Music preview: Belle & Sebastian

For a clue as to which category Belle & Sebastian's three homecoming nights at Glasgow's Barrowland this week fall into, an emphatic preview was offered at the tenth anniversary of their Bowlie Weekender at Butlin's in Somerset, last weekend.

Part of the All Tomorrow's Parties festival which stemmed from the original, Belle & Sebastian-organised Bowlie, last week's event featured a headline set from the group in some of the form of their life, featuring strong evidence for the case that they're a great rock'n'roll band as much as they are heartbreaking balladeers.

There was a most orderly stage invasion and a set list spanning what singer Stuart Murdoch called "the three ages of Belle & Sebastian – although I'll leave it to you to decide where these start and end".

Trying to organise a chat with Murdoch the next day, however, offered the most illuminating insight into his relationship with the fans as he threw himself head first into the range of social activities on the fringe of the festival.

There was a Scrabble match against the weekend's tournament champion (Murdoch lost, so will now pay for the victor to watch his band in Barcelona next year); the final of the five-a-side league (the band's team won, although ex-Chelsea and Everton winger Pat Nevin was playing for them); a reading from and Q&A session about his forthcoming volume of blogged diaries The Celestial Caf, and almost incessant requests to stop and sign items as he walked through the centre.

It's a level of fan dedication which few pop songwriters apart from Morrissey will have experienced, but it's one Murdoch seems to thrive on.

"It doesn't overwhelm me at all," he says a few days later, from the relative solitude of the tour bus, nursing a heavy cold.

"It's funny, my wife (he married Marisa in New York in 2007) gets more freaked out by the thought of people being intense than I do, and I have to remind her that I'm used to it. That I used to be like that myself about bands. Besides, nobody ever bothers me in Glasgow."

Clearly one of the reasons the band gather such support is Murdoch's literate and deeply personal way with a lyric, and it's a style which is recreated to long-form effect in The Celestial Caf, a tale of favourite films, writing and listening to music, and the sights and sounds of Glasgow's West End.

"It was written from 2002 to 2006, which was a period when the band were very busy and I was at the height of my blogging," says Murdoch.

"It was never actually supposed to be a book, it was only last year that the publisher came to me with the suggestion of compiling it, and I wasn't sure at first. But I said we could do it if they could get a good editor who'd sort the wheat from the chaff."

This kind of skewers the expectation that the four and a half years it took for Write About Love to arrive after Belle and Sebastian's last album, The Life Pursuit, were spent preparing for a career change from songwriter to prose writer.

Murdoch's main creative activity in that time has been the God Help The Girl album, which he created alongside a group of female vocalists, and the musical film of the project which is planned for a 2011 shoot.

Belle and Sebastian only reconvened at the start of this year, when they travelled to Los Angeles to record Write About Love with The Life Pursuit producer Tony Hoffer.

"It was a very happy process," says Murdoch. "Writing a Belle & Sebastian record is fairly relaxed. We're all equal, there's no leader, and it takes pressure off you when you're writing. Playing live together again was a bit weird for about half an hour at the first gig then we never looked back. I thought it would have been a bit harder actually, but it really was a delight."

Murdoch says there are already plans for the group to begin "another writing project" in the new year. In the meantime, his thoughts turn to the next evening's show in Brighton and Glasgow's trio of shows, in the hope it will get him over the disappointment of Belle & Sebastian's first ever illness-cancelled gig at Leicester's DeMontfort Hall last week. It sounds like he needed the rest, but once again he'd rather not let those fans down if he can help it.

Belle & Sebastian play the Barrowland, Glasgow, tonight, tomorrow and Tuesday. The album Write About Love is out now on Rough Trade. Stuart Murdoch's diary collection The Celestial Caf is published by Pomona Books on 22 February

This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday, 19 December, 2010