That Music List: LIST 259

Hello again,

So, for those of you who are following it, how's your World Cup going?

If you're Belle and Sebastian, it's going alright. Whatever else might come to pass, Scotland's victory over Haiti is likely to prove sufficient to secure a last-32 position on the team's first trip to the Finals in a generation. Try telling them and hundreds of thousands of Scotland fans that the expansion of the Finals to 48 teams is a detrimental development.

How things go against Morocco (this week's blog will have automatically uploaded literally halfway through that match) might yet just determine whether attendees of this weekend's two runs through the entire If You're Feeling Sinister album, in Dundee's Caird Hall and Halifax's Piece Hall, find the band cautiously optimistic, very happy or delirious. As Linda and I will be at the latter, I'll let you know next time.

In the circumstances, it seemed only right and proper to open (kick off?) this week's List with Belle and Sebastian's own brand new contribution to the football song genre.

It's a characteristically delightful, nostalgic, self-effacing and amusing rumination on most of a lifetime spent watching the national team try and fail, on not being the kids who'd get Scotland back on the world stage as they thought they would, and so on.

It also rehabilitates the band's relationship with football, in so far as they have presented it on record, anyway. No referee giving them nothing as in Another Sunny Day. No protagonist not wanting to take orders from a moron as in I Don't Want to Play Football. Just an expression of the joy (and anguish) of the game, for the joy of the game's sake, evidently free of cynicism.

The Halifax gig (and indeed certain others on this tour) isn't just about a welcome opportunity to see the headliners once more, however. From a gig-going perspective, at least, it'll afford me the chance to pay a fond farewell to the soon to retire Saint Etienne, the Sheffield leg of their valedictory autumn tour having sold out whilst I was still lacing up my proverbial boots.

(Saint Etienne (yes, they're in that first photo somewhere) - Indietracks Festival, 30/07/2016. Pictures are author's own)

Quite the right moment to give Sarah, Pete and Bob the A Session of Sorts treatment, therefore, albeit finding a representative - but none too obvious - sample from their 36-year body of work minus the sixteen tracks already featured in previous Lists took a bit of work.

I was certain that something from the final International album needed to be included for completeness sake, and it's just a lovely bonus that my choice, a collaboration with the excellent Confidence Man, is accompanied by a jolly Scooby Doo-aping animated promo replete with surprise cameos.

I must admit to a little trepidation beforehand upon learning just how stacked with collaborations International was, with Orbital, Erol Alkan, Nick Heyward (a busier man himself just now, of course, with Haircut 100 newly reactivated), Vince Clarke and The Chemical Brothers all contributing. Happy to report, it's still intrinsically a Saint Etienne album, rather than sketches of their ideas buried too far under other people's arrangements.

How much of it is getting an airing during the current tour dates is an interesting question, with, one would suspect, a quorum of attendees hoping more for some sort of victory lap set rather than too many deep cuts. I could answer that question myself with a quick check on setlist.fm, but where's the fun in that?

Many other nice things in this week's List, of course, of which a few to note include:

Another Forgotten 80s selection in the shape of Wexford-via-New-York singer-songwriter Pierce Turner. Debut solo album It's Only A Long Way Across, from which Orange Coloured Son is taken, was produced by no less a figure than Philip Glass - perhaps the driving influence behind some of the sonic trickery in the choruses here?

Fellow listeners to Piccadilly Radio in the 1980s may remember Orange Coloured Sun being routinely rechristened Orange Coloured Socks by Tony "The Greek" Michaelides, whenever played on his visionary new music strand The Last Radio Programme. Such was his way: the late Stu Allan's hip-hop show Bus 'Diss would similarly always be retitled Bus Pass.

A wildly successful promotions executive away from such playful silly buggery, as well as a highly gifted broadcaster and public speaker over the decades, I will never not have Tony to thank for many mid-1980s discoveries that I still hold dear today - The Desert Wolves, Mirrors Over Kiev, Old Ma Cuxsom & the Soapchoppers, etc. You didn't get those on Simon Bates back then.

Then and Now treatment for Peaches, the Canadian doyenne of explicit, gender-prodding electroclash and no less arresting a presence over three decades into her career.

Other new or recent stuff from Wishy, Souad Massi, Rowena Wise and Man/Woman/Chainsaw. If there is a better power-pop moment this year than Lovesick, the lead track from the first-named's second longplayer slated for later this summer, I'll be more than a little surprised. It's genuinely, genuinely that good, and set to dominate my mental jukebox for the foreseeable.

Having reminded myself of his comparably opulent baroque pop in last week's brief piece on Haute & Freddy, another chance to enjoy some prime Owen Pallett.

The Pere Ubu track mentioned en passant in my Eurovision 2026 review (trust me, it made sense at the time).

To finish, The Long Goodbye features by no means the only qualifier for this feature from Leicester's favourite identical twin filmmakers and spacerockers Matt and JJ Kerry (along with that city's go-to bassist nonpareil Gary Gilchrist), trading as The Freed Unit. This won't be all you see and hear from its parent album in the coming weeks, either.

J xx

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BELLE AND SEBASTIAN - It Only Takes One Lion (2026)