Herb Sundays 157: Stuart Murdoch (Belle and Sebastian)
The Belle and Sebastian leader, author, and taste maestro took the request to heart: "this is music I would listen to when no one else is listening"
Herb Sundays 157: Stuart Murdoch [Season 10 Premiere]
Playlist: Apple Music, Spotify.
Art by Michael Cina
Hey Sam
I just spent the day at the beach, a rare off day, drifting through some music I love. Yeah, this is music I would listen to when no one else is listening, even though there are quite a few well known jams in here.
I’m slow with new music, and even with old music, I tend to accumulate a couple of new old ones that I love every year, tunes that everyone already knew about and I’m last to the party..
But hey, as long as you make it to the party, and I like my party, that inimitable cache of tracks that do it for ME.
‘ It’s your right to choose, it’s your rock n roll’ - “ Middle Of The Road” by Denim
Thanks, Stuart
From the bio: Stuart Murdoch is a Scottish musician, composer, writer, and filmmaker, and the lead singer and songwriter for the iconic Glasgow-based band Belle and Sebastian. Since forming in the mid-1990s, the band has released twelve acclaimed studio albums, including Tigermilk and If You’re Feeling Sinister. Murdoch’s online diaries were collected into his first book, The Celestial Café, and his work is featured in Belle and Sebastian: Illustrated Lyrics. Murdoch also scripted, composed, and directed the movie God Help the Girl. An outspoken advocate for sufferers of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), Murdoch is also an ambassador for the Open Medicine Foundation, working to promote awareness of ME/CFS and the efforts to find a cure. His debut novel, Nobody’s Empire, was published by HarperVia in 2025.
As late Summer rolls and early Fall beckons, who better to pass the aux to than Stuart Murdoch, leader of Belle and Sebastian, one of the more formidable indie successes of the last 30 years, purveyors of a sweetness somehow immune to it all. Stuart’s taste in tunes is well-documented, having two LateNightTales mixes in the band’s name, even. The new book by Stuart is, of course, great, and of course has a killer playlist to boot. And so his Herb entry is exactly what it says on the tin.
I was talking with a friend on an extended vacation about how you can’t ever really chill out, and how losers like us need to instill a degree of sadness and discomfort into what would be pleasure; it's just a reality. It's also similarly true that you can’t get out of your way as a young person, and sad music is the fulcrum. We need the ‘only feel good feeling sad’ kind of lyrics (credit due: Reilly Brennan, Herb 58, on Belle and Sebastian), and so we have bands that trade in being beautiful bummers, many of the best being of Great British origin.
Though the band formed in 1996, I caught the perfect crest of their early wave as a college kid, thanks to local record stores like Neptune Records and Wazoo Records (recently under new management!) importing the Jeepster-backed EPs, and then the good work of Matador Records distributing far and wide. Those early CD EPs caught me right in the ribs while at the University of Michigan, indelibly linked to my experience, each with a chromatic cover encasing a few perfect little jewel box pop songs. So powerfully sentimental, but because they had an “import” sticker on them (like an inverse parental advisory sticker), it made it somehow more real, like other Rough Trade, 4AD, or Creation Records before it. This was a Pan-European emotionality bottled inside, therefore acceptable; sappiness from America could only be labeled sparkling dourness.
As well-known Belle scholar (he wrote the 33 1/3 book, even), Scott Plagenhoef (a fellow Michigan grad I just found out) has reported that the band and its mythology and press reticence benefited from the still-ascendant commercial internet, with just enough to learn about, but a gulf from full exposure. The band was also perhaps a forebear to the giant-sized bands of the ’00s like Broken Social Scene, or The Polyphonic Spree, or “how are there so many fucking people” type-mystery. They instead belong to a previous generation of indie-pop/C86/twee bands, or crews who knew how to dominate the single/EP format, my favorite of theirs being This Is Just A Modern Rock Song (Jeepster, 1998) with the titular track being a “My Name is” (1999) type introduction to the band. “I Know Where The Summer Goes” follows, which you can tell is going to be great from the title, and then comes maybe my favorite, a jaunty one called “The Gate” (a wispy Isobel Campbell vocal) with its big-ass rollicking piano à la Cat Stevens (cue Rushmore (also 1998) soundtrack, another school days classic), then closing with “Slow Graffiti” (“Listen Johnny / You're like a mother / to the girl you've fallen for/And you're still falling”) and that’s more nourishment in 4 tunes than you’ll get from most any album.
The one-color sleeves, reminiscent of The Smiths’ single covers but starring them and their mates instead of dead or lost TV/film stars, formed a constellation in your mind, a sensibility. And the lyrics about growing up and becoming both alive and maybe disenchanted with the world, also akin to The Smiths, whom Murdoch is a significant fan of (albeit, like us all, probably conflicted), hit just as hard as their predecessors. “you liberated a boy I never rated / And now he's throwing discus for Liverpool and Widnes” (a podcast with Craig Finn and Jon Ronson, a man with a voice somehow more soothing even that Stuart’s, explained to me that Widness is an unremarkable UK town) are as softly devistating as “Spending warm summer days indoors / Writing frightening verse / To a buck-toothed girl in Luxembourg.” A specificity that stays with you, and is remarkably relatable, even in its foreignness.
However, similar to my revisiting Postal Service for this Spring’s Dntel (Herb 149) post, the tunes and lyrics are tougher than remembered. The twee-ness was maybe, and probably still is, too allergic for many of my readers, but hearing with fresh ears, it feels alive again. Maybe nuanced emotion feels tough again in the hermetic pop landscape, but what I suspect is that music like B&S or Postal Service got perhaps unfairly bleached on the tray of other media of the time. I still haven’t seen Garden State (2004), for no good reason, but I suspect that it's a culprit piece of media.
Childhood looms over our whole lives, and so bands like Belle and The Smiths will forever rule because of it. All the tropes work: the domineering principal/headmaster, the old way versus our way, and then the descent into sexuality, attempting to lose our self-awareness. Take kissing as a kinetic fireplug: In Belle-world, “the boys are queuing up behind us,” is a competition/sports farce, the other side of the coin of “under the iron bridge/we kissed / and although I ended up with sore lips” both are a dissatisfaction of the status quo, a doomed vulnerability. A Made-in-The-UK sticker trademark.
To close, in this summer of Oasis, it’s important to give you a sense of the cultural milieu from where they came, alongside Cool Britannia/Brit Pop/Spice Girls at the top. Here’s Nick Hornby (Herb 115) writing for Salon in 1997, c/o the wayback machine:
“Gosh, but Britain's got loud all of a sudden. You can hardly hear yourself think at the moment, amidst the sounds of crashing and banging and weeping and wailing and self-proclamation and accusation and electric guitars. The noise started on May 1st, when Tony Blair was elected Prime Minister: Blair's landslide victory changed the national mood literally overnight…But there was no let-up. Our cricket and football teams began the summer by winning handsomely and unexpectedly, victories for which Tony Blair seemed obscurely responsible -- something to do with young people being better than old people at sports, presumably. The Oasis album came out amidst a great deal of ear-splitting ballyhoo, and Noel Gallagher was one of the first to be invited to 10 Downing Street for one of Blair's occasional artsy parties, another indication of fundamental change: The only rock 'n' roller that the previous administration had been able to invite to parties was Andew Lloyd Webber…
Belle and Sebastian have not, as far as I am aware, described themselves as "the best fooking (sic) band in the world," unlike the rest of their peers, and nor should they: A recent sold-out show I saw in London was a shambles, and to this member of the audience an irritating, as opposed to adorable, shambles….But quirkiness is a much rarer commodity in this new, brash Britain than it was. We used to be rather good at it -- generally, we took the view that if we couldn't compete with the Yanks properly, then we'd refuse to play the game by acting daft. This new Brit feistiness, however, has meant that everyone wants a shot at the mainstream: Self-confidence is in, and self-deprecating charm is out -- almost. Luckily, Belle and Sebastian have charm in glorious abundance…
Maybe you have to be living here to appreciate just how welcome this kind of egoless homecooked whimsy is at the moment, but if you've heard the Oasis album, or seen the mass Disteria on TV, you can probably guess. Me, I'm going to sit the New Britain out with a couple of Belle and Sebastian EPs and a good book; it won't be long before we turn back into ourselves again.
SALON | Nov. 14, 1997
Bonus Beats:
For Ethel, forever ago: obligatory re-post for her big release week
Herb Sundays 12: Ethel Cain
Herb Sundays 12: Ethel Cain (Apple / Spotify). Art by Cina. Photo by Jessica Lehrman.
I spoke with Daisy Alioto and Francis Zierer for their Tasteland podcast:
new Ghostly International Journal playlist update for ‘at work’
Solid Mix. Been on repeat for a few weeks.
Excited to listen...and today's MC cover design is glorious✨