Stuart Murdoch's Favourite Albums

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"Usually, the LPs you listen to when you are younger are the ones that just happen to fall into your lap. Especially back in the day. Nobody had lists in the 70s, nobody had cool parents.

The very first LP I got was Pinky and Perky’s Greatest Hits Volume II. I got that at the Scout jumble sale, and loved that LP. A few months later, at another jumble sale, I picked up Bridge Over Troubled Water – and obviously that one has stayed with me longer. But at that age, I probably listened to both about the same amount and I listened to the Pinky and Perky LP all the way through. I took them seriously.

But I feel very lucky that one of those early ones was Simon & Garfunkel. It is always the record sleeves. I was flicking through a pile of records and took a random stab based on the sleeve and the title. I was too young to have heard their songs, I was only nine or ten.

It is a very easy record to listen to when you are young. You wouldn’t need a musical bone in your body to get into every song on this LP. That's why all the early Beatles records are so great. It is almost like music for children, very straightforward with the hooks, and the different flavours of sounds. Now you would look back and think, ‘El Condor Pasa’ is a bit of a funny one, but not when you are young. I remember ‘Cecilia’ really staying with me. “Making love in the afternoon with Cecilia up in my bedroom/ I got up to wash my face, when I came back to bed someone’s taken my place.” There is so much mystery for a ten-year-old boy – and I was a late developer anyway. There is so much unexplained. I didn’t know what the hell was going on up there, I don’t know why he was staying in, why he wasn’t at work, I don’t know what he was doing with this girl – but it was all vaguely exotic and kind of educational.

‘The Boxer’, at the time, seemed to be a very profound song, it gave me chills. “I am just a poor boy and my story’s seldom told” – that's like 'once upon a time' for a kid. That is like the start of a story. You are rapt. That was quite profound when I was younger, whereas a song like 'The Only Living Boy In New York', which is more tender, has grown on me in stature – I love that the song is obviously about his relationship with Art Garfunkel, who is going off to do his film. He says “Tom”, and they were known as Tom and Jerry for a while, so that is the meaning, but none of that clicked with me at the time. It is a very tender song."

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"This was also from my childhood. I’m getting a little bit older, slightly more conscious of what I’m doing – so in the late 70s you’d dabble with everything on the radio, hover with your finger above the record button during Top Of The Pops. I came from a small seaside town, so there wasn’t a great cultural exchange going on. We were dabbling in Blondie and Bowie, but ‘Master Blaster’ came along and I just got addicted to it. That was the single off this album that came out at the end of 1980. I loved it, played it over and over, and this was one of the first times I marched into town and put good hard cash down on a proper tape. I needed more.

Certainly ‘Master Blaster’ is the greatest thing on it, but at that age, you hoover up everything. If you have made the ultimate investment of hard cash, you get your money’s worth. I played that album to death. I even have a little bit of time for the ballad, for ‘Lately’, which isn’t the worst in the world. And, yes, I loved ‘Happy Birthday’, and I still have a soft spot for it actually! When you are playing with the band it is always somebody’s birthday, and if it is a gig night, there is always the temptation to sing 'Happy Birthday'. Quite often you do and the audience joins in, sometimes Stevie will play the Beatles version, we’ve done ‘Unhappy Birthday’ by The Smiths before, but there was one time it was the PA guy Fudger’s birthday. And I wanted to do the Stevie Wonder version. I don’t normally sing the cover versions, but we learnt it during soundcheck and I was high as a kite, loving singing it. Then after the gig, Fudger said: “It was very nice of you guys, but I was actually outside smoking a cigarette”. He missed his song.

I gave into the darkness not long after buying Hotter Than July. I made my first conscious decision to become affiliated with a movement, which was heavy rock. I was flirting with it around the age of 11 or 12, and gave into it pretty soon and everything got taken over by a sea of black."

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"Will this surprise a few people? Quite possibly. Maybe I should blame the seaside town. But I definitely was attracted to rock music and it was the volume, rather than the rebellion aspect. The noise. The sound of heavy metal up loud. And it doesn’t get much heavier than Back In Black. I knew AC/DC was my band early on. I got two LPs at the same time, Back In Black and If You Want Blood…. I’d heard a rumour from one of the bigger boys that the singer had died, and I got mixed up listening to Back In Black and thought that its singer had died. I was unhappy, because I actually preferred Brian Johnson’s voice to Bon Scott’s at the time.

This guy had a voice like a guided missile. I didn’t think about the lyrics to 'Let Me Put My Love Into You’ or ‘Give The Dog A Bone’. I didn’t have any idea who the dog was and why we should give her a bone. I was just totally entranced by the sound.

I’m giving away all trade secrets here – but when I was 12 or 13, I had a room up in the attic. I remember looking out of my window at the town, thinking about people and how they change, and just saying to myself: “I’m never going to change. I’m always going to love AC/DC, I’m never going to be a dick. I’m always going to love AC/DC, I’m never going to be a dick!”

And there is definitely still that side of me. I wouldn’t listen to Saxon or Whitesnake any more, I’ve got no interest, but I will always come back to AC/DC. The title track, ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’, maybe even ‘Shoot To Thrill’ – they are pretty mega.

There is always a moment for AC/DC, and I grew a predictable fondness for Bon Scott as well, being this older brother rebel figure, you know? I had a little thatch of strawberry blonde hair, but it never got down below my neck. The most I ever got with the look was double denim. I remember my girlfriend at the time, when I was 12, buying me an AC/DC glitter badge that I sewed onto my denim jacket. That was as far as I went…"

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"My prog phase! Being 12 or 13 is the age to get into classic rock, and I was listening to Led Zeppelin, Hendrix and all that. My sister gave me a Yes album for my 13th birthday, I think because some of the boys hanging around with her were into prog. It really is sometimes just what music happens to fall into your lap. But I had a strange love affair with this band, they were my next big love.

Again, weirdly, I’m happy to report that love affair has never diminished. I’m a secret Yes lover! They definitely had a classic phase, for three or four albums. Some of the earlier tracks are lovely and folky, but it was definitely all about The Yes Album, Fragile and Close To The Edge, those three classics.

Perhaps people won’t be expecting this one. I’m not going to try to defend Yes, they have got daft lyrics, but the one thing that links many of the LPs here is bands. I’m a band person. I love bands. First and foremost, I love pop music. Secondly, I just love bands, I believe in the power of the band. Yes definitely had this power, you could hear the five of them sitting down to make something, whether you liked it or not, that was original. I’m talking about the classic line-up, which came together for this album, which includes Rick Wakeman. Sometimes it sounds like they are all solo-ing at the same time, including Chris Squire the bass player. They are all going: “listen to me, listen to me”, but it works."

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"I played piano when I was younger, I did a bit of classical, did all my grades, and at secondary school when I was 11, we did form a class band for the school concert. We only played Beatles songs, such was their power. They were just shitting out standards. They were inventing the wheel with every record they did, but also writing unbelievably catchy tunes as if it were the easiest thing in the world. They became their own language of popular music. So our band did them – it was just instrumental versions, I would hammer out the tune on the right hand of the piano. And it is funny, we were called the Kintyre Keynotes – our class was Kintyre A – and if you look at a picture of the band it looks like a shrunken down version of Belle And Sebastian, with pretty much the same instrumentation!

I didn’t set out to put a Beatles LP on here. I had the great good fortune to be given all the Beatles albums, up to but not including Sgt. Pepper, by my uncle on reel-to-reel, along with a reel-to-reel player. So at a pretty early age we would play all the early Beatles LPs and you would have to scroll every side and it was a magnificent sound that came out of the mono speakers.

We knew them inside out and until very recently Rubber Soul was my favourite. I loved them all. I didn’t get Sgt. Pepper until later, but if we are talking about LPs here, there is something about the journey that this record takes you on that just puts it above the other records. It was the first album, in a sense. According to me! They took you by the hand, from the start to the end. In any truly great LP there is a moment that is unplanned, where it becomes greater than the sum of its parts. You are transported like watching a great film or reading a great book. There has maybe been a bit of madness gone into the making of the record, they have been pursuing beauty, but when they put the sequence of songs together, something magical happens.

We talk about it as a band, and perhaps we shouldn’t. It can only happen unplanned – the magic of the LP is a specific thing. I definitely reach for it every single time. Every LP we do. I try to say I’m not bothered but you are always looking to make something greater than the sum of its parts. We borrowed one trick for The Life Pursuit, where we did a kind of reprise of the first song, ‘Act Of The Apostle I’, for the penultimate song. Then after that, we have a kind of coda. So we did try that, but I don’t think you can plan it."

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"This was absolutely the biggest moment for me. People may have heard it from me before, they might expect it, but I am unapologetic about including this record. I had heard The Smiths up to this point, I thought they were funny, they were strange, I bundled them alongside my other records – with my Hendrix or INXS or whatever But it wasn’t until I happened to be in a laundry room after I had failed my exams, and there was a TV in the corner and I think The Whistle Test was on. The Smiths were playing ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’, and during the course of that song I became a different person. That is the only time that happened to me, it confirmed everything about what kind of person I wanted to be, little hints of moods and gestures, the way I wanted to act, what I wanted to wear, the things I wanted to say. It captured that and it was a catalyst. I knew afterwards that maybe I shouldn’t go back to college. You can pin it on that moment.

It was more of the mind, initially, I didn’t change everything about myself overnight, I wasn’t quite as much a teenage girl as that, although I was pretty close to be honest. I remember going into my parents’ garage soon afterwards, taking a white T-shirt and writing in thick, black emulsion paint “The Queen Is Dead” on it. I was about 17, probably old enough to know better than a self-painted T-shirt.

It is an LP that, if you break it down, actually gets quite weak around ‘Never Had No One Ever’, which is the same tempo as ‘I Know It’s Over’ and has the same feel. But they knew what they were doing. It is like the placid point before the whole thing revs up. Again, the denouement – sorry, I’m sounding so pretentious – is ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’, and ‘Some Girls…’ is the perfect coda. Everything is emotionally heading to track nine.

I remember reading a funny article by Robert Forster, one of The Go-Betweens singers, on the rules of rock & roll. He claimed that people always put their weakest song as the penultimate track, so you know you are getting a strong LP when they save their strongest track until then.

But they are all various degrees of magnificence. I don’t like the title track so much, but even the so-called funny songs are great. Nobody has written a song like ‘Frankly, Mr. Shankly’ or ‘Vicar In A Tutu’. Nobody writes like Morrissey, although a lot of people try. The second side is about the strongest side of a rock record ever – starting with those two amazing singles."

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"They absolutely just got me, in about 1986, a couple of years after this album came out. The funny thing is that I found a Cocteau Twins T-shirt in that same laundrette where I saw The Smiths on TV. It felt like an angel had left me this really tatty 'Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops' T-shirt sitting on top of a dryer –it was like the Celestial Laundrette! The design fascinated me; I whisked it away.

The Cocteaus were a band that just kept going up and up in my estimations – to this day I have listened to the Cocteau Twins more than any other group, with the exception of Felt. They are terrific and they are from Scotland! I don’t know what to think about them – you don’t stop to analyse them, you let it wash over you. It casts a spell - one album, Victorialand, was so dreamy, I listened to it for one entire summer when I finally left college and worldly ambition. I was hopeless around women, so the closest I had to having a sensual experience being around women was listening to the Cocteau Twins! It all seemed very sexual, Treasure just seemed laden down with the kind of sex that I wanted to get into. It was a weird time…"

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"This is like the opposite of the Cocteau Twins. It had a great effect on me at the time, but I don’t listen to The Fall very often now. It went along with my abrasive nature at the time – this crazy ranter, Mark E Smith, appealed to me deeply. Underneath his weird accent and his blathering, he seemed to be a very wise man. I was very attracted to wisdom at that age, or at least some wisdom I could understand in the shape of music.

At the time I was hoovering up the NME and Melody Maker, that golden age of weekly journalism and they used to have Mark E Smith in every week, just to see what he would say. He was funny. He was like a child in a way, or he acted that way – saying the kind of things that adults don’t really say. And there was a great attraction, that is quite anarchic, to let your mouth open and see what comes out. It turned into album after album. I would listen to The Fall, I would be reading Albert Camus because of The Fall, and when they released Bend Sinister, I dabbled in Nabakov. I didn’t really have anything better to do, I was following my own agenda. I was in Glasgow, in a bedsit, in a single room, I had shed all my previous friends and I was probably not in a great way, mentally. I was a very straight edge kind of guy, to the point where I was a very healthy meticulous eater, wouldn’t drink or smoke, and was completely absorbed in music.

I lived the music in a way. There weren’t so many distractions around then, so we clung onto these LPs. Bend Sinister was the first one that struck me, I remember being contemporary when that came out, but quickly extrapolated backwards. I didn’t want to put this one in, but when I looked at the name and the artwork, I had a great emotional response to this blithering man with a caved-in face. Calling the record This Nation’s Saving Grace, there is something so bold about that.

I love 'Spoilt Victorian Child', just because it is so funny. There is something quite touching about ‘Paint Work’, and the song before is ‘My New House’ – I just assumed they went together. This is a guy in the most cutting edge punk band in the country at the time, and he has clearly done nothing so radical as bought a new house in track eight and decided to paint it on track nine! But it is infinitely interesting what he decides to tell us while he is painting his house…"

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"I hope I’m not breaking the rules here, including a compilation. But Substance definitely felt like an artefact. I was aware of New Order, but it wasn’t until this record put together these songs I had dabbled with that I realised, “Wow, this is a force to be reckoned with”. I didn’t have much idea about the connection with Joy Division, and they re-recorded some songs for this record, which must have been quite a big deal for them. I can imagine them wanting to make a statement, put their flag in the ground, “This is what we’ve done”.

And New Order have never gone away, for me. The most obvious thing about them is the dance aspect. New Order became my absolute bread and butter – at this point I took my ambitions to the dancefloor. I had given up college and become a DJ, and they became my absolute go-to artiste when things were falling flat. Everyone knows it is going to get serious if ‘Blue Monday’ comes on. ‘Blue Monday’ is probably the single track that I wished I could have created. Something so permanent and cool and fantastic as 'Blue Monday'. I have danced to that song so many times and it never gets boring. They take it up and up, the beats are going, the floor is full and they have the confidence to sing: “And now I stand here waiting” and nothing happens. It is brilliant, so fucking moody! He is this pissed off guy, you know, who has gone to the extent of this brilliant dance record just so he can make a point to his girlfriend or something. I would play it if I still DJed, but I kind of overdosed on DJing, I leave it to others now."

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"By this time I was at the absolute peak of my powers. I wasn’t to know that my life was going to tumble into an abyss six months later. This was the height of my glory years as I call them now. I was completely contemporary with the Stone Roses. I had heard rumours of them from friends in Manchester in the way that you couldn’t now. People might see this on the list and go, “For fuck’s sake, can you not be any more obvious”, like that bit in High Fidelity with Jack Black, making his compilation.

But it can’t be denied. Even beyond all the popular acclaim and the lads getting into it and Britpop and all that stuff, it is just phenomenal. This was a firm favourite, all the singles, I remember I was quite liberated at this time. Before Madchester people didn’t dance to things that they didn’t know and they only danced in a certain way at my club. When house music started and everyone started to loosen up and kids started wearing baggy gear, for the next six months it was amazing. I would play ‘I Am The Resurrection’ and in the middle I would segue into a 60s baggy track, ‘Peace Frog’ by The Doors, which had a similar vibe. It mixed really well, before going back into the end of ‘I Am The Resurrection’.

My club was called The Wasp Factory after the Iain Banks book. I did it at Glasgow University and Strathclyde Uni. It was still a long while before our band got together, I had no thoughts of putting a band together, I was living the dream. A specific highlight was when they first played at Glasgow. The night before, they played in Edinburgh, at this place where I had the good fortune that they used to get me to DJ when they had indie bands in. So I played before and after the Stone Roses gig.

The guys came over, looked through my records, picked out some tracks for me to play and signed my records. I was still a pretty fresh-faced young guy, and I wasn’t starstruck because they weren’t stars yet. But they were very cool, very nice. I hadn’t met many people in bands before, and they were the nicest – very soft spoken, really sweet guys. And it was good to be like that, the girls adore you, and the girls just loved them."

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"For about a year, when my health took a dive, I couldn’t listen to anything. When I got somewhat rehabilitated, and I’d had a bit of help, I think the first two bands I listened to were the Cocteau Twins and The Sundays. They were the only bands I could stand to listen to. Very gentle. That was enough. I said before that I wasn’t a list person, but I remember a few years earlier, in about 1987, writing a list of my 15 favourite bands – and Felt were in there. They were about number ten or 11. I knew they were a cut above your average guitar jangly indie band, and I saw them in 1988 or 89, so they were high up there.

But it wasn’t until I’d been through my little black period that they rose above everything. They suddenly became my band. They were just superior in every way. They were an album band, they were a singles band, they were everything. The one key thing for me at the time was that all their records would completely absorb me. I was doing a lot of lying down at that time, and I knew I could put on a Felt record listen to it all the way through and be taken on a trip. They went through two phases. The first half was with Maurice Deebank, who was a guitarist, and when he left the keyboard player who plays with Primal Scream, Martin Duffy. So Duffy came in, and because Lawrence just spoke, this allowed the music to be endlessly inventive. There was a counterpoint between his speaking his poetry and the music which was endlessly creative and melodic that I just got off on. That was the thing. If you cut my musical veins, I bleed Felt. They are influential in so many ways to me, but one specific thing was the poetry that Laurence wrote. They were so pretty, his words were poetic. The titles like The Strange Idols Pattern, or ‘Dismantled King Is Off The Throne’. He could get away with anything, his band weren’t very well known and someone was letting him put out these amazing delicate records.

My Felt obsession took hold during my recovery period, which was very long. By the time I put my band together I was more robust and had different things on my mind. But Felt had gone in deep. 1991-3 were the Felt years. It was a complete mental and physical void, I couldn’t believe how long it was taking to get back to any kind of normal life. I was crying out, “For god’s sake, nobody deserves this”."

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"That was definitely a revisiting. I was aware of Orange Juice and ‘Rip It Up’, ‘Felicity’ was a dancefloor favourite, but like with Felt, it wasn’t until I had all this time to really think about them that they became the titans of indie for me.

I realised they were the ones, but in a different way from Felt. They were more energetic, they were about living. And I wanted to live. Like Orange Juice! And they were from Glasgow, there was this palpable thing where I knew they lived there, I knew Postcard Records started in that house, I knew these songs emerged from these streets. I had held onto these fanzines from when I worked in this shop in the 80s, and they were so influential for me, they were from 1979-80, and crammed full of Orange Juice interviews, Aztec Camera, The Go-Betweens, and they would talk about their favourite records. I tracked down every single one that was mentioned in these magazines.

I also felt – I can use a biblical metaphor for this, maybe I shouldn’t. But with Orange Juice I felt like Paul from the Bible, because I wasn’t there when Jesus, ie Orange Juice, was around, but the legend seemed to be all around the place. I had built it up and up in my own mind and to a great extent I became this real disciple, someone who talks about Orange Juice and builds up the legend. "

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"This is precisely the start of the band, which is why it is a fitting way to finish this list. New music – although I love it as much as ever – never meant so much to me after I started making records. Love were one of my last times of being amazed, a last stopping-off point. You will notice that most of these records we have been talking about are from the 1980s. Punk for me was the great miracle of music, changed the way music felt and spoke to you, and gave bands permission to do things differently.

But a few of my friends said that I shouldn’t ignore what came before punk. They made me tapes of The Lovin’ Spoonful, The Left Banke, and all this was very timely because it was just before I met up with Stevie [Jackson, Belle and Sebastian guitarist] and Chris [Geddes, B&S keyboardist]. And this was the music that we bonded over. It seemed to be a blueprint, there was ambition and delicacy and orchestration, and there was a baroqueness, for want of a better word.

I knew this was what I wanted for my music. I borrowed certain things – at the time I was very into simple, middle of the road stuff. Things like ‘Sugar, Sugar’ or an Andrew Gold song called ‘Never Let Her Slip Away’. These MOR classic singles that were, on the face of it, very simple. I was really into that. I didn’t want to go beyond that but then I wanted to talk about the things I wanted to talk about. But it helped that in the background was this classic 60s groups and references, and Isobel [Campbell, ex-B&S singer] and Stevie and Richard [Colburn, B&S drummer] were all digging those things as well, those were the benchmarks."