Happy Monday everyone,
We have big, big news for fans of music everywhere and for New Cue subscribers in particular. We’re extremely excited to announce that on Saturday 28 May the country’s greatest singer-songwriter, Liverpool’s Michael Head, is going to be playing a special acoustic show downstairs in The Social, Little Portland Street, in swinging London, for us.
There will only be 120 tickets available for this intimate early evening performance by Mick, which comes the day after the release of his new album with his Red Elastic Band, Dear Scott. We are not breaking too many confidences in saying Dear Scott is his solo masterpiece, as good as any of the life changing records he made with the Pale Fountains or Shack. Yes, that means as good as this:
Or this:
Yes, that good. We told you, it’s a masterpiece! It includes this:
Anyway, if you’d like to come and see Michael Head perform songs from Dear Scott alongside a few old classics in a basement with a full bar and deep, true acoustics between the hours of 6:00 pm and 8:00pm on a Saturday night, as spring sinks into summer in London, for just £20, this is how you can do it…
Tickets will be available in this sequence here: www.thenewcue.co.uk:
29 March, 10:00am: New Cue paid subscribers only on a limited pre-sale basis.
30 March, 10:00am: Available to those who’ve pre-ordered Dear Scott here:
31 March, 10:00 am: On sale generally.
We are so excited about this. It’s going to blow minds, break hearts, change plans. See you there.
BUT BEFORE THAT, please enjoy today’s edition of The New Cue, which features wee Chris Catchpole on the blower to Stuart Murdoch of the mighty Belle & Sebastian. We’ll see you all on Wednesday for a Lost In Music with Craig Charles.
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Stuart Murdoch
After Stuart Murdoch formed the band at project for unemployed musicians in Glasgow in 1994, Belle And Sebastian quickly rose to become the archetypal indie pop band of the era with records such as 1996’s If You’re Feeling Sinister and its follow up, The Boy With The Arab Strap. Murdoch’s fondness for a bit mannered fey-ness led them to be branded “twee” in some quarters, although they beat Steps to the best newcomer award at the BRITs in 1999 and also put on their own four-day festival on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean, neither of which are particularly twee. In May, the band release their ninth album, A Bit Of Previous. One of the highlights of the record is a song called If They’re Shooting At You, which the band recently put out to help raise money for the victims of the war in Ukraine…
Chris attempted to speak to Stuart on Zoom a couple of weeks ago to talk about the making of the album, but after several aborted attempts they went old school and spoke over the phone instead…
Hi Stuart.
Hi, sorry about the faff earlier.
Oh, don’t worry about it. I'm calling you from a landline now, so we've gone even more analog and retro.
That seems fitting.
How are you this morning?
I'm good. Whenever the sun is shining I have to get out in the open. I’m up the Clyde Valley a bit at the moment. My signal was strong a minute ago so I’m staying right in this spot so we should be OK.
That sounds idyllic. The new Belle and Sebastian album is the first record you’ve made in Glasgow since Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant, which is going back a bit.
Yeah exactly. I think we started recording that in 1998 so it was a long time ago.
What impact did going back home have on this album?
I think we were ready to do this. It’s weird, as a group we maybe lost a little bit of confidence in ourselves as producers. You think, ‘Oh we’ve got to go with that guy, that guy's gonna have a better sound, or that guy's gonna be more contemporary, or maybe that guy's gonna get us a hit record’ or something. There's a little bit of nonsense wrapped up in that, you know, because we've learned our moves. Let's face it, our most popular records are from more than 20 years ago and we made them ourselves. So it was really nice to come back and roll our sleeves up and say, ‘Well, how can we shape ourselves?’ I was really happy to do that.
How did you set up your rehearsal space up to record during the middle of Covid?We were sticklers for the procedures. We were very strict. We decided to convert our rehearsal space into many rooms so everybody's got a little space for themselves with people peering through windows and we made holes in the walls. It became ideal. We’d been talking about converting the place into a studio for ages and I was kind of dragging my feet a bit. So we did it out of necessity and it really worked.
I’ve got an imagine in my head now of your studio being like that old Beano cartoon, The Numskulls with all these little people living in tiny rooms inside a guy’s head.
Yeah yeah! Have you seen a movie called Inside Out? That's my favorite movie of the last 10 years and it's basically just The Numskulls for the 21st century.
I went to The Beano exhibition at Somerset House recently so it must be fresh in
my mind.
Oh wow. That sounds great.
It is. If you're in London it's definitely worth checking out. There's even a cartoon version of Bob Stanley from Saint Etienne in there. That’s when you know you've made it, when you’ve appeared in The Beano. Is that an ambition Belle And Sebastian still need to tick off?
Being a cartoon? Maybe. The Beano and The Dandy have their origins in Scotland and D.C. Thomson. Do you know the characters The Broons? I think it would be more fun for us to be in that. I think it'd be more fun to show up on the streets of [fiction Scottish town] Auchenshoogle.
Going into this, were you conscious that you didn’t want to write a quote unquote lockdown record?
I put something in the sleeve notes for the LP about it not being a lockdown record. There's a little bit of hubris there. I think what I meant by that was the lockdown experience didn’t affect me as much personally. Because we have young kids, you're in a sort of lockdown anyway because you don't get to be so social and also because years ago I got chronic fatigue syndrome and ever since my life has been quite restrictive anyway, so I found things didn’t really change. And it must be stated that making a record is a sort of lockdown. That’s the moment when you go and hide yourself away from the world and then you decide what your thoughts are and you try to put them down on record.
A Bit Of Previous is a great title for an album, especially when you’re nine records in. Is it a reference to past lives? I initially thought it was about getting arrested.
It is a bit. It’s a bit tongue in cheek. In the UK and we have that phrase ‘a bit of previous’ which can be that you’ve done time or it can be when you have a history with the person, you’ve got a bit of previous. We were talking about that and then that day we happened to be working on a song about reincarnation and I’m thinking, ‘This is a perfect title for a song about reincarnation...’ It just stuck. In another awkward Bell and Sebastian twist, that song A Bit Of Previous didn't actually make it onto the LP.
Have you ever been arrested?
Actually, I did have a bit of previous as a schoolboy. I got caught for nicking some stuff. I’m not proud of it. I remember I was quite clever in school and it was a real shock to people because the cops came up to the school and they had to come round my house afterwards. When you’re young I think you can fall in with the wrong people. That sort of stuff can happen to most people.
Maybe it’s something about being a teenager being drawn to petty crime.
Yeah, petty crime and arson. That was a big one, arson.
What?
Just setting fire to things, not like buildings or anything. Just wood and paper.
Phew. Thanks for talking to us Stuart, what else have you got on today?
I’m going to follow the river back to Glasgow.
Sounds lovely, enjoy!
CC