Most bass players are heard but not seen. We demand nothing more of them than that they stand off to one side when on stage, preferably behind their amp. We would rather they didn t turn up for photo shoots as this gives caption writers the unwanted task of having to remember their names.
Stuart David, though, is a welcome exception. Better known as the bassist of Belle And Sebastian, those Brit Award-winning indie subversives so beloved of Pete Waterman (not!), David also leads a double life as the man behind Looper, a multimedia side project he started with his wife, Karn.
The album, Up A Tree, is an inspired curio of wry, whimsical spoken word narratives over dance-oriented beats and samples and indie guitar noodlings. Belle And Sebastian aficionados will know what to expect by listening to A Space Boy Dream , David s contribution to last year s Boy With The Arab Strap LP.
It came together with a single that I did for Sub Pop originally, explains David down a phone-line from his Glasgow lair. Then the live show came together because my sister was doing some fund-raising for an arts school and she asked me to play at it so my wife Karn made some films that went along with the songs. We showed them on lots of different TVs and we had loads of aerials on stage. My brother Ronnie showed some still slides and we had super-8 film. We were just trying it out that night and were really surprised at how well it went down, so we thought we d keep doing it.
A good way of getting to grips with Looper is to visit their website at treehouse.clara.net or it can be accessed at jeepster.co.uk. There you will find snippets from David s esoteric tour diaries and a photographic exhibition by some friends and fans as well as sundry other weird stuff.
Karn s an artist she studied sculpture at art school so we wanted to find a way of working together, says David. A lot of the multimedia ideas come from her, while I take care of the music. The website came about because we wanted to have a venue that would be like that; with a gallery, a book shop and a space for live performance. We couldn t really afford the real thing but we realised that we could do it on the internet without it costing very much.
Although Looper is very much a product of David s idiosyncratic imagination, he admits that the murmurous mumbling of compatriots Arab Strap was an early inspiration, not in terms of content Looper s songs have none of the booze n birds obsessions of ver Strap but because of the unashamed use of their local dialect.
When I heard their first single, he remembers, that was the first thing I had ever come across that had a Scottish accent on it. Before that I enjoyed a lot spoken word stuff that was mostly Irish: Van Morrison, some Bob Geldof stuff, Whipping Boy. Yet I was quite embarrassed about my Scottish accent at the time. But I thought that the Arab Strap thing worked well and so I started doing some readings from books. And so my initial confidence came from them.
A real standout on the album is Columbo s Car , wherein David fantasises about being stalked by the squinting detective, on account of his illegal use of samples. As well as being a great yarn, the song also seems to be making a point about the ethics (and aesthetics) of sampling.
It came about, explains David, because a lot the songs that we had written for our first show had loads of obvious samples in them, like Elvis singing for instance. So much music exists in the world now. Sampling is just like using the natural resources that are already there.
Of course I couldn t end the interview without getting David s reaction to that Brit Award. Just how is the band reacting to having the mainstream media spotlight turned on them?
They re all kind of lying low and hoping it will go away, answers David. I m so confused about whether they want to be successful or not. I m not even sure I do myself.
Stuart David: definitely not your typical bass player, then. n
Up A Tree is out this month on Jeepster Records. Looper play Whelan s on Sat 20th March. Belle And Sebastian play the Olympia Theatre on 28th April.