If You're Feeling Sinister: Live At The Barbican

We Say...

Review by Peter Paphides

For music fans of a certain sensibility, Belle and Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister couldn’t have come at a better time. By 1997, it seemed as though indie music had all but been co-opted by Britpop — an understandable state of affairs for a genre that had long languished in the margins. Oasis and the imitators who came in their wake were everything that old school indie wasn’t: arrogant, boorish, inclusive and seemingly bereft of any poetic aspirations. If You’re Feeling Sinister allowed the first wave of indie kids to mount something of a rearguard action. We were still here, and if someone wanted to make a record for us to rally around, we might even dig out the old anoraks — and perhaps even leave the house.

For that reason alone, Belle & Sebastian’s second album will always hold a special place in the heart of their most ardent fans. After seven years laid low with chronic fatigue syndrome, it seemed at the time that Murdoch couldn’t get his songs out quickly enough. Only a few months separated If You’re Feeling Sinister from their limited-edition debut Tigermilk. But such was the impact of If You’re Feeling Sinister that it immediately saw Murdoch singled out as a fitting heir to his heroes Morrissey and Edwyn Collins.

In 2005 then, it was, no surprise that, when asked to perform one of their albums as part of Britain’s annual Don’t Look Back season of concerts, Belle & Sebastian chose ...Sinister. If nothing else, the show gave them a chance to show just how much they had progressed as a live band. Unlike the incarnation which played these songs at the time of their release, the band you hear whipping up a gentle storm on "The Stars of Track & Field" no longer sounds like a school orchestra conducted by the only Smiths fan in the staff room. Indeed, thanks to a new string section, the plight of the metaphorical protagonist of "Fox in the Snow" addresses the throng in new baroque colours. Pushed along by Chris Geddes’ Charlie Brown-style ivory-tinkling, "Seeing Other People" — Murdoch’s paean to small-town sexual politics — rolls along like the opening credits to an unmade Bill Forsyth film. And audible over it all is the renewed confidence of a singer whose between-song banter couldn’t be further removed from the former church janitor who once seemed to regard his audience with a mixture of suspicion and fear.

Hard to single out a specific highlight, but — all told, "Get Me Away From Here I’m Dying" probably inches it. This, after all, was the song which, more than any, underscored the young Murdoch’s audacious facility with a lyric. You don’t pen a line like “Nobody writes them like they used to/ So it may as well be me” without some notion that you have the talent to back it up. That’s still as cool now as it was then. How touching also, that far from treating it like an albatross, the enormity of what they achieved with this album audibly means as much to Belle and Sebastian as it does to their fans.