Stuart Murdoch passes through Dundee “all the time”.
But the Belle and Sebastian frontman cannot remember ever being on stage here.
“It’s funny because I have family in Carnoustie, so we’re up and down quite a lot,” says Stuart, phoning in while on a walk near his home in Glasgow.
“My mum, she passed away a couple of years ago, but she lived there. And my sister’s still there with her family, so we visit a lot.”
Proving his local know-how, he shouts out West Port’s Parlour Cafe as his go-to coffee shop in town.
“And I love walking up the Law, or visiting the shore at Broughty Ferry,” he adds. “I love when you can be close to a city but feel like you’re out of the way.”
For Stuart, Dundee feels like “one of the select few Scottish cities that’s on the up”.
“The light seems to be fading from a lot of Scottish smaller towns and the cities, but Dundee seems to be bucking the trend,” he observes.
“Especially with all the work that’s been done on the front, it’s an attractive city to visit now.”
But despite frequenting the City of Discovery on his personal time, 56-year-old Stuart’s never played to the city’s crowd with his band.
“It’s funny, and a bit shameful really, because I’ve been trying to get Belle and Sebastian in the Caird Hall for 25 years!” he reveals.
“And the one time we did manage to get a booking, years ago, it fell down. It’s just been bad luck.”
Is the new book more than a Belle and Sebastian memoir?
Now he’s finally getting on a Dundee stage – but not as a frontman. Instead, he’ll be up there as an author, in conversation with 6 Music DJ Chris Hawkins.
Stuart’s debut novel Nobody’s Empire – which he hopes will be “the Trainspotting of ME” – came out in 2024.
Inspired by Stuart’s own life in the Glasgow music scene and his well-documented struggles with ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome) the loosely fictionalised account follows main character Steph as he learns to live with his illness in his early 20s, and makes his shambling way towards what will be a lifelong career as a musician.
For Stuart, writing a novel wasn’t the aim of the game. Nor was writing a memoir.
“I just had a notion that I wanted to write about this period of my life,” he explains. “And I didn’t necessarily mean it to be fiction, I just started writing – in much the same way that I write songs.
“As you can imagine, when you sit down to write a song, it’s not strictly facts that you’re writing. It’s this sort of dreamy world.
“And I think I wrote the book from the same outlook.”
Why ME isn’t the star of the show for Stuart
And although ME is a constant of the story – both protagonists Steph’s and Stuart’s own – the book is not a piece of activism. To Stuart, it’s a piece of art.
“I’m not a prescriptive writer, I just write what I write,” he says. “And mostly I write to entertain.
“So this isn’t a story of ‘woe is me, isn’t this awful’ or ‘shouldn’t there be more help for people with this?’.
“I mean, I do think those things. But they’re not really written into the book.”
Writing any sort of book (or any sort of song) is impressive for an artist who has said he “doesn’t really read novels or listen to music”.
But this too is wrapped up in ME – and the years of his early life that Stuart spent cocooned in records and novels, trying to stay still enough to recover from it.
“I remember once reading an interview with (REM frontman) Michael Stipe saying he doesn’t listen to music. And I love REM but I thought: ‘Who does he think he is?!’. And now I say exactly the same thing,” confesses Stuart.
“I spent so much of my early 20s listening to music and reading novels in my room. But when I started making my own stuff, I took in less and less. If you’re constantly taking in other people’s words, it can be harder to find your own.”
‘I sit by rivers and ponder’ – Stuart Murdoch
So what does the dad-of-two do in his spare time?
“I sit by rivers, and I ponder,” he says feyly. As if to prove a point, I hear the roar of the River Kelvin in the background.
“No, I come walks down to the river here, that makes me really happy. I meditate a lot,” he continues. “I do read, but I tend to read mostly self-help books, self-improvement.
“I think that kind of literature can be overlooked, and everybody’s on a journey. So I’m interested in other people’s advice.”
Indeed, a huge part of Stuart’s own journey (and his novel) is his spirituality.
An avid churchgoer and frequenter of Buddhist centres up and down the country, he describes his coming to his own music as “meeting God at the piano” in an flash of inspiration at his mother’s old house in Renfrewshire.
“Now I sing in my church choir, and sometimes I even take the services,” he says cheerfully. “I think in most of my work in the 90s and 2000s, I was a bit coy about my beliefs.
“But I very much am a churchgoer, and I think as I get older, that thing only gets stronger.”
Band and fans ‘are a middle aged couple’
Nearly 30 years on from their genesis, Belle and Sebastian fans have grown up along with Stuart and the band.
“We’re a middle-aged couple, us and the fans,” he chuckles.
“But you know, we’ve seen a lot of second generation fans the last couple of years, a lot of young people. That’s been really nice.”
His own young people are sons Denny and Nico who he shares with wife Marisa Privitera.
And beyond some schoolyard inklings that they might have “a famous dad”, Stuart reckons they’re largely unbothered about their father’s near-legendary status in the indie music scene.
But after attending “cool, hip” gigs in the last month from the likes of cult Irish singer-songwriter Orla Gartland and ‘Messy’ hitmaker Lola Young, Stuart’s not trying to cling to trendiness among a younger demographic.
“The crowds at these gigs were all young 20-something females, and I was thinking about how we used to be the cool, hip band around,” he laughs softly.
“Of course you don’t take your own audience for granted, but you have to let people have their own bands.”
Bring your Belle and Sebastian requests to Dundee show
Now as he prepares to get on stage without the rest of his Belle and Sebastian cohorts, even a seasoned musician like Stuart admits he’s feeling nervous.
“I love having my band, this solo thing is quite new to me,” he says, so quietly he’s hard to hear over the rush of the water.
“But I’ll bring my guitar and I might take some requests – if I can accommodate them in a not too rubbish way.”
Stuart Murdoch is at Fat Sam’s, Dundee, with Chris Hawkins on Friday May 9 2025.
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