When I was eight months old, Scottish indie pop icons Belle and Sebastian released their fifth album “Dear Catastrophe Waitress.” My parents danced me around in our kitchen to the band’s peppiest album yet, and 21 years later, I had the opportunity to interview founder and lead singer Stuart Murdoch ahead of the band’s show in Kalamazoo: the town where, for my entire life, I’d grown up alongside their music.
On the morning of May 6, I packed a Kalamazoo College shirt as a gift and met Stuart, who had been scootering around downtown beforehand, in the garden behind Bell’s Eccentric Cafe. We took a seat at a green picnic table in view of the stage the band would play on later that night.
My lifelong passion for Belle and Sebastian has occasionally been puzzling to others, and even to myself. It was also what led me to reach out to Stuart in the first place. Hands still a little shaky, I turned on the recorder.
On this tour, B&S had played in NYC, DC, and Chicago. So how did it feel coming to Kalamazoo – a place we need shirts and pins to confirm really exists?
“Sometimes playing a smaller place, I feel that the band is more relaxed,” Stuart explained. Being in a smaller city also means it’s less likely the members will have friends or family attending, which can make the show more casual for them.
“I don’t know anybody in Kalamazoo apart from you,” Stuart laughed. “So, it’s nice. You can feel kind of free and easy.”
This was the band’s very first time here. Why Kalamazoo?
Stuart told me the band’s agent, Jim Romeo, had likely decided based on where it made sense for the band to go in between larger cities.
“I’ve worked with Belle & Sebastian for close to 25 years so I have a pretty good sense of what kind of places they like to play and each tour we try to add in a few off the beaten path cities,” Romeo confirmed over email. “Maybe in the back of my mind I thought about the Belle / Bell’s connection. They also like playing outside and this was one of few chances this tour to do so.”
As Stuart explained, Kalamazoo’s proximity to Grand Rapids also “gives people a chance to see a band closer to home.”
“I’ll be checking out tonight to see where people are actually from,” he added. “I’m interested to see how many people from Kalamazoo actually come to the show.”
The band spent a little time exploring Kalamazoo before the show – whether on scooter, like Stuart, or on foot, like drummer Richard Colburn. Richard told Stuart he’d noticed the parks and “small-town vibe” while on a walk. “And in this town here,” Stuart said, “it’s nice to be close to nature.”
Kalamazoo’s show was the first of Bell’s’ 2024 Beer Garden Concert Series. It also marked the first live performance of the jangly “What Happened to You, Son?,” a single released at the start of the tour. After the next song, Stuart commented on how nice the weather was.
“Being from Scotland, usually we bring the rain, but this couldn’t be sweeter,” he said. “And I just wanna check, is anybody actually from Kalamazoo?”
After a series of cheers, he asked “What do you call yourselves? Kalamazoolanders? Kalamazoobergers? Kalamazoo…zooers?”
Overlapping shouts from the audience were met with “I just wanna be polite. Does anybody ever call this place the Kzoo?”
More cheers let him know we do. All the time.
“I was going to start [it], that was going to be my thing. Okay, I like the Kzoo!” he said. “This is our first time in town, so I guess we can play anything.”
K first-year Olivia Schleede, who attended with her friend El Myers ’27, “was jumping for joy” when she recognized the next song: “She’s Losing It.”
“I think there’ll always be a surprise, because we’ll drop in old tracks that we haven’t played the night before and that we’re not gonna play the next night,” Stuart said during our interview. “And I think that’s part of the fun.” Before shows, he looks at the setlist from the last time the band was in town so he can switch it up. But because this was their first time in Kalamazoo, he said, “everything’s going to be fresh.”
When creating the setlist, he explained, “I usually start by – well, for instance, asking Sarah [Martin].” The singer, multi-instrumentalist, and only woman in a band of seven was about to walk past our picnic table. “What do you wanna sing tonight?”
As Sarah joined us, we continued chatting about setlist ideas.
Because of the train tracks next to Bell’s, Stuart said, “I thought ‘Didn’t See It Coming’ would be good.” He sung a lyric to explain why: “Take me on a train!”
Sarah agreed. “Did you know that Chris” – B&S’ keyboardist – “is gonna make a spoof Twitter handle so he can get what he wants into the set ‘cuz there’s more likelihood?” Stuart is known to pay attention to fan requests – after I’d initially asked about the process of making the setlist, his first response was “What do you wanna hear?” – but the three of us laughed about the other members’ goals to, in Sarah’s words, “infiltrate the setlist.”
With songs like Sarah’s “Reclaim the Night” and guitarist/singer Stevie Jackson’s “To Be Myself Completely,” in Kalamazoo the band showcased one of the things that make them so unique.
“The great thing about having different singers in the group is there’s that automatic variety,” Stuart had told me. “You come to a point where you’re like, okay, let’s do a Stevie song! Then it’s back to a Sarah song, and so you use that as part of the color and dynamic in the show. And it’s a great boon. It keeps things interesting.”
Stuart, who’d skipped out on the tour bus to take the train from Chicago to Kalamazoo the day before, told me about his love for trains during our interview.
“This feels like a train town,” he said. “I love that there’s tracks right next to the venue there.” Because we spoke before he made the setlist, he told me he’d “be trying to think of any songs that mention trains.”
As the band played “If You’re Feeling Sinister” – the title track of their second album – the red lights on stage, complimenting the color of the album cover, were soon accompanied by the horn of a train passing right by Bell’s.
“I think it’s so romantic,” Stuart had told me. “Obviously we have lots of trains in Britain, but everything stops for the train here. And you hear it. You never hear – British trains don’t make that hmmmffff, y’know?”
“Alright, sir!” he said as the train passed by, the horn continuing. “Just for us.”
As he’d proposed before, the band played two of their train-themed songs soon after: “The Loneliness of a Middle Distance Runner” and “I Didn’t See It Coming.”
Standing on an equipment case pressed against the barricade after “There’s Too Much Love,” Stuart got a chance to ask people where they were from, as he’d planned earlier. He found the first person he asked was a local: my dad! Holding the microphone up to me, he asked if I was still in school.
“We got any more Kalamazoo College?” he asked the audience. I was excited to hear more cheering, and Stuart leaned down with the microphone again.
“What’s your magazine called?”
“The Index! Kalamazoo College, it’s our newspaper.”
“That’s my favorite college newspaper,” Stuart said. “I never miss an edition.”
The last song was “Le Pastie De La Bourgeoisie” – my answer to Stuart’s question about what I wanted on the setlist. As Stuart, Sarah, and Stevie sang “and you love like nobody around you,” I knew doing so had been worth it.
The band left the stage, returning soon after for the encore. Stuart filed in last, wearing the Kalamazoo College shirt I’d given him earlier. With “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying,” the band “played us a song to set us free,” and said goodbye for now to Kalamazoo.
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