Happy 25th Anniversary to Belle & Sebastian’s third studio album The Boy With The Arab Strap, originally released September 7, 1998.
In the late ‘90s, Belle & Sebastian were touring with fellow Scottish band Arab Strap and having a grand old time drinking and partying every night. Everyone, that is, except for Belle & Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch. He was suffering from myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), or chronic fatigue syndrome, and so in London he decided he’d find somewhere else to stay in order to avoid the nightly bacchanal. It was just one more situation where Murdoch was forced to be a spectator in his own life, and so the resulting song, “The Boy With The Arab Strap,” combines the raucous joviality of the pub with the loneliness of being outside of it all.
As he usually did when he was feeling ill but still wanted to get out into the world, Murdoch boarded a bus and rode around the city. “I’d been unwell for quite a long time, and suddenly we were in London playing this gig and I was still unwell,” he recalled to the NME. “That day I remember riding on a bus from Camden and writing most of the song on the bus. I passed a prison, and that makes it into the song. Yeah, that was my London experience of that year.”
What Murdoch didn’t know when he wrote “The Boy With The Arab Strap”—and when Belle & Sebastian used it as the title of their breakout third album—is what exactly an Arab Strap is. The name had stuck with Arab Strap singer Aidan Moffat after he mail-ordered a vibrator for his girlfriend and received an Arab Strap as a lucky add-on. “I’m always kind of naïve, I didn’t know it was a cock ring,” Murdoch said.
The way Murdoch ended up finding out it was a cock ring—because Moffat didn’t tell him—was when The Boy With The Arab Strap went gold and he gave his parents a copy to display in their living room. “And then the minister came ’round and it became a topic of discussion, and my mum afterwards says, ‘Why did you have to call it that?’” Murdoch recalled, laughing. “Oooh, vicar!”
Appropriately, it was in the Murdoch family living room where Belle & Sebastian first began. At 21, Murdoch had been diagnosed with ME and had to quit university and move back home. There was a piano in the living room, and whenever he had any energy at all, he would sit down to compose little songs. It was a lifeline for him, the only thing that made him feel connected to his humanity, and to productivity.
Eventually, after a few years, he regained a bit of strength and enrolled in a Glasgow city-sponsored program called Beatbox for unemployed musicians and those too ill to work. “At first I thought it was terrible,” Murdoch recalled. “I thought the type of music that they were playing was terrible. But after a while, I realized that this was the only game in town and that I should use it.”
It was at Beatbox that Murdoch met mild-mannered Stuart David. Murdoch was looking for a bass player, David wasn’t a bass player, but because Murdoch’s songs were so simple, he figured he would learn the bass to accompany his sick friend. “When we first started out, he just didn’t have the energy to do more than two or three songs at a time,” remembers David. “It was quite a slow process of getting his strength back.”
Murdoch and David recorded a few demos, but Murdoch felt that the music would be stronger with a group around it. He tried to corral other people into forming a band, but for whatever reason it just wouldn’t happen. Through a stroke of luck, David was living in a crowded flat and he wound up recruiting one of his flatmates, Richard Colburn, as a drummer. Colburn hadn’t played drums in several years—and even when he had he’d only done it casually. “I mean, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing at all,” Colburn laughs. “And in some ways, I still don’t. In a lot of ways, I still don’t.”
There was a bar in Glasgow called the Halt that hosted an open-mic night, and one of its regulars was a guitarist named Stevie Jackson who played in a band called the Moondials and who Murdoch became obsessed with. “He was the compère. It was all these folks getting up, clinging to the songs they’d written that week,” Murdoch recalled to the Guardian. “Stevie did a good job of cajoling people up and at the drop of a hat he’d perform a song and show everybody how it should be done. I was very impressed.” Murdoch soon made it his cause célèbre to snag Jackson for his band, but Jackson kept declining. So the only thing left to do was to write him an impassioned letter.
“I’d just left a group and didn’t want to join another,” Jackson said. “So when he asked me to join his, I refused. Then a letter came through the door and he was just very open about his dreams and aspirations. He said: “I know something’s going to happen and I want you to be part of it.” Jackson finally relented.
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Still, something was missing. Murdoch loved ’60s band The Left Banke, particularly their song “Pretty Ballerina,” and he wanted to bottle that sound. “If you listen to that song, the strings and the cello and the violins are as intrinsic to the arrangement as the guitar, the bass or the keyboards,” Jackson explained. So Murdoch began looking for people who could add violin or cello to their mix.
He heard about someone from a couple of musicians he knew—a young woman who played the cello and recorded little songs in her room. Six months later, he was in line for the bathroom at a New Year’s Eve party and who happened to be in the queue beside him but Isobel Campbell, who was so drunk she was hanging onto the cabinets just to keep herself upright. They struck up a conversation, and Murdoch soon realized she was the girl of the bedroom cello songs.
“There weren’t so many girls like that in the town,” Murdoch said. “She had this sort of long blond hair and the dresses and…seemed very sweet at the time.” (The way Murdoch giggles like a schoolboy at the telling betrays the likelihood that the musicians who told him about Isobel also mentioned that she was a hottie.) “You know, something was in the air, it was nice, it didn’t do us any harm,” he admits, giggling again.
After she told him her name, Murdoch asked Campbell if anyone ever called her Belle, and she told him her mum did all the time. Oddly, Murdoch had been writing a short story about two characters named Belle and Sebastian (inspired by the 1965 French TV series), but instead of it being about an Alpen boy and his dog, it was about a Glasgow hipster couple who made music together. The following day, Murdoch went over to Jackson’s house for dinner and dreamily told him about the girl he’d just met, uncannily called Belle. Murdoch saw the coincidence as kismet, and so the band now had their official name and their new cellist. (And Murdoch had a new girlfriend—hee hee.)
Soon there was another party, this time at Stuart David’s crowded flat, where the band met Chris Geddes, who they’d recruit to play keyboards and piano. (“He showed up and he was really stoned,” Campbell remembers with a chuckle.) The band immediately busied themselves with tons of rehearsal and, in the meantime, drummer Richard Colburn enrolled in a Music Business course at local Stow College. The group poked fun at him a bit—it went against Colburn’s laidback nature to become a music-biz mogul—but they would soon discover just how fortuitous his enrollment in the program would be.
Stow’s Music Business course took a very hands-on approach. Every year, the students chose a demo from an unsigned band, recorded the band’s album, and then promoted the record. Colburn submitted a Belle & Sebastian demo from their Beatbox days, and the Stow students chose it as the lucky winner for their project. The band recorded its debut Tigermilk (1996) in three days, with only two more allotted for the mixing. The lightning speed of the recording did nothing to compromise Tigermilk’s quality, and several big labels had already expressed interest by the night of the launch party.
Despite the major-label interest, the band decided to keep it indie—and hence, maintain complete creative control—by signing with Jeepster Records. But a notable part of that early, major-label feeding frenzy included being courted by Sire Records’ Seymour Stein, famous for launching the career of Madonna.
After signing to Jeepster, Murdoch continued to recover from his illness, and so he moved out of his parents’ house and began living in a church while working as its caretaker. The band started rehearsing there, and multi-instrumentalist Sarah Martin began attending practices, soon becoming an official band member. Belle & Sebastian ended up recording their sophomore album, If You’re Feeling Sinister (1996), a mere three months after Tigermilk.
Because both albums were written during the worst of Murdoch’s illness, they’re infused with a melancholy wistfulness, a Morrissey-like ache for a life not one’s own, followed by sunny attempts at rallying. “When I was sick and alone, songs came out fully formed,” Murdoch told the New York Times in 2009. “I became obsessed with writing about people in terrible situations, people who didn’t have a voice. Then I tried to get happy, that happiness you feel when you start acting like a 12-year-old again.”
By the time The Boy With The Arab Strap was released, Belle & Sebastian were no longer dutifully playing Murdoch’s songs of isolation, but becoming a band all their own. In fact, only one song on the record, “Sleep The Clock Around,” harkens back to Murdoch’s days of being housebound. Members Stuart David, Isobel Campbell, and Stevie Jackson all contributed to the songwriting and, by employing a more democratic distribution of the duties, The Boy With The Arab Strap offers a much more universal view of 20-something adulthood, albeit one that’s still precarious (“He had a stroke at the age of 24 / It could have been a brilliant career”).
I listened to the album constantly throughout college, but The Boy With The Arab Strap became most precious to me in 2001-2002, the year after I graduated but was still hanging around my university town for a couple semesters of art school. (My college offered a year of free tuition to anyone who graduated with a 3.5 GPA or above, so I took advantage of the generous offer). That year was one of the most creative of my life—I was painting and sculpting and drawing, and I’d also formed a band with some other grad students, so I was making music all the time, too.
But even with as much fun as I was having, I felt like I was in an odd limbo between not-quite adulthood and real adulthood. I wondered if I was in arrested development. Comfortingly, The Boy With The Arab Strap seemed to capture that unique mixture of carefree exuberance and a shameful shirking of responsibility. (Rolling Stone caught onto that vibe in their review, too: “It’s the soundtrack to staying too long in your college neighborhood and becoming one of those types who hold down library jobs.”)
The Boy With The Arab Strap opens with the gauzy “It Could Have Been A Brilliant Career,” Murdoch’s ethereal whisper and Jackson’s gentle fingerpicking dissolving into a jangle as we’re told about 20-somethings taking themselves too seriously—“She wears the clothes of an emperor / But her paintings are a sham / And they’re going for a grand.” Murdoch’s tender vocals imbue the song with empathy, and so we’re not quite sure whether he’s serious, or if he’s critiquing the cynical notion that anyone who dares to do something creative—particularly a young person—is lazy and suspect.
In the same semi-ironic vein, “Sleep The Clock Around,” featuring beautiful harmonies by Murdoch and Campbell, captures a fading Gen-X slacker sensibility—that is, only if you don’t know it’s about Murdoch’s illness. Conversely, “Is It Wicked Not To Care?,” written and sung by Isobel Campbell, comes across as less a declaration of not giving a shit, and more as a deeply sincere mediation on life, and a love for one’s fellow humans. Meanwhile, the truly slackerish “A Summer Wasting” describes Murdoch’s Summer of ’87. “I’d failed my higher ordinary physics for the fourth time, and gave into music,” he recalled. (The album’s other summer-themed song, “Ease Your Feet Into The Sea,” finds Murdoch ruminating on a friend’s suicide.)
“Seymour Stein,” an all-time fan favorite, features Stevie Jackson singing cheekily about Belle & Sebastian’s 1996 meeting with the Sire mogul. Jackson happened to be working that day and couldn’t join in on the meeting, which is reflected in the final mournful line “Seymour Stein, sorry I missed you.” Of course, Seymour Stein himself eventually heard the song. “How could I not know it? It was written about me,” he told Tablet magazine in 2013. “I’m very happy that they chose to write a song about me. It’s a good song, it’s a very good song.” Comically, Stein remembered the band’s failure to sign as his decision rather than theirs (it was theirs).
Next up, the sublimely jazzy “A Space Boy Dream,” written and performed by Stuart David, would see David soon leave the band in order to create more songs like it with electro outfit Looper. Pumping with organ, “Dirty Dream Number Two” makes you want to skip down the street while contemplating secret sexy thoughts. (The song is about a dream Isobel Campbell had starring Denis Leary.) Another dreamy song about celebrity, the piano-driven “Chickfactor” recounts Stevie Jackson’s experience of being interviewed by the New York-hipster fanzine of the same name.
Rowdy and boisterous, “The Boy With The Arab Strap” now always makes me think of the goofy British TV series Teachers, which always ended in the pub and with this song. It’s hard to feel bad about life listening to this track, though the band Arab Strap ended up feeling otherwise. “I was upset about the album title because ‘Arab Strap’ is in big letters on the front, much bigger than ‘Belle & Sebastian,’” Arab Strap frontman Aidan Moffat said. “And the first time I saw a poster for their album, I thought it was for one of our shows.” Murdoch is apologetic: “I think he deserves to be a bit peeved that we hijacked the name of their band. But it was an honest thing—I was describing my experiences hanging around with him and the words tumbled out very easily.”
By the end of my strange, aimless art-school year, I’d see Belle & Sebastian perform at the Tower Theater in Philly that May. One of my bandmates—a guy I’d known since we were both English majors—asked me to go, and the whole thing was awkward because I had no idea if it was a date. But because the Internet is weird and wonderful, I stumbled upon a review of that very show on Pop Matters by a guy who’d driven all the way across the state from Pittsburgh with his girlfriend. It concludes: “The band gets a well-earned eight of a possible ten (8/10) for a well-executed, fun show that succeeded in doing the impossible: satisfying the English majors for the evening.” I wholeheartedly concur.
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