"Everybody has a story" - a talk with Stuart Murdoch
September 20, 2024
In a recent InterAction article, we spoke to Scottish singer-songwriter Stuart Murdoch about his journey with ME, which he shares in his new book, Nobody's Empire.
Speed read
Stuart Murdoch has lived with ME for over 30 years. He has manage to build a slow career in music and is the lead signer in the band Belle and Sebastian. Stuart reflects on storytelling (particularly in his new novel), his journey with ME and his sense of belonging in the ME community. He wants to make a difference and raise awareness. He shares his certainty that no life is ever wasted.
Nobody's Empire: an evening with Stuart Murdoch.
Talking with Stuart
How would you introduce yourself to our readers?
I'm Stuart Murdoch and I’m the lead singer in a group called Belle and Sebastian. I've had ME for over 30 years now. I was quite severe at the beginning, but I managed to make a career – a slow career – in music. I’ve been very well supported throughout. I’m still coping with ME. It's a deep background, affecting everything in my life.
Once it had happened to me, I felt like ME was almost like a verdict. It changed my life forever. Everything that went before got thrown away. It was a complete reset. The consolation was that I slowly started to write songs and eventually managed to forge a career.
Everybody has a different story, and I've written the story of how it all happened in the novel, Nobody's Empire.
The book has been described as part fiction, part memoir. It certainly feels like your own voice coming through.
Oh, for sure. I think the fictionalised part is more the other characters, because I've invented characters, I've merged characters and I've made up many conversations. But when it comes to the thoughts, that’s me – some of the thoughts were from me at the time, but then some of the thoughts are those I'm having now, in hindsight.
I don't think I was as wise then. Hopefully I'm a little bit wiser now.
There's a power to storytelling… but there are different ways to tell stories. Song lyrics, for example, are quite a different style from a novel. How have you found the difference in the types of writing?
I think writing a book, you get the chance to flow – to be as simple as possible. You speak your thoughts, you put yourself in your head from a previous time and you say what you felt. That's as simple as you can get. Songwriting can be a bit trickier. There are different kinds of voices that you can employ, but [in the book] I was trying to give them the straight dope.
I had a friend who's been quite severe with ME; I let them read the story a while ago and they really enjoyed it. At the same time, they said, there are a lot of ME people who might not dig this so much. Some might say that you haven't advocated enough or explained enough or gone into enough depth. But I had to put the story first.
It is an ME story, but I didn't let ME hold me back. It is my story – hopefully there's some truth in it.
There is this sense of searching and journeying throughout the book. ME is just one part of that.
In the book, you have the gang: Stephen, Carrie and Richard – the three ME people that support each other. We felt that if you can escape the context of ME – if you could actually think about your own life and what you would like to do – then that's a victory.
When ME impinges itself, which it often did, those would be the rough times. If you were thinking about music, if you were losing yourself in music, or if there was a chance that you could be in a relationship – or some of the other things that the three characters aspire to – then this became a victory.
What are your hopes for the book?
I would like to help people. I don't just mean this with the book. I mean in general. I do want to be useful.
It would be great if it could serve some sort of purpose. I'm hoping that when I do interviews that maybe I'm doing a job, by raising the issue again. Because we all know that there's work to be done, that people still feel as if they've been deserted.
I’ve just said that we tried to escape from ME and that would be a victory. At the same time, every time I've been involved with Millions Missing, or any advocating for ME, I don’t feel I’m in a foreign country.
I feel like I belong. I recognise ME people. I am one.
I'll never not recognise ME people as good people, who just want to get on with it – they want to work, they want to live. I think the powers that be don't understand or don't care that ME people want this chance and deserve it as much as anybody.
Many are still labouring under the false belief that it's “all in your head”, and the legacy of that.
There are always mental health aspects that come with any illness – be it cancer or another major illness. Some of these mental health aspects may come before, some of them come during, some of them come after – they're interwoven.
But for the physical aspects to be ignored in the case of ME is unforgivable. A doctor has to listen to a patient, believe what they're telling them and take appropriate action. They need support. We all need support.
One thing that comes through in the book is a love of nature, of being outside. Is that something you find helpful in terms of your wellbeing, while managing the impact of the illness?[LC1]
Not only that, but nature as a process. Again, I'm echoing what Stephen says in the book, but I used to tell the gang, look, nature knows how to heal. We had to have that when nothing else was going for us.
That's an interesting existential question for lots of people with ME who find themselves to be stuck. You get to this point, where you throw up your hands:
“The trees are still growing. I can see the birds flying. Everybody's got this. Everybody's got the energy, the energy of nature and life. Why don't we? What's gone wrong?”
There’s no answer to that at the minute. I redoubled my efforts back in 2014/15 because after I had my second kid, I took a big nose dive.
I thought, right, I'm going to get back into ME. I'm going to look for up-to-date research and see what the latest is. I went to a clinic; it was all about breaking it down, peeling back the layers of the onion, taking bloods all the time.
I went through a couple of years of this… sending away my blood and doing tests and changing my diet, and all different types of supplements, so expensive and time consuming. But I felt that I was in a position where I was saying: right, make me the guinea pig. I will do anything, if I can open a door somewhere.
I must admit I didn't come to any great conclusions. I didn't make any great leaps.
It was an eye opener. I am so empathetic with people who are going through the same thing, who don't have spare income like I did and don't have energy and time to try that… because it became like another job.
It's difficult to describe ME to someone who has no lived experience of it. How do you feel when you have to explain it to someone?
I'm doing what I'm doing and I’ve found a position in which I can survive and so… It's funny, nobody asks me! Even my wife, even the person I'm closest to in the world. I think it kind of escapes her and always has. I could graze my knee and she would make much more of a fuss over the sight of a little blood than the fact that I'm shattered for the whole day. It’s so difficult.
Going back to the gang in the book, with the three of them – and this is absolutely true – when we used to meet as an ME club in the early 90s, it was like Fight Club. We didn't discuss ME outside [of the club]. We thought it was a waste of time. The energy it took to explain it was all the energy we had.
Are you impacted by brain fog?
Funnily enough, brain fog on the whole I'm not too bad with. Me and my best friend Kira – who Carrie is based on in the book – we always say, just another threshold. There's always a threshold.
For me, brain fog isn't usually my threshold… it'll be energy or it'll be viruses. For her, it's headaches, they are the first thing that strikes.
Within the framework of the energy I have, my brain does still seem to be active, which is a great boon. Even when I need to lie flat, I go through a formal process of meditation where I’m trying to actively calm my mind and slow everything down. That's useful.
There's a deep sense of spirituality running through the book.
Yeah, definitely. And that's not for everybody. But then maybe you don’t have to share a sense of spirituality to be interested in it. For me, it was something that I wanted to be completely honest about. When there's not much going on, to me, the spirituality… It's life itself.
When things stop, I'm so lucky that I have this sense of ‘otherness’, that I have a sense of what went before, what’s going to come after… within this lifetime, sometimes you feel, what a waste. In my own personal faith, it’s not a waste. The work that you're doing, with the ME, you have to increase your patience. Your compassion is increasing all the time.
It is not wasted. Your life is not wasted.
Nobody's Empire: an evening with Stuart Murdoch
In celebration of his debut novel, Stuart will be hosting a series of evenings where he will be reading extracts from Nobody's Empire, singing songs and hosting a live Q&A, with our Chief Executive, Sonya Chowdhury, having been asked to host the evening in Bristol on 12 October!
Tickets are available here.
