The Party Line by Belle & Sebastian

Album: Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance (2015)

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Songfacts®:

Belle and Sebastian penned this song about Club Divine, a long-running dance night at Glasgow Art School at which the band were all regulars. Guitarist Bobby Kildea told Drowned in Sound: "The building has since been completely remodeled and renovated, the 'Black and White Tiles' having been replaced with grey lino, which may not have the same ring to it, but will nonetheless provide a suitable surface upon which future generations can commit their own crimes."
The band had the dance floor in mind when they constructed the track. Kildea said: "Once we had established the basic groove of live drums, bass and Stuart (Murdoch)'s vocal, everything else was just filling in the blanks. Ben (Allen) our producer, made up the beats in the verses, which worked well in contrast to the live drums in the choruses."
The Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance album finds Belle & Sebastian embracing dance music for the first time. "I like to dance. We all like dance music," vocalist and songwriter Stuart Murdoch told The Independent. "But we've probably been seriously incapable of expressing that before now. Now we're just really relaxed – you just have to let your inner dance come out."
Asked by Uncut magazine where the Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance album title came from, Stuart Murdoch replied: "It's a line from a poem... Sort of a spare song title. We had it lying around. It felt like the right title to put with the images for the album cover, which came to me in a dream. The weird robot girl."

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