Halfway through their Astoria show on Thursday, the unthinkable happens. Belle & Sebastian, firmly in this writer's top ten all time favourite bands, feel boring. For either circumstantial reasons (we've chosen to sit upstairs and muffled sound renders between song banter incomprehensible) or deliberate ones (early classics like "Expectations" and "Seeing Other People" are played way too fast, as if the group are trying to get them out of the way), there's hardly any emotional rapport. It all seems flat and passionless.
Twenty four hours later, the very notion of Belle & Sebastian being boring is unthinkable. Again, it falls to circumstance and design. We're downstairs this time and the Friday night crowd clearly wants to party. Whereas last night's audience seemed strangely hushed and static, tonight there's whoops of delight at song intros and what passes for a moshpit round these parts (well, people actually dancing). B&S, unsurprisingly, react in kind. Thursday night kicked off a little after that midway low, but tonight they're superb throughout.
The slightly tweaked set helps. A familiarly paced "The State I'm In" results in exactly what would have saved Thursday: a singalong. Although newer songs like "Step Into My Office, Baby" and "I'm A Cuckoo" have a chirpy, infectious energy that suits their current incarnation (somewhere between sixties orchestral pop and seventies bubblegum), they lack the fragile poetry that illuminates "TSIM". It's almost Newtonian: vibrant confidence elicits a steady toe tap, whereas gorgeous vulnerability evokes a stronger, more joyous reaction.
Another strange notion in a B&S live review: two subsequent set lists being mostly identical. This reviewer once saw B&S two days in a row and not a single song was played twice. Considering they're playing three nights in London, you'd have thought they'd have gone for something similar. But no. This is the new, professional Belle & Sebastian, plugging the new album with a smattering of favourites as back up. This is them playing the game properly for once.
And, of course, it is better (the band are slick, you don't have to wait five minutes between songs, when they hit their emotional stride on Friday, it's breathtaking in a way they'd never have managed before), and it isn't (there's a preciousness that has gone somehow, an inclusivity that's dissipated). They're certainly more entertaining now (each night has a gimmick: a bloke making balloon animals on Thursday and indie karaoke on Friday), but mere entertainment wasn't entirely what you went to B&S for in the first place.
The only possible parallel can be with football. You stand in the pouring rain watching your favourite team rightly get the arse thrashed off them, and you still show up the next week hoping for something better. B&S have reached that hallowed place in some people's hearts now. The simple difference being, they're more likely to follow up a deadening nil-nil draw with a spectacular 6-0 win. Which leaves the diehard fans asking just one other question.
Why the hell did they take "Travellin' Light" off the new album?
