Belle and Sebastian Live

Belle and Sebastian. Somerset House, London

Maddy Costa. Tuesday July 20, 2004. The Guardian

In a sense, Belle and Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch is too good for pop. You feel it when he sings of the "Asian man with his love/hate affair with his racist clientele" in a glorious, dancing version of The Boy with the Arab Strap halfway through the set. You sense it again even as he swallows - or forgets - the best line in The Model, in which blindfolded Lisa meets a blind kid at a party and has "the best sex that she ever had". His lyrics are packed with the kind of jolting yet amusing observations that made Alan Bennett's Talking Heads monologues so absorbing for so many; if they weren't attached to cute, jangly indie tunes, perhaps Murdoch would be a household name, too.

It is hard to begrudge Murdoch's decision to stick with the band, though, when he's having so much fun. Vivacious songs from new album Dear Catastrophe Waitress send him bouncing about the stage; in between, he teases guitarist Stevie Jackson and chats to the audience about anything from London architecture and Scottish nationalism to Alex from Franz Ferdinand's surname. It's odd that the audience are so slow to respond; perhaps they would rather be tucked up with the lyric sheets after all.

Or perhaps they're just mesmerised by Murdoch's voice. Honed by years with a church choir, his voice has a shiver-inducing sureness of tone rarely encountered in this kind of music. It's so perfect, in fact, it can't help but show up the inadequacies of the band. Clarinets and strings produce an agonising array of wrong notes. Apart from an impromptu rendition of Waterloo Sunset, Jackson's singing is so woefully tuneless that he makes you wince. Eight years and six albums in, Belle and Sebastian still sound like a bunch of schoolkids messing about at lunchtime. For Murdoch it's clearly good enough - but it's hard not to wish he had a touch more ambition.