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Murdoch shares Ayr, the seaside town where he was born, with Robert Burns, Scotland's greatest poet. This fact would become part of Belle and Sebastian's creation myth for its cultish fans, although it's hard to find any relationship between the two men other than their vivid writing. Like good poetry, Murdoch's lyrics wield specific details that can seem extraneous at first, but ultimately lend the weight of reality to their subjects. And although the man sounds relentlessly optimistic over the phone, his lyrical themes are much darker — and at times, more hopeless-seeming — than his sweet, high-pitched singing or his faith might suggest.
Some of that edge doubtless came from living in the crumbling industrial burg of Glasgow, Scotland's largest city, where Murdoch went to university in the '80s. After some years in school, chronic fatigue forced Murdoch to quit — and left gaps in his life that he eventually filled by writing songs on the piano.
In the middle of a bout of sickness, during an unforgivingly wet and cold Scottish winter, Murdoch and a friend, who was also suffering from chronic fatigue, decided on a whim to go to California. They intended to go to San Diego, having read that it had the best weather in the country, but the plane stopped first in San Francisco, and so did they.
"It was a shock to us because we were so weak," Murdoch recalls of arriving in the city. The two stayed in a hostel on Union Square, which they were eventually thrown out of, and ended up sleeping on benches. Somehow, aided by three months of living in San Francisco and visiting chronic fatigue support groups, the two Scots got their strength back. "It was a boost to us that people in the States, especially people in San Francisco, accepted you at face value, accepted you for what you were and weren't prejudiced against you," Murdoch says. "We felt like second-class citizens at home because we were sick."
Murdoch, then 24, had begun writing songs only about six months earlier and found himself in California without a piano, the instrument he had learned as a child. But the songs were still coming out of him. So while here, he learned the guitar — just the basic chords he needed to write songs. Those few fingerings were enough. When he ran into a student who happened to have a show at UC Berkeley's KALX radio station, his exotic accent piqued interest. So Murdoch and his friend, feigning that they were a real band, got invited on the show to play some of their favorite records and perform their own songs.
"I kind of got the bug after that," he chuckles. "So we would turn up at college stations [around Northern California] and kid that we were sort of an established group and go on and play music." He didn't even have a band, but the young Murdoch was already on a mini-tour.
On the day he had to return home, Murdoch remembers, the seminal D.C. post-punk band Fugazi played a show in Dolores Park. He's still sad about not being able to go. But it was then, health improved, guitar skills in tow, first songs already written and performed, that Murdoch vowed to return to San Francisco with his own band.
"I always wanted to play in Dolores Park," he says, still wistful after nearly two decades. "I hope that Treasure Island will have a similar vibe."
In early 1996, three years after that S.F. trip, Murdoch assembled a haphazard group of himself plus six others, acquaintances for a final project in a class at Glasgow's Stow College. The idea was to record an album for release on the college's own label and then move on. They had no ambitions or plans to become rock stars. "I thought perhaps I could make a record and then collapse back into my sickbed," Murdoch remembers.
He couldn't. That seven-piece group became the original lineup of Belle and Sebastian. The album of precious daydreams and reverby twee-pop the band recorded would become Tigermilk — a debut that slowly spread through the U.K. via word-of-mouth. After positive attention was showered upon Belle and Sebastian's quickly released second album, If You're Feeling Sinister, the 1,000 original vinyl copies of Tigermilk quickly began disappearing or selling for hundreds of pounds in record shops. In the years between the initial pressing and the time Tigermilk was reissued, Belle and Sebastian's debut album obtained a sort of legendary status — partly because so few could actually listen to it.
Even before the success of If You're Feeling Sinister, the class project had shoved Murdoch's musical life in a new direction. "The moment the last chord was struck in Tigermilk, I could hear what was going on, and I could see what we had," Murdoch says. "I thought, 'Okay, I'm in it. Whatever happens, I'm going to try and keep this band together.'"
But since Belle and Sebastian formed as a class project, and not a band, the members' abilities and expectations didn't line up. Musically, they had far more ideas than performing experience, which made their early live shows weak, haphazard affairs that often failed to capture the subtle grace of the recordings. Murdoch, mostly recovered from chronic fatigue but never of robust health, struggled to record, write, tour, and do all the other things a songwriter and singer in a rock band is supposed to do. These factors contributed to the band's negative reputation as a bunch of wimpy, wallflower types who couldn't thrill a live audience.
After four albums, two of Belle and Sebastian's key early members, vocalist and cellist Isobel Campbell and songwriter, singer, and guitarist Stuart David, left in 2002 and 2001, respectively. Their departure marked a crucial turning point for the band — and led to a reassessment that greatly improved its live presence. "Everything became much more organized and easy," Murdoch recalls of the lineup change. "It was like going into battle with enough power to actually win."
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