It’s been a big year for Stuart Murdoch so far. Not only is the songwriter celebrating the 30th anniversary of his band Belle and Sebastian, he’s also marking the Stateside paperback release of his debut novel, Nobody’s Empire. Yet sitting under a tree in a Glasgow park, Murdoch appears unassuming. His bike beside him in the grass, and hiding behind a pair of sunglasses, the 57-year-old Scotsman blends into his surroundings rather than standing out as the deeply gifted writer and performer he is.
Murdoch formed Belle and Sebastian in the mid-’90s with his friend Stuart David before later recruiting vocalist/guitarist Stevie Jackson, cellist/vocalist Isobel Campbell, keyboardist Chris Geddes, and drummer Richard Colburn—most of whom would remain in the group, though Cambell and David would leave at the turn of the millennium to pursue solo careers (Sarah Martin, Bobby Kildea, and Dave McGowan joined later, forming the current septet). Taking their moniker from a short story Murdoch wrote—which itself took its name from a French children’s TV show from the ’60s, based on a novel from the same year—Belle and Sebastian played refreshingly warm indie pop with a sound borrowed as much from The Smiths as it was from The Kinks, The Velvet Underground, and even their contemporaries Yo La Tengo.
photo by Anna Isola Crolla
To get a sense of the band’s early impact, recall the scene in 2000’s High Fidelity where the plaintive opening of “Seymour Stein” plays from the overhead speaker of John Cusack’s character’s Chicago record shop, leading him to ask his lovably shy employee, “What’s this?” He replies, “It’s the new Belle and Sebastian, you like it?” Before Cusack can reply, his more boisterous employee, played by Jack Black, pops in to deride the melody and, after getting his “Walking on Sunshine” turned off, says, “OK, go listen to your sad bastard music.” The scene is hilarious, of course, with Black running and dancing around the store like the music nerd that he is; but Belle and Sebastian isn’t so much “sad bastard music” as it is intimate, narrative-driven pop. “Seymour Stein” is from the band’s third album, 1998’s The Boy with the Arab Strap, yet they’d established their sound even on their earliest material.
Tigermilk is one of those debut statements—however melancholy—that leaves a mark. Not unlike Songs of Leonard Cohen, the 1996 record announced the arrival of a major new songwriter. As he’d prove throughout his career—whether on Belle and Sebastian’s recent pair of LPs, his 2014 directorial debut God Help the Girl, or in his first novel—Murdoch is a compassionate writer with a particular affinity for down-and-out characters. He’s more interested in what people want than what they have. On Belle and Sebastian’s very first song, “The State I Am In,” he sings over gentle guitar strums, “I was surprised / I was happy for a day in 1975 / I was puzzled by a dream / That stayed with me all day in 1995,” going on to convey the varied emotional registers of his narrator. With a sunny melody, the song served as a warm introduction to a songwriter who had a keen ability to connect with listeners.
“From the initial days of the group, I had to do it,” Murdoch tells me of the origins of Belle and Sebastian. “The songs were bursting out of me, so in a sense I was doing that for me. I had to communicate. But I was reaching out to people. I think at the start it was more about me needing to make my mark, needing to communicate, needing to tell people what I’d been through, and just wanting to get a vibe going.” With songs like the horn-backed “She’s Losing It,” about a girl who’s “got a lot to be mad about,” and the Beatles-esque “You’re Just a Baby,” a portrait of a lovelorn twenty-something, Murdoch established a sometimes-melancholic yet ultimately upbeat vibe. Tigermilk even has the effects-tinged “Electronic Renaissance,” a danceable highlight with its tingly synths and fast drums.
The marked influence of early Velvet Underground—of Lou Reed’s songwriting, in particular—comes with Tigermilk’s side-B openers “I Could Be Dreaming” and “We Rule the School.” On the former, Murdoch sings, “For every step / There was a local boy who wants to be a hero”; and, later, “If you had such a dream / Would you get up / And do the things we believe in?” In his own way, without preaching, Murdoch is asking the listener if they’re really living their lives the way they want to be living them. The latter track is a bit more defiant, with the down-and-outers he’s been singing about having finally risen: “On a bus stop / In the town / We rule the school.” Toward the end of the song, he even echoes Reed’s “Miami, F-L-A” from the opening of “Walk on the Wild Side.” Like Reed’s character, Murdoch’s are searchers.
photo by Joshua Mellin
“From the initial days of the group, I had to do it. The songs were bursting out of me, so in a sense I was doing that for me. I had to communicate.”
photo by Joshua Mellin
These figures also populate If You’re Feeling Sinister, the follow-up to Tigermilk that was also released in 1996. On the folky album opener “The Stars of Track and Field,” Murdoch celebrates his titular underdogs when he sings that they’re “beautiful people.” On the freewheeling, Dylan-indebted “Me and the Major,” he voices them, singing that the naysayers are “taking it out on us,” and that he wants “to dance” and “get a whiskey.” The opener and other songs on Sinister, such as the similarly Dylan-nodding, “Like Dylan in the Movies” and the elegiac piano ballad “The Fox in the Snow,” would become essentials in their discography. Reflecting on Belle and Sebastian—who are currently playing both of these records in full on a 30th anniversary trek across the globe—Murdoch says, “It’s been a journey, and I think, as you go on, one thing that you’re thankful for is that the same people are together. Some people say, ‘Do you ever get tired of each other after all of these years?’ But the real thing is that it’s like family.
“Also,” he continues, “you have a confidence in each other, playing-wise. If the band were to splinter, we wouldn’t have the same sound and, when we get together to produce new stuff, everybody knows what to do. Everybody knows the best in each other. So really it’s a gift that we’ve been together for so long.” Speaking about the impact of those two debut records, Murdoch adds, “Our miracle year—my miracle year—is 1996, when the group first came together, when we recorded Tigermilk within three months and then, five months later, we recorded Sinister. I think we got kind of lucky that it was sort of spare, and I think some of my best songs are on those records.” Now playing Tigermilk one night and Sinister the next, Murdoch doesn’t tire of either record. “There’s no slack in it,” he says. “You feel just fine. I don’t know if we can do that with any other records. The records tell a story.”
photo by Søren Solkær, circa 2015
“When we get together to produce new stuff, everybody knows what to do. Everybody knows the best in each other. So really it’s a gift that we’ve been together for so long.”
photo by Marisa Privitera Murdoch, circa 2019
Murdoch has continued this story with his novel, which even shares its name with a Belle and Sebastian song. Semi-autobiographical and somewhat of an origin story, the book centers on a young man named Stephen navigating illness, music, and love. The book often reads as a coming-of-age tale in the vein of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, going so far as to borrow the name of James Joyce’s protagonist. As a plaudit on the back cover from Go-Betweens co-founder Robert Forster goes, Nobody’s Empire is a “come of wisdom, coming to California novel.” The protagonist is, in fact, a budding musician who arrives on the West Coast in search of gigs and fellow wanderers, hearkening back to On the Road.
Murdoch’s character also has Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and deals with its crashing effects throughout the book. In real life, Murdoch has ME and is an ambassador for the Open Medicine Foundation, trying to find a cure for the illness. Despite the toll of ME, Murdoch found writing the novel to be cathartic. “It’s difficult not to be confined by an illness that’s so pervasive. Actually, in the last couple of years—especially in this last year—I’ve had ME symptoms come back. It’s very difficult to tour with this sort of stuff, and it’s very difficult to just ignore it when you feel cruelly. But weirdly, the cathartic thing about the book was actually more from a mental side, because for a lot of the [writing period] we had to cancel some tours because I had a bit of a breakdown.”
photo by Joshua Mellin
Still, Murdoch decided to finish it. “I wasn’t working with the band, and I was putting my present experience from 2023 into the book and into Stephen’s character, and I was actually leaning on that a little bit more—on that sort of mental side of things, on the anxiety and depression side. So, in a sense, I was bringing that to the book, and I feel that the writing of the book did me all sorts of favors in the present, because it was almost like a consolation.” It’s a story that Murdoch has been wanting to tell for a while. “I was sort of building up to it,” he says. “I was kind of thinking, ‘Wow, did it really take you almost 40 years to learn to get right into telling this story?’ But I think it’s more fun to look back in reflection and tell a story rather than actually live it, and so I was happy to go back.”
With his book on shelves and his band touring the world again, Murdoch gets back on his bike and keeps riding. As he once sang, “If they follow you / Don’t look back / Like Dylan in the movies.” FL
