For their ninth album, Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, Glasgow’s Belle and Sebastian veer from their twee refuge into a groove, dance, and funk affair. Producer Ben Allen (Animal Collective, Gnarls Barkley) appears to have pushed the band’s book nook onto a dance floor and cranked up the Funkadelic and M83. P-Funk as twee-funk? There, I said it. The band used the Eurovision Song Contest, ground zero of European pop, as inspiration, trying to write songs that could pass for entries from throughout the contest’s history—like the Morocco song from 1981, or Sweden’s from 1988. The result is both disparate and unified. As Belle and Sebastian begin their latest tour, singer/dean Stuart Murdoch is doing battle with chronic fatigue syndrome. When we spoke, he was walking around Central Park in New York City.
What is the status of your chronic fatigue syndrome? It’s absolutely ongoing…
