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Stuart Murdoch at The Chapel (10 Feb 2025)
art: @galine_illustration
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The Chapel
San Francisco
February 10, 2025
On a blustery, cold San Francisco night (cold for San Francisco, that is—a frigid 45 degrees), I walked to the end of a long line of well-dressed indie kids of all ages. We were queuing up on Valencia Street outside The Chapel music venue in San Francisco’s Mission District, the neighborhood that just happened to play a part in Nobody’s Empire, the debut novel by Stuart Murdoch, Scottish singer and mastermind behind the twee-pop wonderband Belle and Sebastian. Fans of the band, which dug its deep, pop hooks and its wispy rhymes into the hearts of twee music lovers from 1996 on, also know it as the name of one of their songs and the album it’s on. The book tour promos played to its audience: It was marketed as a night of “readings, songs, live Q&A, and book signing,” and it featured informal chats with moderators and hosts Mike Schulman and Nommi Alouf, the latter of whom figures in the novel as the college radio station DJ who invites the main character on her radio show.
Fans of the band might be well aware of its history, and therefore much of what happens in this novel. It more or less covers Murdoch’s years just before he started B&S, as told through the eyes of “Stephen,” the Glasgewian who’s forced to cut his university career short in the face of chronic fatigue syndrome, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME for short. Stephen and a friend decide to take off for the warmer climates of California, where they fall in love with the locale, and the locals, and find a way to flourish despite their health challenges. As Murdoch said during the appearance, they came to the U.S. before the internet really took off, hoping to get more information about a disease that wasn’t as well-known back in the early ‘90s. “Like skateboards and ‘Starsky and Hutch,’ we thought that you could find out [more] about ME in California,” he said.
As Murdoch’s book tour stop happened to take place at a well-known music venue in San Francisco, fans hoped that he’d also play a few songs as promised. Of course, he didn’t disappoint, sprinkling in charming solo versions of Belle and Sebastian songs like “Fox in the Snow” and “Beautiful,” and of course the book’s namesake, “Nobody’s Empire,” with just himself on acoustic guitar or keyboards. The audience, half-seated and half-standing, didn’t hesitate to sing and clap along.
Murdoch and the band have done acoustic or stripped-down versions of Belle and Sebastian songs during various tours, but having a more fleshed-out, fictionalized backstory of his time in California before the band’s start added a magical layer to the night’s performance. The crowd, full of diehard fans young and old, seemed rapturous—missing the well-loved members of B&S, but still enchanted by the lyrical loveliness of Murdoch’s solo versions.
Since San Francisco plays a big role in the novel, Murdoch chose songs and shared personal photos (projected on the screen behind him) that loomed large in his Bay Area memories. “I made a promise to myself that we weren't going to come back to SF until we had a band,” he recounted. As he, and anyone who was there, recalled, he made quite an entrance at that Warfield show in 2001—driving a motorcycle onstage, revving the engine as the Shangri-Las “Leader of the Pack” played.
If you’re a fan of Scottish bands, of thoughtful, literary-infused twee music, of the indie scene of the ‘90s, or any combination thereof, the evening was a thrilling one-two punch. Murdoch expanded his witty, between-song banter into extended tales and insightful anecdotes (his roadie nickname in Glasgow was Primrose, because he was so unlike his leather-clad fellow roadies), namechecked bands he idolized and mentioned in the novel (like the Sundays and Luna, members of whom he sent early copies of the book to), and doled out the all-killer, no-filler loveliness of classic B&S tunes. And it ended with that same, block-long line outside the venue, this time wrapped around the inside of the Chapel, as everyone queued up to have a chat and a selfie with Murdoch as he signed copies of his book. It was a lovely bookend to the night; you couldn’t write it any better.
| Robin Lapid ♥ weheartmusic.com ♥ twitter.com |
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