Riffs, Rants and Rumors: Listening In On Belle and Sebastian's Late Night Tales

posted in: Features • Rock

What do you listen to when the hour is late, the lights are low and careening power chords and wailing vocals just don’t suit the mood? Everybody’s got their own answer to that question, but those who dwell in the rarefied dominion of record geekdom are especially attuned to what makes a good after-hours mix, priding themselves on concocting the perfect combination of tracks to watch the wee hours drift by. That’s the idea behind the British Late Night Tales series, which brings in a different celebrity guest to curate each volume. In the past, LNT has tapped the talents of The Flaming Lips, Snow Patrol, Midlake, Arctic Monkeys, Fatboy Slim and many more, from varied stylistic sectors. Six years ago, indie-pop giants Belle and Sebastian were added to that list, and now they’ve got the rare honor of returning for a second round, delivering the latest Late Night Tales mix. To find out how the whole thing came together, let’s lend an ear to Belle and Sebastian keyboard man Chris Geddes, who was actually the main overseer of the collection.

Explaining his lead role in the process, Geddes says, “The last one I kind of did myself, but tried to reflect things that everybody in the band liked, and with this one, when they asked us to do it¦we did kind of plan that it was gonna be a bit different. I sort of hoped to take a bit of a back seat and leave it for other people in the band to come up with their choice of tracks, but as it turned out other people weren’t putting enough tunes forward to make up the compilation. So I ended up again choosing the majority of them, but this time maybe with more input from other people in the band than there had been in the previous one.”

So, does the selection represent a cross-section of tunes that have been influential on the seven-piece Scottish ensemble as a whole? “I would say the majority of them have, in different ways,” figures Geddes. “The ones that have been the most apparent influences on the band would be the more kind of ˜60s pop stuff like The Lovin’ Spoonful [“Darlin’ Be Home Soon”] and Sarah’s [Martin, multi-instrumentalist] choice of the Wonder Who song [“Watch the Flowers Grow”]. And then there’s the more recent stuff, the likes of the Remember Remember tune [“Scottish Widows”]”Mick [Cooke, trumpeter] and I did a couple of gigs as members of the band a few years ago when their first album was out. I was certainly really inspired by playing with them. And I would say the kind of folkie stuff, that’s something that’s always been part of our musical background as well, things like the Bonnie Dobson tune [“Bird of Space”], where it’s a combination of folk-rock soul with string arrangements, that’s kind of a blueprint for what we do on a lot of records.”

Some of the tracks on the mix are undeniably on the esoteric end of things, and Geddes enthusiastically narrates the discovery process. The ’60s/’70s French composer Roland Vincent‘s head-nodding, wah-wah-laden instrumental “L.S.D. Partie,” for instance””I heard that through a friend of mine,” recalls Geddes, “there’s a radio show on 6 Music, which is the BBC’s kind of alternative/indie music station. There’s a show called The Freak Zone that’s on every Sunday. It’s really good, they play new stuff like Espers,  kind of acid-folk stuff like that, and then they play old prog rock and krautrock and stuff. And a friend of mine called Justin, who used to kick around with Stereolab¦he was DJing with [Stereolab leader] Tim Gane¦he had a slot on The Freak Zone¦he was on one week and he did a little French soundtrack interlude, and that was one of the records that he played. I loved the sound of it, and it took me ages to get a copy of that. And then after all that it turned out David Holmes had used it on a soundtrack [Ocean’s Twelve],” laughs Geddes.

And how about the excerpt from Stan Tracey‘s moody 1965 jazz piece “Starless and Bible Black,” which predates King Crimson‘s song and album of the same name by nearly a decade? “It’s a really amazing album,” Geddes enthuses. “I don’t want to damn it with faint praise, but it’s kind of regarded as one of the best-ever British jazz albums. It’s a really beautiful piece of music, that. The album that it’s on was like a suite of songs that was inspired by the Dylan Thomas radio play Under Milk Wood. It’s set in a Welsh village…it’s all mood pieces inspired by this play. ”

Pressed for a favorite from the mix, Geddes settles on “A Man of Experience and Wisdom” by Afrobeat hero Mulatu Astatke. “That one means a lot,” he confesses. We did another ATP [All Tomorrow’s Parties] festival last winter, and because he’d been playing live again, we thought it would be good to ask him, and he came and played it. The atmosphere when he played there was amazing, and just speaking to him briefly afterwards felt like a real honor. When I first heard his music quite a few years ago¦you never in your wildest dreams imagined that the guy who made these records could get enough recognition that he was able to come and do reasonable-size gigs in Europe¦I think it’s just a magical-sounding record.”

Belle and Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch DJed around Scotland quite a bit before he started the band in 1996, and he’s got a few years on Geddes, so it’s seems reasonable to assume that Murdoch may have turned the keyboardist on to some music in the group’s early years. “Stuart turned me on to Felt in the early days of the band,” says Geddes, bringing up a key influence on the B&S sound, “because he knew I was a fan of [erstwhile Felt keyboardist] Martin Duffy and what he did in Primal Scream, but I didn’t know his previous work, I’d been a bit young to be into Felt at the time, so that’s something that Stuart turned me onto.” And while Murdoch’s musical knowhow seems none the worse for the wear these days, Geddes reveals that the singer’s treasure-filled vinyl collection met a sad end long ago. “He went to California for a while,” recounts the keyboardist,with perhaps a hint of wistfulness, “and I think he sold off most of his records to fund the trip.”