Broken Dreams Club Interview: Stuart Murdoch

Photo Credit: Stuart Murdoch

As the chief songwriter for beloved Glaswegian indie-pop group Belle and Sebastian, Stuart Murdoch has created some of the most memorable musical characters of the past 30 years.

Whether illustrating a teenager’s love for equines, speculating on the sexual orientation of a professional baseball player, documenting a trove of irreverent sinners, lamenting the lost potential of brilliant artists or cataloging despondent loners, Murdoch has long demonstrated a singular capacity for world-building in four-minute time frames.

So, it should come as no surprise that he’s written his first novel. 

Largely autobiographical the novel, “Nobody’s Empire,” captures the protagonist, Stephen, as he battles myalgic encephalomyelitis (commonly referred to as chronic fatigue syndrome), an ailment that Murdoch has contended with for more than 30 years. In the novel–named after a 2019 Belle and Sebastian song–Stephen befriends another isolated teen, Kira, before eventually setting off for a transformative trip to California–events that mirror Murdoch’s life.  

On Monday, February 10 at The Chapel, Murdoch will sit down with Slumberland Records founder Mike Schulman and local artist Nommi Alouf to discuss “Nobody’s Empire.” 

Prior to that, Murdoch spoke with Broken Dreams Club about the challenges of his illness, visiting San Francisco, transitioning into novel writing and what’s next for him and his band. 

For starters—how is this book tour going? How has the experience been so far?

It’s working out great—I'm really enjoying it. I mean that in a practical sense. I'm a bit under the weather at the moment, so that's the kind of downside. But then the upside is everything else. It feels like I’m just travelling around, carrying a suitcase full of stories with And with the format so far, it’s almost like an American football game, with four quarters. I start with doing readings and we play some music clips. Then we do the interview with the host and I then play some songs acoustically. And then we finish with a Q and A. It's a nice variety for an evening—everything moves quite smoothly. 

You’ve spent the last 30 years on tour, for the most part. What’s it like to be travelling now, by yourself? With no band and only a book in hand—as you say just carrying a suitcase full of stories? 

I’ve always been quite reticent since the band started to actually get out my guitar, and do something by myself, because, you know—I fought so hard to get my band, I don’t want to be without them. But I think this has been a perfect situation for me–to kind of combine a few things by playing music and doing the reading. It’s almost like, if you have that tool in your arsenal, then why not use it? If I was just supporting a book, and I was just going to visit book shops, it wouldn't be so much fun, and you also wouldn’t get that many people showing up. It’s been nice to mix things up a bit.

I don’t think anyone is in the least bit surprised that you’ve written a book, given your novelistic approach to your songwriting. From the very beginning, Belle and Sebastian introduced such rich, fully developed characters. You go all the way back to the “State I’m In,” which is probably the first Belle and Sebastian song many people heard, and there is this central character who feels so real and multi-dimensional. Where did that approach come from—was it the result of being an avid reader?

I think there's such a huge difference—it’s almost like a through-the-looking-glass thing. There are two sides of this endeavor—one of being a consumer of artistic things, and the other to be a producer. They’re so separate and different. Because I can remember trying to write songs in this era when I was consuming a lot of music and reading books all the time, and I just couldn't do it. It wasn’t until I went through this illness and disaster, and years of being in this kind of vacuum that I actually found my own voice. And there’s not many things I set out to do. It just kind of comes out that way, and that's genuine. We were talking about this last night in Toronto, and I think it all comes back to the illness. It all comes back to my life stopping when I was 20. I had these four, five, six years of very little happening. And instead of being part of the world, I had to just be the observer. And at that point, I started to romanticize about the people that I was observing. I could be sitting in a laundry, and somebody would come in, put their wash in, and leave, and I would write a song about them. There was so much that I extrapolated. I wondered what their life was like, because I was standing still. So, I put those thoughts and movements into my songs.

Back to “Nobody’s Empire.” You started writing this book in 2019, right? What prompted the decision to write a novel?

Yeah, it was a kind of lazy decision. I wanted to do something creative that wasn't out of the realm of the band. I thought I might do a comic novel, and it actually started like that. I was supplying pages to a friend of mine, Graham, who was illustrating them, but once I got going, it sort of quickly outstripped the pace that he could write. And I thought, I'm ‘I'm just going to keep going with this and see where it goes.’

How daunting was this task? You’ve been writing almost mini-novels your whole life in the forms of your songs—did they prepare you at all for this endeavor?

I think I was probably just naturally building up to this. I remember Stuart [David] from the band in the early days, he used to write novels, and I thought that was amazing. It was like the moon to me that somebody could just sit down and fill page upon page of thoughts and observations. But again, I'm quite lazy. I don't try too hard. It’s great if you're going to start somewhere, to do what I’m doing. Like “This Side of Paradise,” or “A Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man,” just this side-step from what actually happened. It wasn't this huge amount of invention.

And the novel shares the same title as the 2019 Belle and Sebastian song that opened “Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance,” which captures the struggles you’ve had with chronic fatigue syndrome. When you wrote that song, did you have any idea that you could expand it into a novel?

Not at all, actually. Even that song surprised me at the time, because although I've been writing inadvertently about ME for years, that was the first time that I'd really sort of captured it in the era and the time when it happened. It was actually years later when I did actually write about those initial experiences. I was doing some live readings of some of the passages before the book was fully written, and somebody afterwards on Facebook commented, ‘oh, you should call your book “Nobody’s Empire.”’ I immediately realized that that would be the obvious title.

You’ve been very candid about your struggles with chronic fatigue syndrome. When you were first diagnosed, what were those early periods like? I can imagine that must have been incredibly frustrating, since so little was known about the disease at the time.

It was a psychological nightmare. It's like the rug is pulled right out from under you and your life is stopped completely. And nobody can tell you what's going on. There is no road map to recovery–not even a road map to being ill. I remember going to see a specialist, and he was very nice and said, ‘look, we don't know much about this. You know more about this than we do.’ And then he sent me home, and that was it.

The main character in the book, Stephen, obviously shares so many similarities with you. Was there ever any thought of writing a memoir instead of a novel?

Again, I really didn’t think too much about it. The moment that I wrote the first page, it set the tone. I gave Stephen a name, and everything just felt natural to me. It wasn't really until I finished the book and my agent was like, ‘what is this? Is this autofiction?’ I didn't even know what that was. He said, ‘well, it's not a straight memoir,’ and I said, well, it can be whatever you want it to be. But in the end, I'm happy that they called it fiction.

In the book, Stephen meets Carrie, who is also dealing with health issues. I think people can make all sorts of assumptions about who Carrie might represent—is she based in real life? Or was that character completely made up?

She is very much based on my best friend, Kira. Kira is on the cover of “If You’re Feeling Sinister,” and she's my best friend to this day. The friendship is the absolute core of the book—I meet her on page two and that’s where the magic is. Everything just flows from there—that friendship. And there is a little bit of, ‘well, If they're so close, why aren’t they a couple?’ It’s definitely the central relationship in the book.

With a subject matter that hewed so closely to your life, did it feel liberating to write “Nobody’s Empire?” Or was it scary to be that open?

I don't find anything scary. When you've been through something like ME and you're still going through it, and you've had really bad depression and all that stuff, creativity and being open is actually almost a relief—it’s like the counterpoint. It's a consolation to be so open about this. It's almost like an excuse to be completely, well—not necessarily brave, but just out there. Kira is the same way—where it's sort of bred in us—this inborn sort of stubbornness and openness, because we know what life is. Life is too short, and we've wasted so much time being ill—so we’re just going to tell it how it is. Since the start of Belle and Sebastian, that's always been my driving thing. I have no qualms about it. I will never turn away from getting up on a stage because the alternative is darkness and that is no fun at all.

A central part of the novel and a central part of your life story is this journey to California. You’ve talked in the past about how transformative that experience was for you, and I know that you lived in San Francisco for a short while. Why was that moment in your life so important for you?

Well, it was an accidental thing to be honest. It could have been Melbourne, or it could have been Nice. In the book—and what happened in the book did kind of happen to us—the boys just picked a place to get away for the winter and be warm in a Mediterranean climate. In real life, we actually picked San Diego because we heard it had the best weather all around. But the thing is— the plane landed in San Francisco first. We were there for a few days before we continued our journey. San Francisco was really the first city outside of Glasgow I spent any time in. It got its hooks into me really quickly. And so we went down to San Diego, and that's written about in the book, but I was always getting pulled back to the Bay. San Francisco was such a contrast to Glasgow and there was an obvious liberation happening there. We started to literally feel better because of the weather and there was a lot of baggage that was lifted there. I know it’s a cliché, but when you come to a new city, especially one California, you can be whoever the hell you want to be. In Glasgow, there were a lot of people that still wanted you to stay in your place. They would look down their nose at you if you wanted to try and be a songwriter. It really did all happen in California for us.

And, like every novelist, you have to determine when the story ends. How did that process work for you? 

I remember the advice that a friend of mine, Barry Mendel, gave me. He was the producer in a movie I made called “God Help The Girl.” When I was writing that movie, he said, ‘whatever you do, before you start writing, just decide where it starts and where it stops.’ And so, I used that for the book. I did at least know that much when I set out to write it. I knew it started when I met with Kira, and I knew it was going to finish two years later, just when I came back from the trip. That at least was set in stone. But actually, it's funny, because the American part originally was only meant to be about the last 20 percent of the book. It contrasts nicely with the first half—where we really don't go out of our postcode area. Suddenly, the two of us are in California and more starts to happen. And I ended up writing much more than I thought I would about that trip.

Going back to San Francisco—you’ll be returning here on Monday, to speak at the Chapel. Are your experiences coming back to San Francisco always special moments for you? Anything you’re particularly looking forward to seeing here?

I just let it happen. Sometimes, when you're on tour, you don't get a chance to do all the things you want to do, but in San Francisco it tends to be different. There’s a character called Jeannie in the book, and I get to hang with the real Jeannie in San Francisco, which is great. She's remained a firm friend for years. Actually, the last time I was there, in May, we rolled up to Oakland, and I was, as usual, really sick. I got off the bus and I went for acupuncture, and it was like a Saturday morning, and the center said they could take me, but I would have to be in a class where I was part of a demonstration. I went into this kind of lecture theater, and they put me on a table. And there were like, 50 Chinese students learning acupuncture, and I was the subject. There was this very good healing vibe about, and they were all smiling and happy to be there. I was ‘like, San Francisco, you've done it again.’ I got out of the acupuncture and I thought I should really go back to the bus and rest, but then I just said ‘fuck it, I'm getting on the BART’, and I ended up in Mission Dolores Park. I made it there and met my friend Heather, and we just caught up and it was such an amazing day.

You’ll be speaking with Mike Schulman from Slumberland Records and Nommi Alouf. You mentioned these book talks as almost “American football games with four quarters.” What can we expect on Monday?

The fun thing about every talk so far—and I've done this in the UK as well—is that every night, it's a different host. Every day goes in a different direction. We don't know where it's going to go, and I'm really happy about that. This will be the first time that there's two hosts and Nommi is kind of in the book–she’s represented by this character called Sharon, who is a DJ that Stephen runs into. But I think it will be that kind of slightly misty thing, where it’s kind of hard to tell what will happen.

Looking ahead—any other novels in your future? Or was this a one-time endeavor?

I love storytelling and I guess music is what I'm best at. But I'm always just waiting for the next thing. My radar is on all the time. I think on the whole, I'll probably do less Belle and Sebastian stuff in the next 10 or so years, and try to do slightly different creative endeavors. I'm not sure if I'll end up writing another book, but I always feel very creative, and I know that time is short.

Belle and Sebastian played a bunch of shows last year, but nothing is scheduled for 2025. Do you all have any live dates in the offing? 

We’re going to wait until 2026 and we're going to some bigger shows. Usually, we start recording music right after we're done touring, but I wanted a little break. I wanted a chance to maybe think about doing something else. Those guys are all doing their own thing, I mean, Stevie [Jackson] is recording just now, Chris [Geddes] and David [McGowan] are writing together, Sarah [Martin] is writing. Everybody's doing their own thing.

What about new music? You all have been incredibly prolific over your career. “Late Developers” came out in 2023—can we expect new music soon?

Yeah--there won't be an album, which is what I was kind of hinting at. I personally want to put my creativity into a different project. I've been writing different music. I'm interested in writing for choirs, actually—more like a kind of spiritual music, this kind of gospel, churchy type music. This is just early days, and I really don't know which choir I'm going to do it for, but sometimes you just gotta swing the bat the other way and see what happens.

Show Details:
Stuart Murdoch “Nobody’s Empire Book Tour”
Where: The Chapel
When: 7:30 p.m., Monday, February 10
Tickets: $30, available here.