For many musicians, saying thanks to the fans is a matter of etiquette. But Belle and Sebastian were never ones for empty gestures. The indie sextet’s new record is marked with the words and the faces of 80 fans who travelled to London to meet the band.
“We’d been doing sort of a DIY job with the music itself, and I thought it would be nice to have the fans be on the record cover,” says singer and instrumentalist Stuart Murdoch, who photographed the visiting fans. “It was a little bit like a factory. We had to move fast the whole day. I just wanted to capture something from every one of them.”
Belle and Sebastian’s new three-EP project, released from December 2017 to February 2018, is titled How to Solve Our Human Problems. To get fans to relax and loosen up for their portraits, Murdoch asked them, how do you solve your human problems?
“We got some interesting answers,” he says. “Some people were really political – you know, ‘End capitalism and let’s think up something different.’ Other people were a little bit more fun – a girl from Japan said, ‘Me and my girlfriend just like to eat Nutella and hold hands.’ I thought that was kind of cute.”
These fans – young and old, bald and bearded, smiling and somber – stand front and centre on the covers of the three instalments of How to Solve Our Human Problems. Now, Belle and Sebastian are taking their newly-minted EPs to see the world. After jaunting across the UK, the band will touch down in Perth and head east, stopping by Melbourne’s Palais Theatre on Friday May 4. Murdoch vividly recalls the band’s previous Australian tours, and says he considers their 2011 concert in Sydney one of their best.
“Playing the Sydney Opera House was one of the most memorable, one of the most pleasurable gigs that we ever played,” says Murdoch. “It’s one of the most beautifully acoustically-designed spaces.”
Australia is, like Murdoch’s native Scotland, a polarised country – increasingly drunk on the easy opportunities for outrage provided by social media. Belle and Sebastian attempt to push back against this trend, in their own small way, with music that is stubbornly tender and humanistic.
“I try to avoid confrontation,” says Murdoch. “I don’t think it helps at all, and I think we’re never gonna work it out by getting angry. We’ve got to come at it from a position of peace. I might sound like a hippy, but I think old hippies can still change the world.”
But what about punk rock, an essentially angry breed of music? Does Murdoch really want us to pitch London Calling and Never Mind the Bollocks into the dustbin?
“Let’s not get confused,” says Murdoch. “I think a lot of great punk rock may have sounded angry, but the best punk rock was personal. It wasn’t necessarily about ‘smash the system’ and ‘smash this’ and ‘smash that.’
“Oftentimes, Joe Strummer and John Lydon would be talking about very personal things that were affecting them. Like in ‘White Riot’: ‘I want a riot of my own’. He’s saying, ‘I want it to be a personal thing. I want it to mean something to me. I want to change the world that way’. There’s actually a really constructive and social element in these songs.”
How to Solve Our Human Problems is the product of long sessions of collaborative tinkering. ‘There Is an Everlasting Song’, a classically Belle and Sebastian folk serenade, is one of Murdoch’s favourites on the record. Rather than laying down the track in a single session, Murdoch and bandmate Stevie Jackson sketched the outlines of the song and then had the other musicians come in and colour in their parts one by one.
Despite a preference for humane music, Murdoch doesn’t believe that art has to justify itself with a positive message. For Murdoch, optimism is simply practical.
“I don’t have any capacity in my life to be negative,” he says. “I can’t make music unless I’m being positive – there’s no space to be negative.”
