Belle And Sebastian's 'sad-bastard' music has made them morose indie favourites for a decade. But their new album may surprise longtime fans, writes Brian Boyd

The nominees were Coldplay, Steps, Propellerheads, Cornershop, Billie Piper (pre-Dr Who), the improbably named Hinda Hicks, Gomez, Another Level, Cleopatra, 5ive, and Belle and Sebastian. The award was for the Best British Newcomer at the 1999 Brit awards.

At the time, Coldplay were unknowns. Steps were huge and were widely tipped to win. So when Zoe Ball announced that the winners were Belle and Sebastian, there was widespread disbelief. Nobody had heard of this band; some doubted they even existed. Maybe it was a post-modern, KLF-type prank.

The next day a tabloid newspaper boasted the headline "Scots band cheat at Brits". It was the very early days of online voting, and the allegation was that a whole slew of votes had been received from two Scottish universities.

It all made perfect sense. Belle and Sebastian (named after French comic characters) were archetypal undergraduate indie fare. These post-Smiths sensitive souls were the very reification of student angst-lite.

A scene in the film High Fidelity summed them up perfectly. The dweeby record shop assistant puts on a B&S record in the shop. Enter his co-worker (Jack Black), who, referring to the music, asks threateningly "What is this? I don't want to hear any of your sad-bastard music."

The band formed in 1996 in an all-night cafe in Glasgow and have wrestled with the unfair "twee" label ever since. They blagged their way onto a government-sponsored music business course and, as a project, recorded their first album. Only 1,000 copies of Tigermilk were released on vinyl and copies of this first pressing now fetch four-figure sums at record fairs.

While not quite on the periphery over the years, Belle and Sebastian have never had any huge crossover appeal. But their intensely loyal fanbase ensures that their albums always chart and their shows always sell out. Film-makers love them: apart from the mention in High Fidelity, Todd Solondz used their music to good effect in Storytelling. The more cult-like US television shows like to drop their name - and the reference is usually something to do with the problems a shy, sensitive character has in tracking down one of their rare EPs.

B&S have never been ones for the "grip and greet" promotional opportunity, though a recent move to the Rough Trade label has galvanised them somewhat. For their new album, The Life Pursuit, the whey-faced band, who permanently look like they're waiting for an audition for a Mike Leigh movie, decamped to the Babylon of Los Angeles.

A circumspect Stuart Murdoch (lead singer) takes up the story: "We wanted Tony Hoffer to produce it. He's also produced Air, Beck and The Thrills, and he's based in Los Angeles, so we travelled over to him. It was very relaxing, like a holiday in fact. What I loved about it was driving to the studio every day and listening to great 1960s pop music on the radio, which really got me motivated for the sessions.

"You wouldn't know it was recorded in Los Angeles, though - I'm not the type of songwriter who is influenced by his surroundings. And we're very much a Glasgow band; the city always features in our work. It was hardly going to be a Californian-sounding record anyway. We had all the songs ready before we went out there."

Although he imparts that The Life Pursuit is "no big jump" from previous albums, it's clear that the band are intent on travelling further away from their initial bedsit indie sound.

"There is this fixed image of us as a band who have these delicate arrangements and acoustic observations, and that's just not true" Murdoch says. "The band has changed a lot over the years, people have joined and left. I tend to just follow my nose with the music. We are pretty stringent about the songs, always lambasting ourselves. We are really concerned about stuff like the tracklisting on the albums, and particularly on this one.

"To me, the sequencing of an album is like editing a film. It's very difficult to get right. If you listen to The Unforgettable Fire by U2, you'll find that it has the right song at the right time and it really works for them. That's an example of an album that is greater than the sum of its parts."

While there was no conscious decision to subvert their sound, the new album certainly contains a few surprises. Song for Sunshine is the closest B&S have ever got to a Sly and the Family Stone/Earth, Wind and Fire sound, while White Collar Boy sounds like 1970s glam rock. They sound like The Go-Betweens on the album's stand-out, Another Sunny Day, while fans of the Tigermilk-era B&S will be joyed by the beautiful Dress Up in You.

"There is a side of the band that has been there for quite some time, but we've just never put it down before," Murdoch says of the funk/glam inflections on the album. "I suppose we've been heading towards this for a few years now. But as I said, this is not a huge jump. There's always been these elements to our music - it's just that people tend to only mention the 'fragile acoustic' stuff."

Murdoch has long been a Christian (the songs do contain oblique references to this fact) and up until recently he worked as the live-in janitor at his local church. "It's probably deeply unfashionable," he says of his religion. "But that doesn't bother me one iota. It's a big part of my life." He would like to fuse religion and music more overtly in the future.

"What I really want to do as a different project, away from the band, at some stage is to record some church hymns, some really old hymns. But then again, I'd also really like to write a girl group album and I also want to make an album with a west of Scotland women's choir."

Belle and Sebastian play The Ambassador, Dublin on Sunday and Monday. The Life Pursuit is released on February 10th