Tuesday 7 June 2011

The Alternative TOTP Canon #12: Belle & Sebastian - Legal Man

Very much understandably, the band who didn't so much as send most of their members to the ceremony when they won a Brit have the air of people who never expected to be asked to appear on prime-time television. As a result the female chorus, who you'd imagine might have made the matching effort, are in whatever they turned up in (Isobel Campbell always dressed like that) and their only concessions to staging are some flowers and their mate in a gorilla costume. The director nearly misses him too. Luckily, what Stuart Murdoch lacks in miming ability he makes up for in fluid movement.

5 comments:

Steve Williams said...

That is ace. Of course towards the end of Pops, Belle and Sebastian seemed to be on every five minutes, when it was on Sunday nights and they had to book the bands ages in advance, so they performed virtually the whole of The Life Pursuit, including The Blues Are Still Blue, which got nowhere near the top forty.

Are we going to get The Crimea in this series?

Simon said...

Sadly no, it's not on YouTube. Similarly, if anyone reading this has the 1999 TOTP featuring Sebadoh and whatever video card-based sorcery is required to encode from VHS, we'd like to hear from you

Steve Williams said...

No, it's not, is it, which is a real shame. I remember in the papers that day their record company did ads saying "Watch The Crimea on Top of the Pops tonight".

Steve Williams said...

Incidentally, I was wrong, The Blues Are Still Blue was of course a Top 40 hit, and in fact was performed on the same show as White Russian Galaxy. It was White Collar Boy that was performed despite not having charted.

Chris Brown said...

Spooky, I saw that for the first time a couple of days ago (I wanted to embed the track on another forum and the video isn't on there).