They say that you should write what you know, so Stuart Murdoch did just that. The frontman of Scottish indie-pop stalwarts Belle and Sebastian looks slightly aghast at the realisation that he is a newly minted member of quite a niche club: the rock star-turned novelist.
“Now I’m trying to think who else I’ve read,” he says in his soft burr. Let’s not mention Morrissey, I suggest. Richmond Fontaine’s Willy Vlautin? The Decemberists’ Colin Meloy, perhaps? He scratches his head, deep in thought. “Nick Cave is a very competent one, and the fellah from Teardrop Explodes, Julian Cope – although he was mostly writing about the music that he loved. Yeah.” He sighs, smiling. ”It’s a small group, isn’t it?”
Murdoch’s debut novel Nobody’s Empire is a semi-autobiographical work based around a period of his early 20s when he was newly diagnosed with the chronic illness ME (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis), also known as chronic fatigue syndrome. His main character Stephen is in mourning for his old life – now fragmented, due to his debilitating illness – while attempting to forge new friendships, find a community that understands him and build on the tentative songwriting career that he has begun to dabble in.
It’s not Murdoch’s first foray outside of his band; in the past, he has written and directed a film (2014′s God Help the Girl) and published The Celestial Cafe, a collection of blog posts and essays chronicling a three-year period of making and touring two albums with his band. Nobody’s Empire, however, is certainly his most personal work to date. Set in the early 1990s, it’s often poignant but also darkly humorous, as Stephen contends with his new reality alongside his best friends and fellow ME sufferers Carrie and Richard.
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We had sex maybe once a month. The constant rejection was soul-crushing, it felt like my ex didn’t even like me
“All of the major things in the book pretty much happened to me – even if they happened in a slightly different order,” says Murdoch. “There definitely is a Richard and a Carrie in real life, although they’re slight composites; Ciara, who’s the daughter of the Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty [and features on the cover of Belle and Sebastian’s 1996 album If You’re Feeling Sinister], is my best friend to this day, so I wrote her as Carrie. But I had to invent conversations and Carrie had to be different from Ciara.”
Murdoch began writing the book in 2019 with the intention of it being a graphic novel illustrated by Graham Samuels, who had previously worked with Belle & Sebastian. That idea fell by the wayside after he began writing more quickly than Samuels could illustrate, “and I just kept going”.
Nobody’s Empire is set between Glasgow and California, as Stephen and his friend Richard decide to pool their limited resources and escape the grimness of a Scottish winter. They head for the west coast for three months, where they encounter a variety of interesting characters in a bid to warm their bones, expand their horizons, research alternative ME therapies and tentatively further their nascent music careers.
Murdoch’s conversational, endearingly rambling writing style – something that Belle and Sebastian fans will recognise immediately – makes for engaging descriptive passages. The novel is a travelogue, a memoir, an exploration of faith (Murdoch is a Christian, although admits to a growing interest in Buddhism these days) and a love letter to his favourite music.
Maurice O’Sullivan said he imagined that he was telling his stories to the old women on [Great Blasket] island. So I imagined I was talking to my ME people; both my circle, and ME people in general
— Stuart Murdoch
There are obvious crossovers between him and Stephen – would it be correct to assume that Murdoch, too, was the kind of young man who made mixtapes in a bid to woo girls?
“Yeah, it was me,” he admits, grinning. “And I do recognise, when I read back through the book and re-edited it, there were a lot of pathetic attempts at romance – but those pathetic attempts were pretty much real. I imagined Stephen, in a way, being a little bit of a Bertie Wooster character from the Jeeves novels; he and his friends falling in love with every passing female. There’s a little bit of that same sort of running joke with Stephen and Carrie, too. [Ciara and I] would sit for long hours in cafe windows – not just talking about people we wanted to be with, but things that we wanted to do, and things that we couldn’t do.”
There is also a link between the Belle and Sebastian song of the same title, originally released on their 2015 album Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, which referenced Murdoch’s illness. After reading certain passages in the novel, lines from the song like “I was like a child, I was light as straw / And my father lifted me up there / Took me to a place where they checked my body / My soul was floating in thin air” have an added resonance. So, too, does a passage where Stephen suffers a breakdown in his parents’ house, and the option of ending his life fleetingly presents itself as an option. Things really did get that bad at one point, says Murdoch, and the illness continues to impact both his mental and physical health to this day.
[ Bernard MacLaverty: ‘You must want to write but anger spurs you on’Opens in new window ]
“I think it’s useful to be open and I’m not shy about being open,” he says, nodding. “In fact, I had a tougher time with mental illness. I had a physical and mental breakdown about two-and-a-half years ago, and I feel like I’m still in it. It’s just one of these things.” He shrugs. “It was coming out of lockdown, and things were much harder trying to tour with the band, and there was pressure there; and the pressure of bringing up two kids [11-year-old Denny and eight-year-old Nico, whom he shares with his photographer wife Marisa Privitera], I found really difficult. So I had this breakdown.
“The one good thing – or the thing that I clung on to – was the book. Actually, I was feeding a lot of the information and emotions that I was feeling back into that place, and I was probably leaning a little bit harder on that mental health aspect during the life of the book. Certainly, I was feathering my present experience back into the book. But I think that’s allowed.”
He recalls how important it was for him to write in his own voice, and for an audience that would understand where he was coming from.
“Okay, here’s a parallel,” he says, leaning forward. “I mentioned Bernard MacLaverty before, and I asked him one time back in our ME days: ‘Bernard, give me a book’. He gave me this book called Twenty Years A-Growing by Maurice O’Sullivan, about life on the Blasket Islands off the southwest corner of Ireland. And I loved that book. Maurice O’Sullivan wasn’t a writer, but he’d been asked to write about his life and he said he imagined that he was telling his stories to the old women on the island. So I imagined I was talking to my ME people; both my circle, and ME people in general. Not to say that it’s just for ME people, but that’s where it started. That’s who I felt I was talking to.”
Now 56, does he regret not applying his songwriting talents to the novel form earlier in his life? He shakes his head.
“When the band came along, it felt like the greatest gift of my life,” he says. “It was a life-changing moment in a good way, so I was so thankful and grateful for it. And then it became this thing that I had never predicted. I thought that I was capable of making one record, maybe two at most, and then I’d call it a day – that was all I wanted to do. I never thought I’d play concerts, because of my health. So I’ve never taken the band for granted, and it’s always come first. There’s a couple of times that I’ve stepped away – to make a movie and to write this book – but I’ll always come back to the band. Because it’s much more than just music; it’s my family now.”
That doesn’t mean that there won’t be other novels in the future, though. He is dedicating the best part of a year to promoting the book, but also has ambitions to record a gospel album next; whether that’s a solo project or one with Belle and Sebastian remains to be seen.
“If anything was going to be a solo thing, it would probably be my exploration of faith in music,” he nods. “I think I would love to work with other singers on that. So if there’s one thing that would be outwith the band, it would be that. But we’ll have to see.”
Last year was a “disaster” as the band were forced to cancel four tours because of his ill health; this year, he says, has certainly been better. And there is plenty to look forward to, although he is characteristically mellow about the prospect of the novel becoming a No 1 bestseller.
“The thing is, not everyone’s gonna read it, of course,” he shrugs, smiling again. “I’ll be happy if people find the book the same way they found our band; if it means something to them, I’ll be delighted.”
Nobody’s Empire is published by Faber on October 10th
