The Boy With The Arab Strap — Belle and Sebastian (1998)

The year a shy band learned to share the microphone, and a quiet record turned out to be full of joy.

By Rafi Mercer

Third albums are where bands find out what they are.

The first is usually made in a hurry, from everything that has been waiting years to be said. The second is made under the weight of the first. By the third, the urgency has gone and something else has to take its place. Some bands run out of things to say. A few discover they were never one voice to begin with.

Belle and Sebastian made their first two records in a matter of days. Tigermilk began as a Glasgow college project, pressed in a run of a thousand copies that sold out and turned a project into a band. If You're Feeling Sinister followed the same year. Both were essentially Stuart Murdoch's songs, sung by Murdoch, with a band gathered around him.

The Boy With The Arab Strap took months. It was recorded at CaVa Studios in Glasgow in 1998, produced by Tony Doogan and released that September on Jeepster. Twelve songs. Forty-five minutes. And this time, the voices change.

Isobel Campbell, until then mostly heard on cello, steps forward to sing "Is It Wicked Not to Care?", soft and unhurried. Stevie Jackson takes "Seymour Stein", named after the American record man, and "Chickfactor". Stuart David, the bassist, half-speaks "A Space Boy Dream" over strings, like someone describing a dream he isn't sure he had. Campbell and Murdoch trade lines on "Sleep the Clock Around", which then, without any warning at all, brings in a set of bagpipes.

Bagpipes. On an indie record from 1998.

And they work.

That's what's special here. A band that had been one man's private world became a group, and you can hear the room open up. The arrangements fill out with Mick Cooke's trumpet, Sarah Martin's violin and Chris Geddes's keyboards, but the record never feels crowded. At the time, critics noticed that some of its loveliest moments come from half the band choosing not to play. Space is part of the arrangement.

What's magical is the balance. Murdoch writes small, exact scenes about people slightly out of step with their own lives: the summer wasted, the career that went sideways, the friend who drifted. "It Could Have Been a Brilliant Career" opens the album in under two and a half minutes and seems to contain an entire life that never quite happened. Yet the music underneath is bright, brisk, almost cheerful. Sad words, glad tunes. The album holds both in the same hand and never asks you to choose.

And then there's the title track, which is the wow.

Five minutes, a steady pulse, handclaps, a melody that feels as if it has always existed. It became the song at Belle and Sebastian concerts when fans are invited up onto the stage to dance with the band. Think about that for a moment. The shyest group in Britain, a band that kept their faces off their own sleeves, ended up with a signature song that is a stage invasion.

The record closes with "The Rollercoaster Ride", more than six minutes long, Murdoch and Campbell together, letting you go slowly rather than all at once.

This is an album that rewards attention without demanding it. Played in the background it sounds pleasant, wistful and a little twee. Played properly, front to back, it fills with detail: a trumpet line arriving late, a second voice tucked just behind the first, a cello doing something you missed the last six times. It's also a record that has always travelled the old way, from person to person. I first knew it through a colleague at Virgin who loved it so completely that, for a while, a whole buyers' office in Uxbridge loved it too. That's how this album moves. Not by forecast. By people.

It reached number twelve in Britain and number seven in Norway. Pitchfork dismissed it on release and, twenty years later, called it one of the band's most beautiful records. A few months after it came out, Belle and Sebastian won Best Newcomer at the Brits, on their third album. In High Fidelity, a record-shop clerk sneers at "Seymour Stein" while it plays in the shop. The joke has aged worse than the song. The cover shows Chris Geddes, photographed by Murdoch on an afternoon by the River Ayr. The title was borrowed from Arab Strap, a fellow Glasgow band who were not altogether pleased to find their name on someone else's album.

All of that is very Belle and Sebastian.

But the real story is simpler. A songwriter stepped back, and a band stepped forward. Somewhere in those months at CaVa, the voice of Belle and Sebastian became plural.

Third albums are where bands find out what they are. This one found out it was a room full of people, and that the door had been open all along.

Who sings on The Boy With The Arab Strap?

Stuart Murdoch sings most of the album, but this was the first Belle and Sebastian record to share lead vocals widely. Isobel Campbell sings "Is It Wicked Not to Care?" and duets on "Sleep the Clock Around" and "The Rollercoaster Ride". Stevie Jackson leads "Seymour Stein" and "Chickfactor", and Stuart David speaks "A Space Boy Dream".

Why is the album called The Boy With The Arab Strap?

The title borrows the name of Arab Strap, another Glasgow band Belle and Sebastian had toured with. Arab Strap were reportedly less than pleased, and some listeners at the time assumed the album was a collaboration between the two.

Is The Boy With The Arab Strap a good place to start with Belle and Sebastian?

Yes. It's warmer and more expansive than the first two albums and shows the band at its most collaborative. Listen to it front to back: its sequencing, from the brief opener to the long closing "The Rollercoaster Ride", is part of the pleasure.

Rafi Mercer writes about the records that reward attention. For more from Tracks & Tales, subscribe or read more album reviews.