FEATURE:
No Expectations
Belle and Sebastian’s Tigermilk at Twenty-Five
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A lot of great albums from 1996…
are celebrating twenty-five years in 2021. I have already covered the Manic Street Preachers’ Everything Must Go (which was twenty-five on 20th May). Today, I want to look ahead to the anniversary of Belle and Sebastian’s Tigermilk on 6th June. Led by the incredible Stuart Murdoch and with some brilliant instrumentation (especially superb cello from Isobel Campbell), Tigermilk is an album that I heard when it came out in 1996, but I have connected with quite hard recently. I want to bring in a couple of reviews for an album that I would advise people to get. Before coming to the reviews, Stereogum ran an anniversary feature in 2016 to mark twenty years. The story behind the album and the way the band released Tigermilk is fascinating:
“Belle And Sebastian released Tigermilk, their first album, 20 years ago today, but I didn’t hear it then. Neither did you. Neither did practically anyone. The band self-released the album, limiting it 1,000 copies. This wasn’t because they figured only 1,000 people would want to hear these songs. Even as modest as they may have been, Stuart Murdoch and his co-conspirators must’ve known they had something here. Tigermilk isn’t some basement four-track recording; it’s a set of lush, orchestrated, fully realized old-school pop songs, all recorded in full and lovely clarity. Rather, Tigermilk, at least on some level, was part of Murdoch’s grand plan. It could’ve been a happy accident — a bunch of Murdoch’s songs, recorded with a group of near-strangers, for a music-business class. But Murdoch liked how bands like the Smiths always had some mysterious unheard records haunting collectors’ shelves. He was into the idea that a band could have some vast shadow history lingering somewhere. So he went about manufacturing one for himself. That’s Tigermilk. Murdoch didn’t want anyone to hear the thing — at least, not immediately. He wanted it to be out there as some impossible-to-find curio, one that might exist only in fourth-generation dubs passed around fan communities. At this point, Murdoch was in the business of world-building. Tigermilk was background material.
But if you did happen to be one of those weird lucky randoms who got to hear Tigermilk before it turned into an object of cultish covetousness, you got to hear something special. Even from the beginning, Murdoch was as gifted at writing songs as he was at developing his own mystique, which is really saying something. This band was only a few months away from hitting on something like perfection and releasing the absolutely deathless If You’re Feeling Sinister. But they were already just about fully formed, capable of putting together these lush and layered songs on what I have to imagine was a shoestring budget. While scrappy immediacy was still basic indie rock currency, Murdoch and his friends were working with synths and trumpets and strings and expertly reverbed oldies-radio guitars. “The State I’m In” remains one of the band’s most perfect songs, and they must’ve known that, since they recycled it on the Dog On Wheels EP a year later. And plenty of other Tigermilk tracks belong on that list: “Expectations,” “I Don’t Love Anyone,” “My Wandering Days Are Over.”
There was some context for what Belle And Sebastian were doing on this album. The band’s native Glasgow, after all, was the site of a miserablist underground scene that was only just starting to take shape. And it was also home to twee pioneers like the Pastels and the Vaselines, both of whom, you’d have to imagine, were key influences. The Smiths clearly loomed large for Murdoch, as did the first couple of Nick Drake albums. But nobody else was putting these influences together in the same way that Belle And Sebastian were early on, and Tigermilk must’ve sounded absolutely alien to anyone who heard it cold. Here we had a classically gifted songwriter cranking out these hooky, bittersweet odes to misfits, all wispily sung and precisely worded and made to sound like they were recorded at Abbey Road, with a full orchestra on deck. How does a group of total unknowns record an album like this? And how do they put it out to only a thousand people in the world? Frankly, I’m still at a bit of a loss to figure it out.
The band hadn’t quite locked down their aesthetic on Tigermilk. There are a few moments that aren’t quite fully realized yet, like the watery synthpop of “Electronic Renaissance” or the ever-so-slight garage-rock bite of “You’re Just A Baby.” But this is still an example of something rare and mysterious: a band figuring out its craft and its sound in the shadows, and still coming close to perfection. They’d come even closer with Sinister, the album that ended up exploding skulls on both sides of the Atlantic. But taken on its own merits, Tigermilk remains a minor miracle, a piece of precise beauty that, if you hear it at the right time in your life, sounds like it was made completely for you personally”.
With such an incredibly quick recording turnaround, one might think Tigermilk is an album that could come off as slight and lacking in nuance. Instead, the debut album from the Scottish band is incredibly deep, layered and memorable. Their tenth studio album, Days of the Bagnold Summer, was released in 2019 and it is a real corker. I love that their debut, as it started on such modest ground and has grown into this classic. In their review, Pitchfork offered the following:
“Tigermilk also leaves room for a bit of self-mythologizing. Murdoch wrote “My Wandering Days Are Over” after meeting Campbell, and the lyrics contain direct references to Campbell’s job serving drinks to tired businessmen at a piano bar, as well as “the story of Sebastian and Belle the singer.” The moment when Murdoch sings, “I said, ‘My one-man band is over/I hit the drum for the final time and I walked away,’” it’s as if Belle and Sebastian becomes no longer his solo project but a true unit.
After two days of mixing, all that was left to decide was an album title and artwork. Murdoch settled on a photo he had taken of a then-girlfriend, Joanne Kenney, naked in a bathtub pretending to nurse a stuffed tiger. Claiming inspiration from venerable jazz label Blue Note but more often compared to their melancholic UK poet-laureate predecessors the Smiths, Murdoch presented the image in monochrome, a tradition that, with a few exceptions, has carried across Belle and Sebastian’s discography. With its mix of sensuality and childlike whimsy, the shot could hardly have been more strikingly appropriate, and the title, Tigermilk, naturally followed.
Electric Honey manufactured only 1,000 vinyl copies. At Tigermilk’s release party, attendees threw the records like Frisbees. At least one was spotted at a shop the next day. Murdoch continued his job at the church; Campbell’s bartending days weren’t over. The album received just a single review on its initial release, with Scottish arts magazine The List favorably opining, “Let’s hope Belle and Sebastian reach the size of audience they have the potential to seduce.”
But the students at the music business course remembered to send the record to BBC DJs John Peel and Mark Radcliffe, who began to champion the group. The mystique of Tigermilk spread when Belle and Sebastian released their masterpiece If You’re Feeling Sinister later in 1996 via London indie Jeepster, with U.S. distribution via now-defunct imprint The Enclave. They dropped three more EPs, including the demo with the original “The State I Am In,” and a third album, The Boy With the Arab Strap, which brought Campbell and Jackson to the fore on vocals for the first time, before Tigermilk finally received its first widespread release, in 1999. By then, copies of the original vinyl were selling for as much as £850; cassette dubs circulated, but few people could’ve heard the album.
From the beginning, in January 1996, Murdoch had written in response to an offer from Jeepster of his desire to “draw in my audience, instead of bombasting them.” Because the band was averse to interviews, traditional publicity photos, or touring, it’s appealing to think that fans had to find out about Belle and Sebastian for themselves, through word of mouth, hearing them on the radio, or in my case, downloading “The State I Am In” in my first week of college after hearing a classmate name-check them as her favorite band. No music exists in a vacuum, of course—purposefully mysterious 21st-century acts from Burial to Jungle can attest how a lack of information can sometimes be a media angle in its own right—but Belle and Sebastian left space for the already-formidable songs on Tigermilk to grow into listeners’ lives.
When it was made, the album was a pointedly melodic, anti-machismo rejoinder to Britpop’s increasingly lunkheaded swagger and the post-grunge bluster of American alt-rock radio. “There’s no sex in your violence,” Gavin Rossdale grunted on Bush’s “Everything Zen”; “There must be a reason for all the looks we gave/And all the things we never said before,” Murdoch chirps atop a hand-clappy T. Rex stomp on “You’re Just a Baby.” Tigermilk was also a worthy successor to the “oppose all rock’n’roll” ethos of early UK punks Subway Sect, the droll yearning of Glasgow indie pioneers Orange Juice, and the confrontational tenderness of Kurt Cobain’s beloved K Records. By the time of Tigermilk’s 1999 re-release, critics either sneered or swooned accordingly. “Do you want to know how much I hate them? Even their name raises my blood pressure,” a mid-tier Scottish pop singer told The Guardian, amid juvenile complaints about “wussiness.” In those lad-mag, anti-“P.C.” years, it was still acceptable for an otherwise-approving Rolling Stone review to use the disparaging slang term “swish” (Pitchfork’s gonzo original assessment was also positive).
These days, Tigermilk’s radicalism may be harder to perceive, but it’s no less essential. In recent decades, as Belle and Sebastian have became reluctant elder statesmen of a twee movement in music and film, the early caricatures of them have also spread—a 2015 review on this website cast them as “the most sensitive band in indie rock, patron saints for daydreaming boys and girls”—but to buy into that overlooks the depth in these songs. As keyboardist Chris Geddes felt forced to complain to the NME as far back as 1997, “We’re human beings, not sensitivity machines.” And while the notion of male un-macho-ness has been hijacked by a basket of deplorables I’d rather not talk about here, you need look no further than the White House to know what type of man is still truly in power in 2020. Tigermilk might not preach revolution; with its low-key insistence on the notion of art as a source of personal epiphany, it feels revolutionary nevertheless”.
Go and listen to Tigermilk if you have not heard it before. I am sure we will hear songs shared from it ahead of its twenty-fifth anniversary. In a year where there were a lot of big and hyped albums put into the world, Belle and Sebastian’s introduction was completely lacking in festival and commercialism. I think that the album is such a tremendous and moving listen. The fact we are talking about it all these years later shows that it doesn’t matter how many copies you press and how much promotion you do – the quality of the material will shine through and survive. When they assessed Tigermilk, AllMusic observed the following:
“Recorded quickly and cheaply as the first album from Electric Honey, the in-house record label from Glasgow's Stow College's music business program, Belle and Sebastian's 1996 debut, Tigermilk, is a rare record in many respects. Initially, it was simply scarce, limited to a run of 1,000 and not re-released until 1999, by which time Belle and Sebastian were established as one of the great indie pop sensations of the late '90s. It is also rare in the sense that not many indie records are made with assistance from a university, but Tigermilk is rarest in how it captures a band that seems simultaneously fledgling and fully formed. Certainly, Tigermilk bears its share of rough edges -- the subjects linger in adolescence, the compositions aren't as sophisticated as what would arrive just a short time later, "Electronic Renaissance" is the kind of lo-fi synth pastiche bands need to get out of their system in their first year -- but they're splinters on a distinctive aesthetic forged by singer/songwriter Stuart Murdoch. His wry delivery and plummy voice, along with his predilection for delicate folk, disguises his toughness. Tigermilk may be gentle on the surface, but Murdoch's strength is evident in his sardonic storytelling and sturdy craftsmanship, the very things that wound up being the foundation of Belle and Sebastian's career. They're in full flower on Tigermilk, surfacing on tunes throughout the album, but crystallizing on the skipping "She's Losing It," rushed "Expectations," '60s throwback "I Could Be Dreaming," and, especially, "The State I Am In," a masterful melodrama that points toward the richness of If You're Feeling Sinister, which arrived just a few months later. Those are the moments when Belle and Sebastian feel preternaturally gifted, seeming to know precisely who they were right out of the gate”.
I shall leave it there. I wanted to mark twenty-five years of Tigermilk before 6th June. The incredible Belle and Sebastian are still going strong. Whilst their sound has grown and their fanbase has swelled, I think that their debut album ranks alongside their best work. In a huge year for music, one could have been forgiven for overlooking Tigermilk. It has earned such a reputation and legacy that many might not have expected twenty-five years ago. It is a phenomenal album that is…
HARD to ignore.