It's something of a surprise to me that I've taken a year to put Belle & Sebastian on this series though they've featured elsewhere plenty. Yesterday their Ninth studio album came out. I had planned to buy it, waited for it with great anticipation but yesterday, listening through to it online, too much of it sounded like The Pet Shop Boys and St. Etienne to me. Nothing wrong with either of those bands but it's not particularly how I want Belle & Sebastian to sound. They have too great a legacy of their own.
So I went back to their early singles and EP compilation Push Barman To Open Old Wounds. They were a quite incomparably gifted band. And just as importantly they made a stand against those British bands around them at the time who were complacent and opportunist. Whose horizons were narrower.
This might be the rockiest thing the band ever did. Spaghetti Western soundtracks, Love, The Smiths, Left Bank chic, a shelf-full of books and films and themselves mixed up in a blender and poured out into a bowl Splendid! Belle & Sebastian. They knew how it felt to be Seventeen. They should have made a film with Wes Anderson. Their early records are one outstanding soundtrack after another.
'Sunbeam shone, mousy girl on the end pew
You'd stay home, oh if only they let you
Le Pastie de la Bourgeoisie
Municipal pool, you're a junior life saver
But you're friends are all serious ravers
Le Pastie de la Bourgeoisie
Reading Judy Blume
But you came too soon
You're too tall, much too tall for a boyfriend
They run and hide, from your buck tooth and split ends
Don't be scared, like the books you've read
You're the heroine
You'll be doing fine
Wouldn't you like to get away?
Bestowing the memory of good and evil
On the ones you left behind
The heartless swine
And you love like nobody around you
How you love, and a halo surrounds you
Le Pastie de la Bourgeoisie
In the Autumn cool
Say cheerio to school
Listen Dear, I've been watching you lately
If I said all these things you would hate me
Le Pastie de la Bourgeoisie
At the church bazaar
I nearly went too far
Wouldn't you like to get away?
Give yourself up to the allure of
Catcher In The Rye
The future's swathed in Stars and Stripes
Wouldn't you like to get away?
Kerouac's beckoning with open arms,
And open roads of eucalyptus
Westward bound .'
You'd stay home, oh if only they let you
Le Pastie de la Bourgeoisie
Municipal pool, you're a junior life saver
But you're friends are all serious ravers
Le Pastie de la Bourgeoisie
Reading Judy Blume
But you came too soon
You're too tall, much too tall for a boyfriend
They run and hide, from your buck tooth and split ends
Don't be scared, like the books you've read
You're the heroine
You'll be doing fine
Wouldn't you like to get away?
Bestowing the memory of good and evil
On the ones you left behind
The heartless swine
And you love like nobody around you
How you love, and a halo surrounds you
Le Pastie de la Bourgeoisie
In the Autumn cool
Say cheerio to school
Listen Dear, I've been watching you lately
If I said all these things you would hate me
Le Pastie de la Bourgeoisie
At the church bazaar
I nearly went too far
Wouldn't you like to get away?
Give yourself up to the allure of
Catcher In The Rye
The future's swathed in Stars and Stripes
Wouldn't you like to get away?
Kerouac's beckoning with open arms,
And open roads of eucalyptus
Westward bound .'
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