Photo by Tom Spray
5-10-15-20 features people talking about the music that made an impact on them throughout their lives, five years at a time. For this edition, we spoke with 46-year-old Belle and Sebastian founder Stuart Murdoch. The Scottish band's upcoming ninth record, Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, is out January 20 via Matador.
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I got all my music from the charts; there was nothing I got from big sisters or parents or cool friends. We have a show called "Top of the Pops" in Britain—Thursday night, the whole nation pretty much watched it, because it was the only pop music on TV. And then, on Sunday night, we had the chart rundown of singles for that week. Music was all-prevailing in the early '70s—I remember gathering a little group and singing the pop songs of the day in the playground at school. There wasn’t so much to do then; it wasn’t like people were standing around playing computer games on phones. I had a swing in my back garden when I was little, and I used to go up and down while singing the chart rundown myself, the best I could, from 10 to 1. The first hit I became aware of was "Young Love" by Donny Osmond, which was a #1 hit in 1973. He was singing about young love and, being 5, I could relate! I saw him on "Top of the Pops" and thought to myself, "He’s obviously a nice, clean handsome young man—he sings for me!"
Nineteen seventy-eight was an amazing time for unbridled pop music. I hadn’t affiliated myself with heavy rock—I hadn’t really given into peer pressure—so it was still about the charts. We had disco and soft American soul music all through the '70s, and that was OK, but around '78, suddenly some great music came in and I clung to it immediately. Blondie were the best. They were just perfect: You had a proper pop star [in Debbie Harry] that everyone loved, but they were kind of punky as well. The song I loved then was "Denis", which I still love and listen to all the time.
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The early '80s were a totally lost period for me, and it was a little bit of a lost period for music. It’s meant to be a classic pop era, but for some reason, for me, it seemed a bit undefined, but that’s probably because I hadn’t found the underground yet. I worked all the time because I didn’t have a social life—I was at that awkward age where I couldn’t relate to anybody. I was working on a farm, driving a tractor, and the radio was on at all times. It was the summer of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, who I loved—they were #1 and #2 for the whole summer.
I also worked in a delivery van, and they always played the American charts. I hated it. I thought the American charts were so lame compared to the British charts, because you never had anything punky or avant-garde. But they played so much Lionel Richie and Hall and Oates that I developed a passing admiration for them. "All Night Long" is tremendous! Somebody [at the Belle and Sebastian show] in Los Angeles the other night shouted, "all night long!", and we had this big dialogue about how it would be great if we could just launch into the song and play it right. The fellow came up to me after the show and said, "You know, I wanted you to play your own songs all night long—I didn’t want you to play Lionel Richie!"
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This is smack dab in the middle of the best music period for me. By '88-'89, I was completely obsessed and absorbed in the world of indie, to the extent that I was failing university and couldn’t even speak to my parents because I had nothing in common with them. They thought I was crazy—I was giving up the careers they wanted for me. I was DJing and roadie-ing for bands, and every month, a new track came out that felt like a revelation. I remember the first time I heard Public Enemy’s "Bring the Noise", probably on John Peel’s show. I liked some rap, but this seemed to be an entirely different beast. You had to give into it.
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My big change happened in 1990—I got burned out on music. I sold most of my records and stopped DJing and started embracing books and films and a quieter life. That’s when I started to write myself; when you have a big clearing of the mind, that’s when the opportunity to write comes in.
I had an obsession with Felt, an indie band that stayed with me all the way through the '90s. I was also really looking back at the '60s and '70s for the first time. I had a friend who was my rival DJ at the club—I was always Mr. Contemporary and he was Mr. '60s Psychedelia—and he’d dig up all the best music and play it at this club called Divine in Glasgow. He’d make great compilations—he introduced me to the Left Banke, the Lovin’ Spoonful, and also the idea of Northern soul music. People assumed Belle and Sebastian were an '80s[-inspired] indie group, but the fact is even '80s indie groups came from somewhere else. It was a combination of post-punk and embracing the beauty of the '60s and '70s: the Velvets, the Monkees, the Byrds, Love. That was in the blood. By this time, I had all these ingredients that were all mixed up. Even more so, I had a side of me that was really into middle-of-the-road cheesy pop—I loved '70s radio smashes. I took that all with me. By 1994, I was percolating with all these private obsessions about what great pop music was—which I didn’t seem to share with many people around me.
By this point, [Belle and Sebastian] were producing the equivalent of two albums a year, breaking new ground for ourselves with songs and arrangements, and trying to play concerts. Especially around '99, it became a very difficult time for the band; a couple of people had better things to do, so the process was a bit fraught. I was acting like a Glaswegian Brian Wilson, always in the studio and looking for the sound. It was a shitstorm. We weren’t geared up for it. The records actually got weaker around Fold Your Hands—we were trying to be ambitious, but we didn’t have the group consensus. We were always fighting. I wasn’t listening to much music.
I remember going to a club and this group Camera Obscura came on and right away I fell in love with Tracyanne Campbell’s voice. We started chatting, and I said, "You should come and rehearse in the church hall," which was our house at the time. It was such a pleasure to get away from our group and watch this fledgling band who were much more innocent. Their sound was really clean, and they hadn’t been cluttered by loads of arrangements. The songs were just simple and real pretty. I remember sitting in on all their rehearsals and pretending to mix their sound, because the grass seemed so much greener in their world than in our own. I remember one track in particular, "Park and Ride", which was perfect. They were a real guide and made me think, "We need to get back to playing simple music again."
Things had been going better with the band, and I was back in love with pop music. It coincided with a nice period in Glasgow where there was a little indie-club revival, and they had good catholic taste. Suddenly, everybody from the indie scene was there, but listening to soul, the Clash, and Roxy Music, even middle-of-the-road classics like "(Don’t Fear) the Reaper", which I approved of! That stuff sounds great in clubs. Occasionally, something [contemporary] would get my attention, like a Sugababes hit I would immediately be obsessed with and listen to over and over and put in my own mental canon of classic hits. But they were few and far between.
I had taken a break to do God Help the Girl and I went off into the wilderness, but I was having a great time writing and watching a lot of films. I had this playlist of 30 what-I-would-consider-classic tracks that I’d play every day, and it would put me in a trance. I was going back to more intimate music. The key bands were the Cocteau Twins—I always listened to the Cocteaus, but I kept loving them more and more—and there’s always Felt, the Sundays, the Blue Nile, the Railway Children. I can make a playlist for you in 10 minutes now; it used to take hours to make a good compilation tape. But there’s still a skill to roping things together. Whenever we make a new album, we’re still desperately trying to make a so-called compilation that people will listen to all the way through. But, in a sense, we’re contradicting ourselves: I can’t remember the last time I listened to a whole album by a contemporary band. So why would I expect other people to listen to our music all the way through? But I still do!
At this stage, I like what I like. In the past, I would try to like something, or try to fit in with something, or play records so that people would dance to them. I’m still in love with Nina Simone and Joni Mitchell; I still listen to Everything But the Girl and 10,000 Maniacs. I love unusual female voices that are intimate, that communicate a particular feeling.
I’m still looking for that. There’s a song by A Camp called "Love Has Left the Room". It’s one of those songs where you don’t know where it came from, you don’t know if it was a single, you can’t remember where you heard it, but you’re looking around and thinking, "This is the greatest thing that’s ever been recorded! Why wasn’t it a hit?" And they’re probably thinking the same thing. It doesn’t sound like anything new; it’s completely soulful.
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I don’t hear that kind of honesty so much in pop nowadays, because it’s so processed. When I used to listen to records in the '80s as a teenager—by Morrissey or the Slits or the Raincoats—they were singing to you and telling you stuff about life you didn’t know. It was in the lyrics and it was in the feeling. I don’t mean to sound like an old fuddy duddy, but when you have your headphones on and you’re away for a long walk on the countryside, you want to be controlled by Nina Simone—you don’t want to be controlled so much by Beyoncé.