Belle and Sebastian and St. Etienne

Belle & Sebastian have enjoyed one of the most musically fascinating evolutions of any rock and pop band in recent memory. Beginning as a gentle, multi-instrumental folk pop band in the 1990s, the band's shows could sometimes have an almost church-like atmosphere of quiet.

Over the past decade, however, the band has built on its own sound (without ever abandoning its roots), morphing over time into a vibrant, powerful, soulful, and downright playful group of performers.

The band, increasingly influenced by singer and songwriter Stuart Murdoch's creative genius, are heading back on the road this year for the first time in a few years, in advance of their latest record. While in concert they'll certainly take out the woodwinds and fiddles to perform audience favorites like “Stars Of Track And Field” and “Like Dylan In The Movies”, the real joy kicks in on newer material. Shot through with an almost Motown-like bounce, the audience is likely to be out of their seats and turning the show into a disarmingly sweet indie rock dance party.

At the center of it all in concert is Murdoch. In front of a band that can sometimes swell to as many as a dozen members, it seems sometimes as if he's leading an orchestra more than a pop group. Affable and funny, Stuart engages the audience in charmingly playful banter that that helps make even festival shows in front of tens of thousands feel like a rollicking Scottish house party.

Named after the French football team AS Saint Etienne - rather than the city in which they’re based - you could certainly be forgiven for thinking that it was the latter that was actually the case, given what a European flavour there’s always been to Saint Etienne’s sound. Over the course of a career that has lasted close to twenty five years, at this point, the Croydon outfit have rewritten the rules of alternative dance, blending pop sounds with house affectations in order to make their own sonic lane. They’ve released eight studio albums to date and maintained a steady level of commercial success - two of their early nineties albums, 1993’s So Tough and 1994’s follow-up Tiger Bay cracked the top ten in the UK, at numbers seven and eight respectively on the albums chart - and their cult fanbase continues to pack out their gigs, both in the UK and on the continent.
They remain a flamboyant live proposition, too, with their standard rock band setup used in unorthodox ways - listen to their washed-out bass sounds, for instance - and Sarah Cracknell a genuinely enthralling frontwoman, with her energetic presence often balanced against her sultry, laid-back vocals; there’s nobody quite like Saint Etienne on the live circuit today.