to relearn things – things that have layers and layers of things. You don’t want to just have Chris [Geddes] hit a spacebar and play a backing track with Bob [Kildea] noodling away slightly at strategic points. You do want to feel as though it’s a performance. You want everybody in the band to be present in the performance. If there’s a couple of songs where folk just do nothing then that feels a shame, really.

It’s funny you mention that. You never quite know where to look during a Belle & Sebastian show because you’re all doing something interesting.

I mean, it’s a nightmare for festival cameramen. It’s the ultimate blink and you miss it. You sometimes see folk scurrying along and you’re like, “Ah, you’re too late!” 

With the body of work that you guys have, are there any songs that you’re still kind of surprised to see people respond to in the way that they do? 

It’s funny. I mean, quite a few of the songs I think have just connected really immediately. Maybe it was just me that felt that. Maybe not everybody did. There’s a couple things from Write About Love, like Ghost of Rockschool. We’ve only played that twice, but that feels as though you’ve got the audience following every step. I mean, I love that folks still enjoy the kind of maligned mid-period stuff as well, you know… Well, I mean, Dear Catastrophe Waitresswasn’t maligned at all. I think folks enjoy that one. But yeah, If She Wants Me is one that everybody always loves. That’s a great one. That’s been a journey as well, just getting the arrangement really right because the string part in it is so high and hard. 

And I guess you don’t always have a string section.

Even if we do, they’re not always the same people. Even though they’re always excellent players, to actually get them to be able to play in sync with the band… So now Chris plays it on a string synthesiser… It was Mick [Cooke], who’s now left the band, that wrote that. He thought a string synth would be the thing and in the end, it was actually played by real violins, but it is better to just have it played by somebody who’s in the band and actually feels it the way everybody else is feeling it and stuff. So that’s a good development. 

As a band, you’ve been referenced throughout popular culture a lot over the last 20 odd years. How weird is it hearing ‘The Boy With The Arab Strap’ referenced in a film like 500 Days of Summer, for example?

I’ve not actually seen that film… I can’t remember what it was now, but I think the very first time there was a case of us appearing as a cultural shorthand for something in a TV show was when we were on the radio in the laundrette in EastEnders.

A real highlight.

Yeah, very early on. The big one for me was in Brookside. There was some kind of villain – it was Gerard Kelly, I think. I mean, I wasn’t a regular watcher, but I think he was on the phone and he was angry with somebody going, “I’m cooling my boots by the pool in Malaga listening to Belle & Sebastian and you’re giving me all this bullshit.” And I was like, “Hang on, some gangster from Brookside is referencing us?” That was a good one. It’s nice to see where you pop up.

I’ve always wondered how Stuart felt hearing Jack Black’s character in High Fidelity refer to Belle & Sebastian as “sad bastard” music.

Yeah, Stuart actually loves that usage of it. There are a lot of times where you get asked if a piece of music can be used in the film and, in a way, it kind of could be any piece of music. It doesn’t really lead the narrative anywhere. But I think even though it wasn’t exactly flattering, it was fine. It was genuinely a part of the narrative and that’s really quite satisfying.

I don’t want to spoil any surprises, but are there any plans for any of the additional tracks that were left over from these sessions? 

I think everybody’s just kind of finding their feet again, but we’re gonna start back in the studio. Not everything that was left was finished. Generally you decide that these songs go well together, so we’ll focus on making sure that they’re all properly finished and ready and then we finish the second batch. There are some where all we’ve got is demos from pre-COVID times. I’ve got songs in my back pocket waiting to open and I know Stuart will too. There’s often the temptation to kind of keep moving ahead… They’re not shit, they’re really good, but you don’t want to spend your whole life in the world of what you were writing about three years ago. Maybe a couple of those songs might get back into this next little adventure.

This is the first time you guys have done a surprise album drop like this, isn’t it?

Yeah, I don’t know whether there’s a kind of commercial reason for it, but we didn’t want to sit on all of that stuff for another two years and then go, “Listen to our new album – it’s been finished for three years.” We were actually hoping we could get it out last year. We were hoping we could get ‘A Bit of Previous’ out a bit earlier than we did and then get ‘Late Developers’ out within the year: that mirror of ‘Tigermilk’ and ‘…Sinister’, because they were out in June and November, so it would have been great. But you know, at that point in ‘96, nobody was worried about scheduling anything. It was just, you know, “It’s done. Get it out!”

‘Late Developers’ is out now.

Words: Paul Weedon
Photo Credit: Anna Crolla