Stewart Murdoch insists he never read the full graphic novel that became Days of the Bagnold Summer. He didn’t need to. “I just read the synopsis,” he shrugs, “and I had the songs by Monday.” That’s Belle and Sebastian for you: a band that can turn a footnote into a soundtrack.
The project landed in Murdoch’s lap by way of Simon Bird (from The Inbetweeners), who figured Belle and Sebastian would be “like the kind of band” the producers might want. Someone then asked the obvious: why not just get Belle and Sebastian? Murdoch laughs, “It was a really good time for us. He just caught it at the right moment.”
The film, a wry British coming-of-age about a heavy-metal kid stuck with his mother for the summer, sounds about as far from If You’re Feeling Sinister as you can get. “We were prepared to do nü-metal bands for the movie,” Murdoch jokes. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed. Instead, Bird got wistful harmonicas, re-recorded Belle and Sebastian classics, and a new single, “Sister Buddha,” that Murdoch swears was just “two instrumental pieces jammed together” before words showed up. Bird didn’t care: “He was just like, ‘I don’t know where I’m gonna put it, but I just want that for the film.’”
Murdoch is comfortable in the genre. “If you can spend your whole life coming of age,” he says, “then you can get away with it all. You don’t have to be responsible. You can act like an idiot. It’s fun to write about, though of course it’s not so much fun when you’re actually going through it.”
The soundtrack doubles as a bit of a Belle and Sebastian time capsule. Bird requested updated versions of “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying” and “I Know Where the Summer Goes.” It wasn’t nostalgia, it was economics. “It was cheaper for us to re-record them than for him to license the old ones,” Murdoch admits, though he enjoyed the chance. Still, don’t expect a wholesale rewrite of the catalog. “They really don’t need it,” he says. “But it did give us an excuse to rerecord a couple. Good fun.”
Fun is the keyword. The band had been sketching out instrumentals for a potential “library music” project, inspired by those BBC records of the ’60s and ’70s. One of those pieces, “Jill Pole,” showcases Stevie Jackson’s melancholy chromatic harmonica. “The harmonica can be very melancholy and wistful,” Murdoch says. “It’s almost Pavlovian—like the first chord of a Mike Leigh film, you just know you’re in for an emotional wallop.”
Not that it’s all wistfulness. Around the same time, Belle and Sebastian were also plotting the “Boaty Weekender,” their floating festival with 25 acts, Buddhist nuns, and, presumably, a lot of Dramamine. “I like the notion that we’re all stuck together,” Murdoch says. “Sometimes you don’t even get time to see the other side at a normal festival. This way, you have to.”
Revisiting old albums live has become part of the band’s job description too. At Pitchfork they played If You’re Feeling Sinister in full, and on the boat they promised another front-to-back performance. “It was joyful,” Murdoch admits, though he’s not sold on making it a habit. “I wouldn’t want to do it very often, because that would take the fun out of it. But it’s much funner to look back on that time than it was to actually be in it.”
And the future? Murdoch hints at another record—sort of. “We might put aside the instrumental project and actually work on a proper LP next year,” he teases, in that way bands always do when cornered about “the next one.”
In the meantime, Belle and Sebastian remain in their natural habitat: scoring awkward adolescence, whether it’s fictional teenagers or their own fans refusing to grow up. “Coming of age is a way of life,” Murdoch grins. Which explains a lot about why Belle and Sebastian have never really aged out.
Listen to the interview above and check out the video below.
