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One afternoon, in 1994, I had an idea. So begins Stuart David's magical, evocative memoir about Belle and Sebastian. Determined to make his living writing stories and songs, Stuart had spent several years scraping by on the dole in his small, industrial home town. Then he had the fateful idea to learn bass guitar, and to head for Glasgow in search of like-minded artists. It was a quiet but powerful idea that would completely transform his life. Within one extraordinary year he had helped create one of the most influential, beloved bands of all time. Set against a vivid background of early 90s Glasgow, In the All-Night Cafe describes Stuart's fortuitous meeting with the band's co-founder Stuart Murdoch on a course for unemployed musicians. It tells of their adventures in two early incarnations of Belle and Sebastian and culminates in the recording of the band's celebrated debut album, Tigermilk. A fascinating portrait of the group and its origins, it is also a story that will resonate with anyone who has put together - or thought of putting together - a band. It is a story of a group of friends who wanted to create a different kind of band and a different kind of music. And how - against all expectations - they succeeded. Written with wit, affection and a novelist's observant eye, In the All-Night Cafe brings to life the music and the early days of this most enigmatic and intriguing of bands. Sometimes we listen to bands that we truly love. And sometimes, if we’re lucky, or at strange and vulnerable periods of our life, it seems as if the bands we love are listening to us. That’s certainly how it felt to me when, like many thousands of young men and women across the country, I became smitten with Belle and Sebastian at the tail end of the 90s. I was living in a small university town, broke and convinced that my best days were already behind me, ploughing through indigestible scholarly tracts, pining hopelessly for someone who didn’t love me, breakfasting on vodka, falling off my bicycle into oncoming traffic at lunchtimes. I had long assumed music could never mean as much to me as it had done when I was an adolescent. And then one night, breathless and bewildered, I heard “The State I Am In”, the opening song from the band’s debut album, Tigermilk. “I was surprised, I was happy for a day in 1975 / I was puzzled by a dream, stayed with me all day in 1995 / My brother had confessed that he was gay / It took the heat off me for a while.” Confessional yet mysterious, telling stories without being storytelling stool-rockers, rekindling half-forgotten memories that could puncture the present: all this and tunes that channelled early Velvet Underground, Love and 1970s children’s television. They sang recorder- and xylophone-accompanied songs about foxes in the snow, rhymed “discus” with “Liverpool and Widnes”, and, loth or too shy to appear in the music press, came across as an appealingly recessive salvation army. Their winsome melodies stalked my subconscious, gave consolation and delight in equal measure, and served both as mirrors and shelters to their listeners’ tatty yearnings. Jack Black, in the film version of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, called it “sad bastard music”. The late Steven Wells described their fans as “a sad bunch who wouldn’t recognise a balls-out, bone-shaking rock’n’fucking-roll song if it nutted their pert little noses flat and shat in the hoods of their crap plastic anoraks”. Opposing all rock’n’roll, once the ethos of such important punk bands as Subway Sect, was central to Belle and Sebastian’s appeal. According to Stuart David, the band’s original bassist and author of this quiet and winning memoir about their early days, what he and vocalist/songwriter Stuart Murdoch had in common was that they “didn’t like blues music or drugs, neither of us drank very much or smoked, and we were both anti-machismo”. Emerging at a period when Loaded, Big Beat and Chris Evans reigned supreme, Belle and Sebastian appeared as a radical alternative. “You might as well do the white line,” rasped Liam Gallagher in “Cigarettes & Alcohol”; “Reading the Gospel to yourself is fine,” trilled Murdoch on “We Rule the School”. For David, being in a band was itself a form of defiance. He’d grown up in Alexandria, 20 miles north of Glasgow, a declining town surrounded by valley factories on one side and nuclear missile bases on the other side of the hill – “the twin evils I’d been born and raised to provide cheap labour for”. He’d subsisted on income support for nearly a decade before enrolling on the dodgy music-training course where he met Murdoch, who’d been forced to drop out of university after being diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. The band’s keen ear for thwarted longing, their appeal to stragglers and dreamers, was born of personal experience and also informed their politics: they later performed benefits for the Scottish Socialist Party. In the All-Night Café, which chronicles the period up to and including the recording of Belle and Sebastian’s first and best two LPs – Tigermilk and If You’re Feeling Sinister – portrays the group as a ragged gang of outsiders of different ages and from different backgrounds (drummer Richard Colburn was a former snooker semi-pro) who came together from a desire to realise the singular beauty of Murdoch’s early songs. Although the singer remains a touch inscrutable here, his conviction shines through: he abandoned early shows because the sound wasn’t to his liking, and persuaded the music college who issued the first record to bankroll an album rather than a CD single. David is especially illuminating on how the warm, gauzy sound of those records was achieved. Murdoch, who sang relatively quietly, insisted on the folk technique of having the vocal rather than the beat leading the song. Their albums were recorded at the church where he was a caretaker and where “every sound reverberated around the wooden surfaces and became coated in the same honey-rich‑toned glow of the light”. It’s this palpable sense of space and vulnerability – some of the recordings are technically shaky – that gives the LPs a tenderness missing in slicker and more compressed modern records. Some of the book’s funniest moments – the band’s future label boss telling them that Belle and Sebastian was too “gay” a name and promising them they will be “the next Radiohead” – take place in local greasy spoons. Considered next to Dexys’ “The Teams That Meet in Caffs” or Saint Etienne’s “Mario’s Cafe”, David inadvertently makes a good case for old-school diners being as important as art schools to the history of British pop. Best of all are David’s masterful and often-moving vignettes. At the end of the recording sessions for Tigermilk, keyboardist Chris Geddes looked a bit teary and confided to the bassist: “This has been the best week of my life. But I’m not sure if it’s just because I’ve had a shite life up until now or not.” At the LP’s launch party, shortly before guests began using free copies of the record as Frisbees (within a couple of years they would fetch £500 at auction), Murdoch gave a shout out to Keith Jones, who supplied the album’s twiddly electronics. “He’s not here,” someone piped up. “He’s at karate.”