Search And Destroy: Belle And Sebastian

I met someone who was working for the band on their cruise who referred to the film as 'God Help Us All'

Haha, I had to give up on the film. Just so badly conceived and executed, and its twee bohemian fantasy Glasgow with no working class or POC in it (apart from the brief appearance of some drug dealing "hooligans") is ghastly. A pal who went to a screening of a rough cut said there was a scene where the lead makes a comment about neds and cockroaches being the only things to survive the apocalypse. Thankfully somebody had a word and it was cut...

yeah the reaction to the pitchfork article was bad, though to be fair he did reflect on it a bit at least and did seem to learn something. his melty "let's be reasonable" stuff has me rolling my eyes, and is why I muted him a while back.

I would put musicians on social media into four camps:

* Never post or only post about new releases, etc. (this is 50%+ and is probably the best option)
* Post reasonable moderate centrist both-sides stuff which is frustratingly nieve, ill-informed and completely maladaptive to an environment like Twitter (Stew and quite a lot of others fit in here, maybe 20%)
* Understand the discourse, are politically sound and know that Twitter is for shitposting and dunking (You can count these people on your fingers, they are so few)
* Have disappeared down a rabbit hole of TERFism, antivaxxers, covidiots, MAGAs, freeze peach, etc. most likely sparked by someone daring to disagree with them once (this is unfortunately something like 20% too)

So all I would say is, better in group 2 than group 4.

Perhaps - to his credit, he hasn't gone down the TERF route like certain Glasgow indie popsters

Naming names is a must here.

Albini is my favorite twitter music person.

Alan from Low is very good as well.

Just so badly conceived and executed, and its twee bohemian fantasy Glasgow with no working class or POC in it

... or Glaswegians.

the band on their cruise

Francis MacDonald from TFC has shared plenty of GC stuff, although he's been quieter on that front of late. He's the most prominent, but others have dabbled, defended their TERFy pals, or made winding up woke lefties part of their tired contrarian schtick. I've also seen people radicalised by some nasty arts/media TERFS. Pretty clear this nonsense is one of the reasons Katrina from the Pastels set up a trans solidarity campaign.

There's a lot of privileged 90s liberalism going round the old Glasgow indie scene. As a result this stuff gets a free pass, as if it's just an "opinion", or people don't say anything cos they don't want to upset the applecart. It's depressing to see the likes of Norman Blake and Mogwai working with or remixing the atrocious Fat Cops - surely they can't be unaware of McColm and Deerin's numerous transphobic columns and tweets, or the fact their keyboard player is married to JKR.

So with all that in mind, good on Murdoch for endorsing Graham Norton's "accountability" comments and saying nice things about Eddie Izzard.

*helped set up* that should say.

Bunch of smug self-satisfied cliquey cunts anyway, always have been

the atrocious Fat Cops

i had never heard of them. had a listen. atrocious seems too kind.

Just checked them out, full agreement. Articles say it's Al Murray the comedian singing, but it's surely another Al Murray.

As if one Al Murray isn't bad enough.

To me Al Murray is Al Molinaro who played Murray the Cop on The Odd Couple and owned Al's Diner on Happy Days.

Ha, atrocious is indeed too kind.

Al Murray the Pub Landlord (for non-UK readers, a shit one joke comedian) is indeed in the band. Don't think he's the singer though, although he may well sing some of their numbers from behind the drum kit. The frontman is Chris Deerin, the New Statesman's clueless Scotland editor. Two sneering centre-right hacks, a crap comedian, a Glasgow indie veteran and JK Rowling's husband: the house band of the worst bits of British Twitter. Their only fans appear to be JK Rowling and (UK media failson) Alex Massie. They're on Last Night From Glasgow, who mostly sell fancy vinyl reissues of 90s Glasgow indie to Bearsden dads. It's widely speculated that at least one of the band is behind misogynist Twitter account Brian Spanner, who has now reinvented himself as a gender critical champion of women having deleted all his posts calling a female politicians "torn faced c*nt"

Worst band line up ever?

I used to have fun innocently sharing with Al Murray far-right racists using his catchphrases ("beautiful British name" etc.) on Twitter, asking if he supported them, until eventually he blocked me. his joke is "pretending to be a racist to make fun of racists, but if you're a racist you can also enjoy it because I'm never going to call you out on it" which is kind of the worst of all worlds.

Privately educated Oxbridge wanker pretending to be a working class racist because working class people are racist aren't they?

How is it that so many threads on ILM in 2022 eventually end up complaining about "TERFs"? I don’t see this on other extent music fora, often discussing the same bands.

Not a fair description of Last Night in Glasgow label imo. They've released a few new albums from veteran Scottish acts and four or five reissues but otherwise it's mostly new stuff.

xp to be fair we've also covered racists, Oxbridge wankers and sneering centre-right hacks, though guess it has to be admitted that we've gone a bit off topic. call it the spirit of Sinister maybe.

it's because terfism is britain's main cultural export these days it's far more relevant than old twindie acts who may or may not be hitching their wagons to it

why the scare quotes is it because the acronym doesn't accurately describe what the movement has become or is it for a worse reason

JKR's husband is some doctor, isn't he?

he's definitely some wanker

lol

I mean, I do not believe JKR's husband is in some scottish band unless I've missed something

Seeing is believing.

https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/4606389/jk-rowling-fat-cops-admiral-bar-glasgow/

fukcing weird

most likeable person in that article is the PA who stole her money

It's just a dad band that no-one would pay any attention to if it didn't have a couple of media people and aging rocker Bobby Bluebell in it.

use of the word "hubby" there is yet more evidence for the convergence of tweeness with fascism

"why the scare quotes is it because the acronym doesn't accurately describe what the movement has become or is it for a worse reason"

Not scare quotes but quotes to emphasize the foreignness of that acronym to me. I live in a country where B&S, for instance, is a longtime favourite of the local hipster scene, but trans issues aren't even really on the radar here. Even directly in the English-speaking world, I question how readily that acronym would be used by the majority of B&S fans – after all, a lot of fans are aging and have not necessarily taken an interest in social issues whose prominence is more recent than the band’s twee heyday.

(And yes, from my distance, the acronym seems inaccurate. I often see it applied to people who wouldn't necessarily identify as RF or even F, or whose views might be part of a particular larger dogma that expressly opposes RF or even F.)

It's mostly people in the B+S age range who seemed most exercised about this particular issue.

TERF acronym is only accurate for a minority faction within the gender fascist coalition the rest are mostly TELFs or TEs but TERF is what stuck to describe this movement and it seems to upset the right people

the presumed apathy about social issues feels similar to the pitchfork thing about normative whiteness in indie the reaction to which demonstrated its point and revealed the deep investment in white supremacy from these putatively apolitical aging indie kids

I don't know where you are but the terf war is uniquely dominant in britain/scotland- repressive forces elsewhere are only just picking up on its effectiveness as a rhetorical and political strategy

I might be out of the age range so I'm more interested in terfism and the spaces that reproduce it than in B&S or indie in general but I'm hardly surprised that the cultural milieu that took 40 years to cancel morrissey is a fertile breeding ground for this stuff

Morrisey's playing a 10,000 seat venue here this weekend. It's close to sold out and the cheapest tickets are $100. I think he's doing just fine.

I overestimate britain sometimes

wait where's here. I overestimated whatever place that is

Toronto.

still the british empire then

just out of curiosity what is the B&S age range for ilx posters? (presumably english or scottish if they have defined this)

yeah there MIGHT be a 'Glasgow' record label who are terfed out of their nut

I think Morrissey's show at the Castro Theater in SF is actually selling relatively well; it's not a huge space, and it's not sold out, but I honestly assumed no one was going to buy these tickets at all. Beats me.

there are still, believe it or not, many people who frankly know nothing about his controversial stances. and of course there are those who just don't care.

How is it that so many threads on ILM in 2022 eventually end up complaining about "TERFs"? I don’t see this on other extent music fora, often discussing the same bands.

because an unfortunate number of prominent uk musicians have gone off the deep-end becoming obsessively transphobic, or have at least indicated some sort of sympathies there and it's not great when musicians you're a fan of turn out to be politically opposed to your existence. this is because in the uk aggressive transphobia is a fairly acceptable bigotry for middle-class liberals who think of themselves as "progressive", unlike most of the english-speaking world where it's largely the domain of the religious right. yes, the 'terf' label is not really accurate for most and i don't see the need to use it over 'transphobe' except when talking about those truly coming at it from an old-school radfem background, which is pretty much none of them these days.

was not previously aware of fat cops and anyone who's had any involvement with them whatsoever should be deeply embarrassed.

hard to really care about murdoch on twitter just coming across as a bit naive but overall well-meaning, i don't really expect much more than that from public figures generally.

"and it's not great when musicians you're a fan of turn out to be politically opposed to your existence"

So the reason is that ILM has more transpeople (or at least more transpeople who post criticism of public figures) than other music fora? But if so, then why is that?

I think ILM has more trans-friendly posters because we are mostly educated, and most of us know some trans people in real life (some of them also posters). ILX on the whole has had some random conservatives, some of whom have been a real pain in the ass, others were alright; but I dont' recall much, if any, homophobia or anti-trans sentiment from people here.

well there was that "we're not like those right wing homophobes so it's actually cool and funny and ironic when we casually throw around slurs" phase for that lasted a decade or so

i'm just speaking personally. i think people here are generally left-leaning enough to seriously dislike it when musicians they like turn out to be frothing bigots endorsing very right-wing political positions. if it turned out they had similarly terrible views about some other minority there would likely be a similar backlash, probably louder & broader if anything.

I dont' recall much, if any, homophobia or anti-trans sentiment from people here.

there's been some issues in the past but it's pretty decent these days