Music for smaller people

I was at the splendid Somerset House last night to see the utterly lovable Belle & Sebastian, part of a very hip summer season also featuring PJ Harvey, Lemon Jelly, Orchestra Baobab and the Afro-Cuban All-Stars. That’s quite a line-up.

B & S were, indeed, as lovely as their records suggest, winsome in the peculiarly Glaswegian manner that always takes me by surprise. Their music glittered and shone, whistled and shimmied, sweetly harmonised and rang out across the courtyard and up into the purple evening sky.

In deference to their surroundings there was a quick version of ‘Taxman’, and in deference to their slightly broader surroundings a full blown version of that old Madness stager, ‘Embarrassment’. And a bowler hat.

I was very struck how everyone there failed to be any taller. I’m an unexceptional six feet tall, and I found that I had a pristine, unobstructed view of the stage. I couldn’t spot one person in front of me who I would have said was a six-footer.

I think the band themselves are all not particularly tall; though these things are notoriously difficult to judge on stage. After the sparkling music had faded away, I was left wondering whether:

(a) A small band attracts small fans.

(b) Belle & Sebastian happen to make music that attracts small fans.

(c) By a sort of sympathetic recognition of the very limited confines of Somerset House, larger fans had shied away, leaving only the smaller ones to attend.

(d) The same as (c), but with the additional factor that Belle & Sebastian themselves had unconsciously been selected for the venue by virtue of their essential unlargeness.

(e) The same as (b), but with the added consideration that Belle & Sebastian were chosen to play Somerset House because their fanlets would be conveniently small.

(f) Short and tall people are attracted to different types of music; or, at least, tend to look for and express different emotional sets in their choices of music. Thus, both band and fans grew alike together in their musical education, and are bound evermore in a swirling mutual appreciation of the smaller person’s universe.

(g) I could have been standing on a step.