More about: Belle And Sebastian

It seems odd to think that it’s been seven years since we last had a full-length LP from Scottish pop purveyors Belle and Sebastian, but perhaps that’s because the Glasgow seven-piece never really went away. 

Since 2015’s Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance, they’ve been keeping themselves occupied with myriad different projects, ranging from a trilogy of EPs, their own four-day music festival on a Mediterranean cruise liner and a second foray into film soundtracks, Days of the Bagnold Summer, the directorial debut of The Inbetweeners’ Simon Bird.

Their tenth LP, A Bit of Previous marks the first full length-album to be recorded in their native city since 2000’s Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant, and it’s a jubilant affair indeed. We spoke to keyboard player Chris Geddes about the new record.

Gigwise: This is the first album that you guys have recorded in Glasgow for 20 years. What did it mean for you guys to record at home again, after all that time?

Chris Geddes: In terms of working on an album, it was a change of pace, because the album's subsequent to Fold Your Hands… we had tended to kind of go away and spend a really intensive block of time in a studio, six or eight weeks, and everybody's there all the time. You do long days and at the end of it, the album is done, or at least very close to done and you maybe just tweak a couple of things. But we had also worked quite a lot in Glasgow over the intervening years…

The Bagnold Summer soundtrack was done here and The How to Solve Our Human Problems EPs were done here. But yeah, in terms of adapting to the circumstances, for ourselves, it was quite positive in a lot of ways. Quite a few of us in the band had been advocating for quite a long time that the room that we used as our practice room was somewhere that it was feasible to make records in, so it's good that we did the work and got it to something that we can use. It's nice to feel that we've got something that hopefully can kind of continue to be a creative hub for the band for a little while.

GW: Are you guys all still based in Glasgow then?

CG: Yeah, nobody's further out than then a few miles. I mean, I think out of everyone Dave is the person who lives furthest out. He's just in a small town that's only like 10 or 15 minutes on the train from Central Station. I think all of us can still probably get to the studio from home within half an hour or something.

GW: What was it that drew you to America after Fold Your Hands Child?

CG: The primary reason for going to do it was always to work with whoever was producing it. So initially, Tony Hoffer, who did the albums in L.A., and then Ben Allen did [Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance] in Atlanta. It was always about the person first and the place second. Obviously, it was a pretty massive bonus that it was in L.A., where we did the records with Tony Hoffer, and it was a great place to spend time. But the flip side of that is I think we've always kind of liked the idea of making music being something that's more integrated into your day to day life, rather than it being something that you only do as this big one-off event once every few years.

I mean, even though we’ve obviously been around for a while and are now at the point where we’re probably older than a lot of the people who did these things back at the time, I still really romanticise music scenes, like Motown in Detroit, Stax in Memphis and Studio One in Jamaica. It was just people in a community who were into making music and they built a studio and something great came out of it. And I've always kind of thought 'Well, why can't you do that here?'

GW: Is it fair to say that this record feels a little more intimate?

CG: I guess part of that comes from when we've worked with external producers, they maybe push the envelope a little bit more sound-wise, whereas if we're self producing the production tends to be a little bit more kind of naturalistic, if it's a live band thing. I think with this one, it wasn't entirely the band. We had a producer and engineer, Brian McNeill, who collaborated with us on the EP stuff, as well. We like to think the production choices are always song-led, and if it's an intimate song then it'll be an intimate production and if the song is going for something a bit more energetic, then the production will follow that again.

GW: I get the sense that being able to do this in your own space and your own terms made for a very different experience to a more conventional recording schedule. Was it a much more kind of relaxed affair?

CG: Yeah, I mean, it felt more open-ended. There were time constraints in terms of deadlines. We still had to hit to be on production schedule for release dates. In the way we were working, we did continue working on songs past the point where we had an album’s worth of songs, but it felt like we had momentum, and we had this space and we weren't going to be going anywhere for a while. And then suddenly, you realise that you do need to hurry to get through to get things finished. So it was relaxed up until the point when it became a panic.

GW: How has the collaborative process between all of you evolved over the years? 

CG: It varies a lot. It's different to the very early days where things were quite strictly Stuart (Murdoch)'s vision. He wrote all the songs and tended to have a very specific idea of how he wanted things to sound. On Tigermilk, even though it was all his songs, things were quite open in terms of people throwing things in and we worked very quickly and didn't really edit stuff much. But I suppose If You’re Feeling Sinister is the one where it's most clearly Stuart's vision.

Ever since that, things have varied and been a bit more open. On this record, there were songs that were written primarily by one person. There were songs that were collaborations between people and there were songs where the person who wrote it had quite a specific idea of the kind of production style and arrangement they wanted and ones where it was very open, so it varies these days.

GW: It’s always been kind of fascinating to me to understand how those pieces all come together.

CG: The thing that I'd say we don't do that much, or at least not as a group, is the kind of traditional Brill Building-style songwriting collaboration where everyone's playing the piano and someone plays a chord, someone comes up with a line and someone else says 'Oh, the next line should be that'. The writing tends to be that either the primary writer brings in a song nearly finished, or someone has a musical idea and then somebody else goes away and writes a set of lyrics for it. I don't know if it's just because there's too many people in the group for that kind of collaboration to work.

GW: There wouldn't be a Get Back-style moment where we’d see all of you jamming, and something just kind of evolves then?

BAS: No, not often. I mean, I suppose if anything, I would say — and this is not to compare myself to that in any way — the things that are not most like Get Back, but the ones that I start off tend to be the ones that are most jammy in the beginning, because I don't really like to refine stuff, or have something in a structure and come in and say to people 'Here's the song'. I do like to just have a little riff we can jam on nice and then see if it sounds good among the band, and then see if any of the songwriters within the band pick up on it and say 'Oh, maybe that's something I could do something with'.

GW: Are there any particular moments that evolved from you noodling away at an idea that stand out?

CG: On this record, the one that I contributed that way was 'Come On Home'. I was really pleased with how that turned out even though, ironically for me, that was one where I did have a slightly more fully realised idea of it, which turned out being the verse that Sarah (Martin) sings. When I first came up with it, I thought that was going to be what the song was based off. We were just playing the musical groove in the room and Stuart came in and wrote this whole other song to it before he even knew that in my head, there was that bit. So I mean, for me, I'm always happy if something I started musically turns into something… I know it's a particular way of working and it tends to result in a particular type of song, but if we can get, like, one song per record, then I'm delighted.

GW: Songs evolve over time, particularly on stage. Are there any that you're particularly surprised have endured in the way that they have? 

CG: I guess the obvious one would be 'The Boy With The Arab Strap'. I mean, I don't think when we recorded it, we thought it was the song that we were going to play at every gig. It definitely resonates with people. I don't get tired of playing it, because it's fun to play. You can tell it brings a lot of joy to the audience when we play it, so it's a happy thing to have. But definitely, yeah, when you play them live, songs take on a life of their own. It's funny, because I think sometimes in your head, you think you're just doing it roughly the way you did it on the record, but then when we did the live album that came out in 2020, you listen back to some of the mixes and realise that you're playing it quite differently to how it originally was.

GW: I'm sure you've probably been asked about it before, but what does something like the 500 Days Of Summer tattoo reference mean to you as a band — seeing your work referenced in popular culture?

CG: It's funny the 500 Days of Summer one, because I actually haven't seen the film. But it came up in conversation yesterday because Titana (Muthui), who is on one of the versions of the cover of the album, popped by the studio to pick up her copy of it and we got chatting. She grew up in South Africa and was saying the film came out when she was a teenager and that was how she heard of the band. Her and a load of her friends at school got really into the band because of that…I mean, I was aware that it was a bit of a thing, but I had no idea that high school kids in South Africa were getting into us because we've been referenced in it. So yeah, it's a nice thing that that can happen.

I guess the use of the band's music in movies has definitely been important. I mean, I think the songs that got used in Juno as well were always our most popular songs in North America as well. Obviously it's nice if someone who is creating their own piece of work and their own piece of art feels that by referencing your work, it will give them a kind of resonance that they're looking for with an audience.

GW: You guys dipped your toe in scoring quite early in your career. Storytelling was a fascinating record, but very little of it ended up in the film. What went down there?

CG: It was certainly interesting meeting Todd Solondz and working with him. He was a very, very creative guy, very smart and hip. But I think we maybe got carried away with the project. I think he probably did just want to use a couple of older songs just as source music in the film, and maybe if we'd written a song for the credits or something that would have been cool. I don't know if we just decided 'No, we're scoring your movie', without really being commissioned to do it. It's an avenue that I think people would have liked us to have gone down, but generally speaking, when a filmmaker wants to use Belle and Sebastian music in their film, it's the kind of song-based music that they're after. They're not really looking for us to write instrumental cues, or they don't think of that as what we would do if we were if we're soundtracking someone's film.

It’s difficult because, generally, a film soundtrack is a collaboration between a director and a composer, rather than between the director and a six or seven-piece band. To really be a film composer, you have to be prepared to surrender your ego, write to a brief and stuff like that. I think there are individual people in the band that can do that, but to do that as a band is more difficult.

GW: A Bit Of Previous really neatly sums up the many different moods of the band. Is there a particular kind of Belle and Sebastian mood that you enjoy playing?

CG: I would say in terms of enjoying playing, I tend to like the more soul-influenced ones, just because that's my taste. On the flip side, even though in the early days of the band, I kind of kicked against it a little bit, these days I really like playing the pretty stuff as well; the more delicate stuff.

When there was a point where it felt like that was all we did and I wanted to kick against it a little bit, but now that we do more upbeat stuff and other things as well, to play the soft things and the intimate things is really nice. Really, really rewarding. Of songs on the record, one of the ones that, for me, was the most fun to make was 'Do It For Your Country', because it is that soft, pretty thing that we used to do a lot, but we don't really do so much anymore. And to have a little moment like that was nice.

It's funny, because I do enjoy all the styles, really. It's maybe both a strength and a weakness of the band that we don't just kind of pick one thing and stick to it. But that in itself is what we've decided to stick to.

A Bit Of Previous is out now.

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More about: Belle And Sebastian