Song 1: The State I Am In

The State I Am In - Belle and Sebastian

Yes, I am a child of Britpop, yes, I am an indie kid, but I'd be lying if I said I came to it by the conventional super-cool routes. I was still listening to Capital Radio, or at best Virgin Radio, in 1996, and still buying my tapes (not even CDs yet) at Our Price (or at best HMV) Ealing Broadway.  Thus it was unusually serendipitous that I found myself listening to a Radio 1 session (John Peel or Steve Lamacq or Mark Radcliffe, can't quite recall) on a summer evening in 1996 and it was a performance by a band called Belle and Sebastian of a song called 'The State I Am In'.

Now, whatever else I'd learnt about indie musicians in my 2 years of reading NME at that point, they were definitely cool, impenetrable, took drugs and didn't go to church or talk about children's TV.
So, when the band in session was announced as Belle and Sebastian, my ears perked up. But is it an ironic, mean use of the lovable cartoon about a boy and his dog in the Pyrenees, i wondered?

"I was surprised; I was happy for a day in 1975, and I was puzzled by a dream that stayed with me all day in 1995".

So far so good! And that voice ... so fragile, so teenagery, so smart, so indie, but not indie like Oasis, thank goodness. Back then, B and S really were lo-fi and incapable, I remember lots of bum notes but I remember the song developing, and thinking I liked the way it was going. It was easy to follow the story, it was funny and then it started to talk about priests and churches and sins and providence, and these were the subjects that had been bothering me for these last six years, not drugs and Camden, not even clumsy politics (not yet!) and he actually sounded like he knew what he was talking about.

So that was the start of Belle and Sebastian for me. Being as how I was still a bit useless then and how Tigermilk was very limited edition and how they weren't really in NME, that was it for a while. Something I'd heard, that I'd warmed to, but I went on listening to Bob Dylan and Blur and  the Manic Street Preachers and The Jam and Spiritualized and Van Morrison and they had quite enough for me for the time being.

But I was lucky to go to university in Scotland and to have pretty cool Scottish friends, so, for my first couple of years there, B and S began to filter into my consciousness as real cult concern, till finally in 2000, I dived fully in (my first B and S purchase was actually the reissued 'Tigermilk' - still on tape though, blimey! - beginning with 'The State I Am In') and haven't looked back since.

So what are Belle and Sebastian and what is The State I Am In?  I'll answer the first question.

They are The Smiths of my generation. Yes, indeed. It wasn't me that first proffered that theory (it was an article I read suggesting that there wasn't actually a Smiths of my generation but that B and S were as close as it got) but I wholeheartedly espouse it.

It's easy to forget how much of an odd little self-contained cult B and S were until 2001. They hardly ever played live, didn't give interviews, they had a name which implied they were a double act and they sang songs about themselves. I didn't even know what Stuart Murdoch looked like. I just remember hearing that he was older than he ought to be.

The NME, as epitomised by powerhouse journalist Steven Wells - the kind of writer 50% of whose stuff you love with a passion, 50% of which you loath and want to send him death threats, the best kind really - hated them, hated them with fervour. I remember him writing about how he'd found himseld playing football with Stuart Murdoch and he was, inexplicably, brilliant and an extremely nice man and that made the weedy wetness of the music all the more unforgivable. It's true that Stuart Murdoch's voice and songwriting does not scream of a brilliant footballer, but he's always been an odd bean, and as the band became more open, more understanding grew.

He was a perennial student who'd lost a huge chunk of his 20s to M.E., a dreamer, a fantasist, an actual Christian, a long distance runner, a real human being, not a rock star.

And being a B and S fan defined who you were in a way that no other band of that era did. Twee, proper, sensitive indie is defined by B and S. No one told you to like them, you heard them and felt here was a band created just for you. There was no Sebastian but there was actually a Bel, but God know what order it all came in.

Extraordinarily, they won a Brit award in 1999, the first sign that they weren't content to stay on the margins forever.

And so began their coming out party, interviews, Top of the Pops, Jools Holland, star producers, it all followed (as, sadly, did the departure of two founding members, first Stuart David who went on to be Looper and also a novelist, and also, of course, said Bel, Isobel Campbell, who has been very successful in her own right, and whose departure, though it denied the band a bit of its cultish magic, certainly seems to have reduced the tension and made band politics a bit easier). And references (as a cultural signifier) in Hollywood films. They haven't become a MASSIVE band but they have become a big band on both sides of the Atlantic (Top 20 albums in the US, live at the Hollywood Bowl, headlining festivals, even creating their own festival).

They really learnt how to play - I've seen them several times since 2001 and the quality and sheer muscularity has got better and better - and Stuart Murdoch's voice got stronger and stronger. Their albums aren't really quite as good as they used to be, but they're still giving it a very good shot and keeping a high standard, they're certainly more eclectic (a little less funkin might be preferred).

And yet, even after all this time, for me, 'The State I Am In' IS Belle Sebastian. Well, strictly speaking, 'Belle and Sebastian', another song on the Dog on Wheels EP, IS Belle and Sebastian, but I'd have to be a smug, witless fool to point that out.

'The State I Am In' is a glorious, wonderful, song which i'm not sure they've ever bettered. It's a builder, a grower, a lyrical tour de force which tells you everything you need to know about its writer. It's vulnerable but sly and daring, it's intricate yet ends up being anthemic.

On 'Tigermilk's second track 'Expectations', Murdoch sings about "making life-size models of the Velvet Underground in clay". Well, I'm going to add to my previous bold pronouncement. B and S are not just the Smiths of my generation, they're also the Velvet Underground of my generation. Only a few thousand people bought that debut album but how many of them were inspired to form a band? How much music on both sides of the Atlantic has sounded like B and S since, tuneful, literate, yes, fey, girl/boy, jangly. I've had countless new bands described to me as Belle and Sebastian-y. Of course, they didn't arise in a vacuum - Love, The Velvets, Felt, Orange Juice etc, went before, but I do believe Belle and Sebastian and The State I Am In were something new, unique, influential and priceless.