On My Indie Years

c/o Stuart Murdoch

My Guardian review was titled ‘Belle and Sebastian and me’.

Which wasn’t really how I meant to to come out. If the me is me, rather than him.

Stuart Murdoch, founder, lead singer and songwriter.

The draft review was a lot more about the connections I found with Nobody’s Empire — some of time and place, and some of being an indie kid.

After university, after crossing American by Greyhound (west to east), and after getting kicked out of my parents’ house, I moved to Glasgow for a couple of months. This was the winter of 1990, when the city was beginning its time as City of Culture.

I chose Glasgow because I could catch a National Express coach there direct from Toddington Services. Coaches were cheaper than trains and I felt at home on them. After riding a Greyhound all the way from Seattle to Denver, that nine hour zip up the spine of the country seemed easy.

The first few nights, I stayed at the YMCA. In my dorm was a guy who only came into the city every couple of weeks, to pick up his dole. He told me that the rest of the time, he hiked around and slept in the hills. He stowed his rucksack and tent behind a wall somewhere a few miles out of town. He said it was a good way to live.

I found a room because I saw an ad in a newsagent’s window up the Great Western Road. So began those days of bedsits and back-court windows. I ended up on the fourth and top floor of a tenement on Rose Street, the same street as the Glasgow Film Theatre. The night I moved in, the old man in the tiny room opposite — Mr A. Curran — died. The father of the Asian family in the next room found him, but brought me across the brightly carpeted hall to confirm that he was really dead.

He was.

I knew without having to touch him. Though I’d never seen a dead body.

Natural causes, although he had bruising to the cheeks, and had been mugged a few nights earlier. A policeman interviewed me in my new room, reading my statement back to me in words I hadn’t used. ‘The deceased was not personally known to me.’

No relations came forward. I cleared out Mr A. Curran’s room — recycling his stack of copies of the Scottish Sun, bagging up his clothes and taking them Save the Children. I kept a tape of Rose-Marie singing ‘Danny Boy’ and his breakfast spoon. He’d used it to eat porridge. He didn’t have a cassette player.

Because I was young, I didn’t take this death as a bad sign. Almost the opposite. I had only just moved to the city, and something real had happened.

I started writing my first novel.

When not at the desk, I began finding my way around — buying cheap vegetables at the Barras Market, attending a Kenneth Anger screening at the GFT, and discovering the Third Eye Centre and the Art School bar. I became a free floating vagabond of the state — signing on for the Enterprise Allowance, which was a few pounds more than Unemployment Benefit.

As far as I know, I never met Stuart Murdoch or any of the other future members of Belle and Sebastian. But once I got into the band’s first records, and got into the idea of the ramshackle community they’d formed in the city, I liked to think one of them might have been sitting next to me in a café, making a cup of tea last all afternoon, or at the Teenage Fan Club gig I saw, hosted by John Peel.

Now that I’ve read Nobody’s Empire, I can be sure I was in at one largish venue with Stuart Murdoch. A minor subplot of the novel involves Stuart’s fictional alter ego, Stephen, developing a crush on Harriet Wheeler, lead singer of The Sundays. He writes her a few sad letters after attending their gig supporting Galaxie 500 at Queen Margaret Union.

I was at that gig.

Great gig.

By that stage, I’d been on the peripheries of indie for a few years. After falling for The Smiths c/o a friend’s older sister’s cassette of ‘Hand in Glove’, I’d become part of that gentle DM-wearing, charity shop-haunting dissidence from Thatcherite Britain. Cocteau Twins, Felt, Furniture, but mainly The Smiths. My hair was up in a pompadour rather than down in a bowlcut.

In Oxford, living on the same road as the Jericho Tavern, I’d fitted in at gigs by Mighty Mighty and Talulah Gosh. Along with the other rain-kissed marginals. The whole room bouncing to ‘Built Like a Car’ or ‘Steaming Train’. That was the ‘cutie scene’ — written up half sarcastically in NME and more sympathetically in Melody Maker.

Narrator Stephen (named after Stephen Pastel of Titans of the Glasgow jangle scene The Pastels?) captures the downbeat yet expansive atmosphere in Nobody’s Empire.

A small world we lived in, littered with cafés, second hand record stores, people looking for and finding the same inspirations, the same loves, just oceans and time zones apart.

I have two other small connections with Stuart Murdoch.

First, a very charming short film was made of probably my most indie short story, ‘Rare Books and Manuscripts’. The writer was Wendy Bevan-Mogg and the star, Neve Mcintosh. Bruce Webb directed, and it’s viewable on his YouTube channel.

As you’ll hear, if you watch it, the playout song is Belle and Sebastian’s ‘If You Find Yourself Caught in Love’.

I remember sitting in the Curzon Soho, for a friends and family screening. The moment the song kicked in was the moment I knew the film had worked. There was a lift as everyone went, ‘Ahhh!’

Second, I shortly afterwards met Stuart in the bar at the National Film Theatre on the South Bank. We were there among a crush of people waiting to attend a premiere of Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan documentary, No Direction Home. (Belle and Sebastian’s song ‘Like Dylan in the Movies’ came to mind.)

I thanked Stuart for letting us use his band’s song in ‘Rare Books’.

What I didn’t thank him for was perhaps my biggest debt to Belle and Sebastian. A few years before, I’d attended a gig by a good friend’s band — Chaser — at the Rock Garden. They turned up their amps, Mark whacked his snare, and I came away with tinnitus.

For about a year, the only way I could ignore the whistling and get to sleep was by having either If you’re feeling sinister or Tiger Milk playing at low volume by my bedside.