Live: Belle and Sebastian

Belle and Sebastian
7 May 2006: BASF Feierabendhaus – Ludwigshafen, Germany

A request for Belle and Sebastian's tour manager: Considering that no one at the show in Ludwigshafen was actually from Ludwigshafen, next time try to book them somewhere that doesn't require a commute; like Heidelberg, where half of us had come from, anyway.

Ludwigshafen. (Not Ludwigsburg, Ed Harcourt; one of the openers, who got astonished laughter from the crowd when he told us he'd never before been to Ludwigsburg.) Hmph.

'The other side of the tracks', my German teacher once called it; though I doubt she'd have said it if she'd been to the other side of other tracks, like the ones in, say, Chicago. Because after you've fought your way down 30 kilometers of rat-race Autobahn, bumbled through 260 or so poorly-marked twists and turns in Mannheim and finally slid down from the bridge over the Rhine and through the Ludwigshafen's BASF office-park metropolis, the concert hall at the Feierabendhaus is actually kind of an oasis. Airy, and cool. Plush theater-style seats, and blazer-wearing ushers to escort you to them. And - highly unusual for Germany - smoke-free. Between openers a girl breezed in with a pretzel. A pretzel. Other side of the tracks, my arse.

So, Belle and Sebastian have been working hard on tour since the beginning of the year, and Stuart Murdoch starts things out saying it's got him so beat he wants to go camp out in the Black Forest. But you wouldn't have detected a derth of energy in the performance, heavy on the new stuff. The critics are right about The Life Pursuit; it's fun.

So fun, even, that guitarist Stevie Jackson couldn't help throwing a lanky arm into a few windmills. The awkward aisle dancing got started early, too, with "Another Sunny Day". After Murdoch complimented the folks stage right, and some girl stage left loudly complained, Hey, what about us? Murdoch hopped down off stage and danced with her in the middle of "Sukie in the Graveyard". Next song and a kid wearing a kilt and stockings scrambles out of his seat and joins the party.

Getting around to the audience banter, Murdoch asked who was from Ludwigshafen, and no one - seriously, no one - spoke up. Heidelberg? Like I said, about half. Mannheim? About the same. Scotland? One. "There's always one," Murdoch joked. And it wasn't the guy in the kilt.

In time he (the kilt guy) returned wiping his brow to his seat. He'd only just sat down when, as Murdoch finally gave in to the girl who'd been calling for "Meat and Potatoes" all night and started it up, he jumped back up and tumbled down aisle and over knees to go dance again.

Murdoch chided the rest of us for looking so tired as he introduced "Your Cover's Blown", and asked us to pretend it was Saturday night, not Sunday. But it was, and it was getting late, and we all had work tomorrow.

Belle and Sebastian honored another audience request, "The Boy From the Arab Strap", when they came back for the encore. But though we waited for a few moments after they'd gone again that's all we got. Still, you had to be grateful for the effort; we all know work can be exhausting.

When a friend heard I was going to see a show at the Feierabendhaus - Feierabend is the German word for quittin' time, by the way - he told me that BASF sends off its retiring employees there with the old gold watch and a buffet dinner. Which is nice, too. It's not a perfect analogy, I know. But hey, cut me some slack: I'm off the clock.

For Comparison:PopMatters

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