What Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch Can’t Live Without

I’m past that stage where I care about cool or anything. I love to be outdoors as much as I can be. I don’t climb mountains — I just like to roam around, walk, cycle, just get out as much as I can, and when I’m out, I love to meditate wherever I am. In Scotland, obviously it’s wet a lot. These little things are just genius. I can sit anywhere. They fold up pretty good, they’re really compact. I keep giving them away because people come up to me in the park and they’re like,where do you get one of these things?Because it’s so cheap, I give it to them. I think it’s quite good karma. Like,Look, take this. Just enjoy yourself.

Being in a band, we travel a lot. If we’re in an airport and have a layover, I don’t care who’s looking at me, I’ll lay three of them out. You can sleep on it in between flights or just make a personal and comfortable space. Last year, touring in America, I went to a nice restaurant with my friend. I don’t usually do fancy, but the seats were super hard. I took this out, and he was like,What are you doing?He was a little bit embarrassed of me, but I didn’t care.

They’re so much fun. The Hudora is the last one I got. They go a couple years because I work them pretty hard. I’m on them all the time. I don’t knowwhyI’ve ended up on the scooter so much. I like bicycles as well. Scotland gets bicycle weather in, May, June, July. It’s warm enough to be on a bike. The rest of the time, I go around on a scooter. It sort of keeps me warm and it’s a little bit of exercise as you go around. I thought it would catch on more. I love the electric ones; I use them when I’m in the States or in Europe, but they’re not legal here. I think in Glasgow, if somebody was trying to refer to me, they’d say,Do you know the band Belle and Sebastian? You know the guy you always see around on the scooter?I think I’ve become “scooter guy.”

I’m a real lightweight when it comes to any kind of stimulation. I can’t really do caffeine. I don’t drink anymore. I’ve never done drugs. I think any kind of supplement or drug thing should have a warning. Don’t try anything without careful consideration. But I think all of us are aware of mental health and anxiety stuff, and we all have things that we do to calm down or de-stress, whether it’s yoga or meditation. I’ve tried a lot of things. I asked my Twitter followers,Look, I’m going through a difficult time. What would you recommend?And people recommended about a hundred different things, whether it was supplements or therapies or little things that I could try. And I tried everything. This was the one that worked for me. Somebody initially recommended an L-theanine spray. I’ve found that, since the spray is expensive, pills are just as good. It just takes the edge off. It’s very mild. There’s not any side effects. That’s my little tip.

I’ve had a condition called ME — chronic fatigue — for the past 30 years. It’s probably best known for being a mystery illness. There’s still no treatment, there’s not even a diagnosis. That can be become very frustrating when you’re feeling so poorly and nobody can tell you anything about it or how to help. In the last few years, when I got a relapse, I’ve become a bit of a Boy Scout trying to find out what’s going on. I’ve become a sort of spokesperson because I’m in a band and I talk about ME openly. I feel it’s my duty to try the latest things. Alan Gordon is a chronic pain specialist, and I followed him on an app called Curable. Even about eight years ago, he was talking about this new process that they were having a lot of success in curing people with chronic pain. Some of the stuff that’s being discussed, like the neuroplasticity of the brain still being able to change — that’s quite new stuff. They’ve done a lot of research, so it’s not just guesswork. I’ve been recommending his book to all the people I meet with ME. If you have chronic pain, chronic symptoms, or chronic fatigue, I think this book could be useful for you.

When you have a weakened immune system, funny stuff starts to happen. So just outta the blue, 25 years ago, I started getting really bad skin rash. The doctor just said it was eczema. The only thing that I found to help at the time was to take a bath in with this stuff. You put a couple of caps into the bath, and it kind of goes cloudy and forms an oily film. It really helps. It’s funny that little things like that can change you culturally, because suddenly baths became a huge deal. I read books in the bath, I watched movies in the bath. It’s better than a bubble bath because soap draws the water out and makes your skin wrinkly, whereas this is feels like it’s putting the moisture back in. It’s great for dermatitis, eczema, any of that stuff. I’ve since got over my eczema, but I still use it. When I met my wife, she gave me a nickname. You remember that movieDances With Wolves? My wife said “your name is Soaks in Lotions.”

This just happens to be the very first thing that I bought on the internet. I’m a little bit attached to it. I burn a lot of incense, any kind of musk or patchouli. My wife doesn’t like it, but when I’m alone and when I’m working, I like to. I feel there’s something quite spiritual about setting something on fire while you’re working or meditating. It kind of reminds me of the ents fromLord of the Rings.

I’m hopeless at DIY, fixing things. I’m a duct tape guy. That’s the extent of how much I’m gonna get into something. I do different colors, but I’m using silver more these days. It’s like the bling of duct tape. I never go anywhere without it. I take two rolls with me on tour, just in case I lose one. I might sound like a little bit like a crazy person, but when you go into hotels, especially in hot places like America or Australia, you know how they have the air conditioning, and even if you turn it off, it still sometimes just goes? British people, Scottish people, we’re just not used to air conditioning. I am against all unnecessary movement of air. I just don’t like it. The first thing I’ll do when I get into a hotel is duct tape the vents. That works for me. Sometimes I’ve gotten into a little bit of trouble for that. I once duct taped up a vent in the studio we were recording in in Los Angeles and I broke the whole system. I didn’t realize that could happen. The studio manager wasn’t happy.

This lines up with the bath thing as well, because another thing when you go into hotels is they’ve got a fancy way of stopping the water. To me, that’s like,no, no, I know this isn’t gonna work to me. It’s gotta have a plug or the first thing you’re gonna hear is the drip, drip, drip. The water’s gonna start draining out. So before I get in the bath, I usually seal the drain with duct tape.

I don’t have one of these pianos. It’s an aspirational thing. I have a nice upright piano and it was probably the most expensive thing I ever bought and it’s beautiful. But I keep the piano in the studio. We don’t have a weighted keyboard in our house. My kids are just starting to learn. Apparently it plays really nice and it’s compact. And it fits in with our house. My wife’s got a kind of mid-century style going, so we are really seriously considering buying one of these retro digi pianos.

I’ve got three of these. People don’t really give us free stuff, but I bought one of these guitars and then Fender saw me playing it and sent me two, which is terrific because I really like them. A few years back, towards the end of lockdown, I got what, in the business, they call a “frozen shoulder.” It’s just outta the blue, you get a lot of pain in your shoulder, and then it seizes up and sticks. That was pretty miserable. It was very painful and I just couldn’t move it. I couldn’t even get my hands up to play piano, and I certainly couldn’t play guitar. This thing lasted for a whole year. About six months in, I was starting to get some of the movement back, and we had a tour coming up. I walked past my local guitar store,Jimmy Egypt, and he had one of these new guitars in the window. It’s the size of an electric guitar, but it claimed that it could sound like an acoustic when you plugged it in. I was just like, if that sounds any good, that’ll work for me. Because it was so narrow, I could get my hand over and I could play this thing fine. And then the great thing is that you flick a switch and it changes from the acoustic sound into an electric sound. I play Fender guitars anyway, and to me it just sounded like a Telecaster, which is what I play. It was the easiest decision. I only had to put it on once for the whole show to play electric and acoustic. Because it’s hollow bodied, it’s super lightweight as well. It’s definitely for the older people. It’s so good. It’s all about the convenience.

I wear this everywhere — wouldn’t be without it. It’s almost kind of self-explanatory, but there’ll be some guys out there, and some women as well, who maybe don’t know about the wicking power. This just means it draws water away from the skin. The bamboo, to me, works better than cotton for comfort. It feels like silk when you put it on, it keeps you dry. It’s just a bit of knowledge. I’m sort of hoping as well that bamboo might be more sustainable than cotton. I know they put so much water into the production of cotton.

By this time your readers will be thinking,Geez, what is this guy? Is he even human?I’m known as the world’s coldest person. It comes from the ME. I was a normal person, temperature-wise, but then everything slowed down. Suddenly I couldn’t get warm. I’m kind of living in the wrong country in Scotland, especially over the past five, six years. With Russia going crazy, the energy prices all went crazy as well, because we got so much of our energy from Russia. Everybody’s trying to save money. I think I looked it up and it costs something like the equivalent of 10 cents to fill a hot water bottle. It stays warm for so long and it’s direct heat. I’m putting this on not only as a comfort option, but an economical one. Unless I’m actually with people, I usually have a hot water bottle on my person somewhere.

I’m serious about my chocolate. I call it my work chocolate because it really just gives me an excuse to eat it during the day. My wife will say,why are you having chocolate after your breakfast?And I’ll say,well, it’s my work chocolate. I’m just getting ready for the day. I mentioned before that I don’t like caffeine, but this is like 70 percent cocoa, so it probably has quite a lot of caffeine in it. It’s my go-to thing that’ll get me through from breakfast to dinner. I do realize that if I was talking to any kind nutritionist or therapist, what they would say to me is,You have an addiction. It’s the closest thing I have to an addiction. I admit it. I get a little bit edgy if I don’t have that chocolate around. It’s particularly this one, there’s just something about it. I’ve been at it for 25 years now. I hope they don’t stop making it.

This is a recent one. I was in Boston doing the touring show for my book. When I do my own show, all I ask for on my rider is some fresh ginger, some honey, and some lemon. You chop ginger up, put on the boiling water. It’s great for singing, getting your throat clear, your chest clear. It’s really good for the voice. But they didn’t have any ginger at the Boston show, so I ran across the street into H Mart. They actually didn’t have fresh ginger, either, but they had these powdered sachets. It tastes as good as the real stuff and it’s so convenient. If H Mart were in Scotland, this would be one of the products that I always have in my house. I drink a lot of ginger tea, but this particular powdered ginger is really very good for the throat and respiratory stuff.