Stuart Murdoch has history with The List. He would drop off demos of his early songs at the Glasgow office in the hopes of coverage (we eventually obliged with the first review of Belle & Sebastian’s debut album Tigermilk) and even once applied to write for the magazine, attempting to woo a bemused editor with a piece on a fictional dead rock star, only to be informed that there were plenty of real ones he could be writing about instead.

Thirty years later, Murdoch has written his debut novel, Nobody’s Empire, named after an autobiographical Belle & Sebastian song about an aspiring young musician navigating illness and exploring spirituality in Glasgow’s leafy West End and beyond. This time he’s written about a real rock star: himself.

The novel’s lead character Stephen Rutherford is a proxy for Murdoch. Other names have been changed to justify a bit of creative license (although The Pastels manage to appear as themselves and local indie heroes The Chairs), while the narrative corresponds to a couple of years in the early nineties when Murdoch was first struck by ME (aka chronic fatigue syndrome), forged a couple of key lasting friendships with fellow sufferers and made a life-changing odyssey to San Francisco. 

‘I wanted to tell the story of ME and the three of us caught in a very small world and what we were going to do about it,’ he says during a break from recording the audio book in Glasgow’s La Chunky Studio. The List has been invited to sit in on his spoilertastic rendition of the last few chapters.

Fuelled by chocolate, with a cushion to muffle the sound of a rumbling tummy, his reading of his own writing flows (although it turns out ‘resignedly’ is a word which is easier to write than to say). Stumbling over the enunciation of ‘Todd Rundgren’, he decides to substitute the more mellifluous ‘Tom Petty’.

Murdoch has been writing short stories for years. Many Belle & Sebastian songs are self-contained vignettes. He has published The Celestial Café, a 2010 compilation of diary entries and musings, and scripted his 2014 film God Help the Girl. But a novel is a different beast. Murdoch says he ‘used to marvel’ at the novels published by original Belles bassist Stuart David. ‘It was like a foreign country to me, how could you keep it going?’

Murdoch started writing in 2019 during a gap in band activity and found he was able to keep it going through lockdown and beyond, even as his ME flared up and the band were forced to cancel a number of tours.

‘It started to mean an awful lot to me because I was bringing a lot of present feelings into the characters,’ he says. ‘So really the Stephen of the book is the Stephen of now as well as the Stephen 30 years ago. I always felt I was being true to myself but your truth is always different from everybody else’s truth and that’s why I’ve changed the names.’ 

As he records the final pages, emotion wells up and Murdoch has to take a moment. The book ends hopefully and there is clearly potential to follow up with a novelised version of the formative years of Belle & Sebastian. 

‘[Belles guitarist] Stevie Jackson always said to me right at the start “there’s two Belle & Sebastians, the one in your head and the seven of us sitting here waiting for you to decide what’s next”. He’s right. It became a real thing, but for the year before and a year and a half afterwards, it was a fictional thing playing out in my head with the world of the songs, so maybe I might write more... ’

Nobody’s Empire is published by Faber & Faber on Tuesday 8 October; Nobody’s Empire: An Evening With Stuart Murdoch will tour the UK throughout October.