Belle and Sebastian singer on the real-life inspirations for his novel

“When it comes down to it, it’s a story,” the Belle and Sebastian frontman tells me as we sit on a bench outside Kibble Palace in Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens.

“I didn’t plan it necessarily as fiction, but I knew I wanted to change the names of the major players. I wanted to be freed up to write a story, to be freed up to combine events and combine characters. And, crucially, I wanted to be able to make up conversations. Because who remembers conversations?

Bell and Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch in Glasgow's Kibble Palace (Image: Gordon Terris)“It wasn’t until Faber got it that we were like, ‘OK what is this? Is this autofiction?’ We were happy in the end just calling it fiction, but it’s really a story.”

Your story, Stuart?

“My story. Absolutely.”

How much your story? Is Stephen in the book 99 percent you? 87 percent you?

“Maybe about 83,” Murdoch suggests.

“Stephen is smarter than me, is less irritating than me.”

Murdoch in 2024 is far from irritating company. He has arrived here today on his scooter looking the picture of the indie pop star at rest.

It’s good to see, because the last few years have been turbulent ones for Belle and Sebastian. The band had to cancel tours in 2022 and 2023 as a result of Covid and Murdoch’s health issues. But they were back on the road earlier this year playing gigs in the United States, Europe and Australia.

“We had our busiest year for five or six years,” Murdoch points out. “We toured pretty steadily from May to a couple of weeks ago, so that was terrific.”

Things on the band front will be quieter for the next few months, however, as he gives his time to promoting the book.

Nobody’s Empire is a portrait of the time before he was who he is now. A time - at the beginning of the 1990s - when he was struggling with the onset of ME and its debilitating consequences.

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“My mum, who was a nurse, was the only one who really noticed how much I’d slowed down. I was losing weight. My usual sparkle had gone. She said, ‘I hope you don’t have that ME,’ because she knew about it from friends.

“My doctor sort of confirmed it and then he sent me up to Ruchill, which at the time was the department of diseases and tropical medicine. There was a nice chap there, a consultant, not in ME, who said to me, ‘You know more about this than we do at this point,’ which was at least a humble admission.”

If anything, Murdoch says, the book starts at a point when things were beginning to get a little better for him.

“The previous two years had been harder. But that was almost too dark. That would have been depressing to write about. I didn’t want to write about that. I wanted to write about where the upswing started, but I didn’t want to shy away from the dark stuff.”

He doesn’t. “Later I was told the doctor gave me a week to live if I carried on with my regime,” Stephen/Murdoch writes on page five.

It was that serious, Stuart? “Oh yeah. And it’s almost easier to go back and talk about it in a story form because it feels like a different person. But those times, of course, were terrible, awful.”

There’s a moment in the book where he writes about his father coming in and scooping him out of bed and into an ambulance. That happened?

He nods. “This is from a typical west of Scotland family where we never talked about stuff. But my illness changed our whole family. It changed my relationship with my dad. My dad just didn’t get it. ‘Why are you at home? Why did you quit uni?’ In his grumpy sort of way he was trying to cajole me out of bed, just not getting it.

“And that moment where he scooped me up that was the change. From that point onwards. My parents were so thankful when I went into hospital. They thought they were going to lose me.”

Bell and Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch sells the Big Issue to raise awareness of the magazine (Image: free) Really, though, Nobody’s Empire is a book about resilience and finding ways of coping. That is Murdoch’s true story. Stephen finds solace in nature, in faith and in music. He takes to writing letters to people; to Harriet, the lead singer of the English band The Sundays and Hal Hartley the American indie film director. He even wrote to Quentin Crisp.

Harriet doesn’t write back, but Crisp does.

“The Quentin Crisp one was later on," Murdoch admits. "We met Quentin Crisp the first time the band went to New York. Somebody arranged for us to have lunch with Quentin Crisp quite randomly. And it was very nice to meet him, but at the same time it was a bit of a question mark. Why are we here?

“I read The Naked Civil Servant when I came home and it made a big impression on me and in the book he talks about how important money was to him because with his disposition there was never any certainty that he would make a living. So, I sent him 20 dollars because his address was common knowledge. I said, ‘We met last year. I don’t know who paid for lunch, but it was very nice.’ “And he sent me a letter back. ‘Dear Mr Murdoch. I remember that lunch. I don’t know who paid, but it certainly wasn’t me. Thank you for your kind message and your even kinder dollars. Quentin Crisp.’ I’ve still got that.”

Those letters. That was the twentysomething unwell version of you reaching out, looking for a lifeline. “You’ll take any lifeline,” he agrees. “Your whole life is happening in your mind.”

And music was one of those lifelines?

“Absolutely. That is the real lifeline.”

What then did it mean to Murdoch when he made that first Belle and Sebastian album?

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“The making of that record … Oh man, it meant more to me than anything else in my life. It meant so much to me. Every time in those early days when I got up to sing The State I Am In I was close to being in tears. And of course nobody understands that, but it was a bloody miracle to me that I was actually doing this. And that carried on for the first year and a half.”

He’s felt a bit of deja vu for that time with the book. “I’m as happy with the book as I was with our first record. I have a little bit of the same feeling.”

In Nobody’s Empire Stephen and his friend Richard (Murdoch and his friend Michael in real life) fly to America and begin to play gigs. I’m kind of impressed, I tell him, that they were able to do that given the state they were in.

“I don’t think I mention in the book my mum and Michael’s mum, when we left were just hugging each other. They were crying. We were quite frail, but we just took off.

“But there was a quiet determination to do something, and, really, the two reasons were, one, we were cold and we couldn't afford to heat our flat. You know what Glasgow tenements are like. And, two, we were interested in finding more about ME.”

Depressingly, some three decades later, it’s possible none of us know much more about the disease. Murdoch is still living with it.

“To be quite open and frank with you, it’s a little bit common knowledge that I had another physical-stroke-mental breakdown three years ago where we had to cancel tours. It was a disaster.

Stuart Murdoch on stage (Image: free)

“I think it had been a combination of going back to touring after lockdown when things were so much more difficult. There was a lot of family stuff.

“The only silver lining - aside from friends rallying round - the biggest silver lining, was I had this book and I lent into the book and I think the book meant much more to me because of what was happening to me.

“I was feathering in my experience of now to some of the more reflective, darker stuff.”

How is Murdoch now? “I’m existing. I’m in better shape than I was a couple of years ago, so I’m thankful for that. I feel that what happened there was, well, you would hope, the great test of your later life, and then you can set a course and keep going.”

The sun is still shining when Stuart Murdoch leaves. It feels appropriate.

Nobody’s Empire by Stuart Murdoch is published by Faber, £20. Nobody’s Empire: An Evening With Stuart Murdoch is at Glasgow University Union, Glasgow tonight