My time as a Belle & Sebastian Superfan or One Troubled Teenager
This is a post I had written back in 2019 when I was first starting to get harassed by super fans of BTS. At the time I had assumed they were teenage fangirls—and some were—but later realized that the primary instigators of the attacks were women around my age or even older. An entirely different demographic than the one I write about below. I was reminded of this post after reading Monia’s excellent piece on The Myth of Fan Power, I thought I’d dust it off. I’ve edited it slightly to fix a few typos and for smoothness. Originally posted November 17, 2019.
One reason I try to be very kind to fanatical fans who are teenage girls is because I was one myself. It’s not a time of my life I’ve publicly written much about before but perhaps now is the time. This is all ancient history, of course, but back in the late 1990s I had a radio show at my campus radio station. That was where I first heard Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister CD. I fell in love immediately. Hard and fast. The melodies and arrangements hit right at the core of my odd 1960s-soaked musical taste and the lyrics seemed to speak directly to my confused, depressed, hormone-addled teen mind. “Get me away from here I’m dying” was the phrase cycling through my mind 24 hours a day back then and here was a band who didn’t just make great songs, they understood how awful it was to be trapped in my head.
“Ooh! Get me away from here I'm dying
Play me a song to set me free
Nobody writes them like they used to
So it may as well be me
Here on my own now after hours
Here on my own now on a bus
Think of it this way
You could either be successful or be us”
“Get Me Away From Here I’m Dying,” Belle & Sebastian, 1997
This was back in the very early days of the Internet and although I didn’t have my own computer I could use the ones in my dorm’s computer lab. You couldn’t just check Wikipedia in those days and the band had (unintentionally?) cultivated an air of mystery by refusing to speak to media or even to have proper press photos taken. Fans—true hardcore fans like myself—may not have known what the members even looked like let alone their thoughts on the latest album, politics, or, well, anything that couldn’t be gleaned from pouring over their liner notes and lyrics.
Somehow or other I found my way to the fan-run Sinister mailing list and traded self-conscious banter as well as actual cassette tapes (live recordings, homemade mixes, the legendary Tigermilk...) with other Belle & Sebastian fans across the globe.
And the fandom grew and grew.
The media took notice, writing their own version of what was happening and as Paul Whitelaw put it in a footnote in his excellent 2005 biography, “A lot of the antipathy people feel towards B&S is undoubtedly aimed less at the group themselves and more at the self-regarding, smugly exclusive nature of much of their fanbase, many of whom will no doubt be reading this book. It’s all your fault, you dolts.”
Ouch.
But if the shoe fits…
Most of these articles trashing the band and their fans and/or hyping up the twee nonsense are lost in the ether—not published online and never uploaded outside of a curated collection on the Jeepster website—but I vividly remember the sense that something was happening and I wanted to be a part of it. Girls in hairslides and vintage dresses. Boys in fuzzy sweaters and scruffy haircuts. The stereotypes were as true as the blue-haired, “streetwear” attired K-pop fan today. And the desire to belong to something, to be around people who understood, was just as strong.
(A couple of pages from my scrapbook. We didn't have cellphones to take video in those days and you either remembered in your mind or brought your film camera to the venue and took shitty photos which you then developed, hoped for the best, and pasted into your scrapbook. Yes, that is a young me with Jarvis Cocker. He was very polite.)
It was about the music but it also wasn’t. Not that I would have understood that at the time.
I studied abroad in Glasgow, Scotland, home of Belle & Sebastian. One of many kids drawn to the scene there. To the band. The media used words like “pilgrimage” and they weren’t wrong. An almost religious fever had built up in a certain, very loud, very self-righteous section of the fandom.
When Belle & Sebastian were nominated for a fan-voted Brit Award, all of us early adopters raced to the Internet to vote. Early and Often.
According to the Whitelaw biography, they got lots of online votes, “[t]housnds of votes, in fact, many of which came from the same servers in Strathclyde and Glasgow Universities, which could either have been the result of one or two particular committed fans, or the endeavors of a whole sweeping canvas of Belle and Sebastian fans. It’s impossible to say.”
We dedicated fans won Belle & Sebastian that award in a stunning upset over super popular mainstream pop group Steps.
The win was so unexpected that only trumpet player Mick and drummer Richie had even bothered to travel down to London for the ceremony.
Belle & Sebastian were accused of rigging the vote but the truth was that their fans had smelled out the weakness in the voting system and organized to the win the award for our faves… an award that came to be more of a millstone around their necks than anything else. Although we wouldn't really understand that until years later, if some fans ever did.
Because here is what I really want to talk about:
Looking back as an adult, it’s clear the fey, soft, exceptionalist “love yourself” image cultivated by the fandom was nothing more than a fantasy we had projected on the band ourselves. The band was caught up in their own struggles and in no position to play mentor to 200 Troubled Teenagers let alone 2,000 or 200,000. Cellist Isobel Campbell has said she was so overcome with anxiety in those days she couldn’t even look at the faces in the crowd when they performed. I have a vivid memory of seeing Isobel at a dance party at a student union and trying to speak with her. She was polite but dismissive. At the time I remember being disappointed and hurt but now I’m just embarrassed. That an anxious young woman of 22 or 23 was in any position to help an equally anxious teenager just a few years younger than her make sense of things… Really, I offer my sincere apologies to Isobel.
And that disconnect, between the group and the fans they had collected, what we were each trying to do. Stuart Murdoch wanted to make good records. Stevie Jackson wanted a band. The superfans, me, wanted purpose in life. And a hug.
Belle & Sebastian’s superfans ran away with the fandom. We internalized the outsider status of our heroes. We became the underdogs, fighting against evil corporate record companies. We wore the thrift store cardigans and hairslides as if they had transitive properties, imbuing us with the rebellious spirit of Stuart’s lyrics so that when others looked at us they didn’t see plain ordinary teenagers worried about a math test but the deep artistic souls we knew ourselves to be… even if we’d never written a single worthwhile line of verse. (And believe me, I didn’t.) Anybody who criticized the group for their less than professional behavior was criticizing us and that could not stand. Belle & Sebastian fans were as loathed by music journalists as much, if not more, than fans of certain pop music acts are today.
In the end, Belle & Sebastian sorted out their internal contradictions, shook off the twee rebel image, signed with a major label in the USA, and have had an extremely good career, continuing to make excellent music to this day. There are only a few bands that I genuinely look forward to seeing what their next single will be after 20+ years but Belle & Sebastian is one.
I think it’s worth sharing this story because I see so many parallels to the way the media has covered BTS over the last couple of years. The focus on the fans, hyping that sense of a building a movement rather than simply enjoying good music. The big difference is that BigHit, BTS’s management company, has leaned into the coverage. Belle & Sebastian didn’t talk to the media or issue press releases in part because they were a DIY band who practiced in a church basement who didn’t see the point in talking to the press or trying to control the narrative. In the late 1990s, you could still get away with “if I don’t see it, it doesn’t exist.” I’m not sure why BigHit has let the narrative be driven by articles like this one on fan translations and personal essays by women who have been fans for 4 months except that it feeds into the ARMY-first narrative that is, for now, a money generator. Plucking dollars from the wallets of impressionable fans who want to prove that their favorites are the best, just like they, themselves, are the best simply for liking them.
Will BTS be able to shake off this mania like Belle & Sebastian were? Do they have the freedom to hiatus and come back with the best album of their career to date like Belle and Sebastian did? Will their teen fans be able to let go of their idealizations and enjoy the group for what they actually are and not the semi-religious experience that they’ve been hyped up to be?
Only time will tell.
But in sharing this story I hope to reach a few teen girls who may be struggling with their own fan experiences and offer a little empathy. Fandom is an incredible experience but it is no substitute for true community or for personal growth.