The 1990s was a curious time for British music. As the loud bravado and boorish, confected pop rivalries of Britpop dominated the press, a landscape emerged that appeared to leave little room for quieter, more contemplative subcultures brewing in the margins. Nestled away in a Glasgow church vestry, however, Stuart Murdoch was crafting an antidote, acting as the creative director of his own imagined musical world.
‘I used to design record sleeves for records that never existed,’ he muses. ‘I didn't have a band or a record label. Nobody was interested. But I would design record sleeves like for the songs I was writing and I'd have fun doing that. I loved records. I loved imagining records.
When those songs coalesced into beloved indie outfit Belle & Sebastian, his imaginative exercise paid off. 1996’s Tigermilk would come to be an album defined by its bookish, monochromatic blue-washed portrait – one that would become a signifier for a very specific brand of indie-pop outsiderdom. Murdoch had initially intended to appear on the cover himself, alongside his then-girlfriend, Joanne Kenney.
‘I dug up the contact strip recently and it's kind of funny and charming and of a time,’ Murdoch states. ‘But at the same time, I just realised I didn't want to be in the picture.’
Instead, he opted to retreat behind the lens.
The Belle & Sebastian Tigermilk contact strip
‘At the time, indie music was all sometimes perceived as a little bit sexless,’ he continues. ‘I think it was Joanne that suggested covering herself with the tiger toy that I’d bought her, so she got into the bath, I took a few pictures and that was it really. From that point onwards, I liked being part of the creative process, rather than being in the picture.’
Assembling the sleeve in a pre-digital Glasgow that lacked the infrastructure for independent music design proved to be an interesting learning curve.
‘I didn't know anything about anything,’ Murdoch laughs. ‘You didn't just go to a guy who made record sleeves. There wasn't a person like that back then.’
He found a solution in Andrew Divine, whose poster designs for the legendary Divine! club nights suggested a shared visual sensibility.
‘It was his first time doing a record sleeve,’ Murdoch continues. ‘The computer programs were new at that point and I remember we went round to the university. We were looking over the shoulder of this guy, trying to find out how to do design stuff. He got kind of annoyed because we were asking a bunch of questions. And he was like, 'Alright, so you can just fuck off and do it yourself.' So we did fuck off and do it ourselves.’
Armed with an early iteration of Photoshop and inspired by the high-contrast layouts of the Blue Note jazz label, the pair began making Murdoch’s imagined records a reality.
Unused cover artwork featuring Stuart 6 months before the band was formed
‘I was flicking through a book of Blue Note record sleeves when he was putting the stuff on screen,’ he recalls. ‘There’s often so much shadow and the contrast between dark and light, so we took all the colour out of the photo, bumped up the contrast and put a couple of different colours through: green and yellow and blue. We liked the blue one and that's pretty much how it came out.’
Where The Smiths used their record sleeves as canvases for Morrissey to swoon over the glamour of 1960s cinema icons, Murdoch sought out his cover stars closer to home, enlisting friends and muses in Glasgow. Building on Tigermilk’s introspective tone, the band’s sophomore album, If You’re Feeling Sinister, depicted a moment of stark vulnerability between Murdoch and his friend Ciara MacLaverty, both of whom had chronic fatigue syndrome.
‘It was kind of accidental,’ Murdoch recalls. ‘I remember just being around her house and she was upset about something. It probably wasn’t really what a good friend should do, but after she’d dried her eyes, I asked if I could take a couple of pictures. There was obviously a fragility about the moment. It was shot in low light. There was no flash or anything and the image was quite murky on the negative, but once we put the red colour through it, it kind of brought out that sort of sense of 'sinister', so to speak.’
The If You're Feeling Sinister contact strip
When it came to the use of colour, the saturated washes – now a hallmark of Belle & Sebastian sleeves – were a way for Murdoch to navigate the world as he perceived it.
‘I'm semi colour blind,’ he explains. ‘In the early days, I just wanted to use colours that I recognised… To me, there was no ambiguity there; I could still see these colours. When it comes to shades and things like that, I get into sort of dodgy territory.’
The emerald green cover for 1998’s The Boy with the Arab Strap, which features keyboard player Chris Geddes being impaled with a sword, was actually a byproduct of a music video shoot that descended into a medieval skirmish.
‘We were shooting the video for a song called Is It Wicked Not To Care?,’ Murdoch recalls. ‘We took a band day trip down to this river in Ayrshire. Chris and Mick [Cooke, former brass player] were wearing kilts and they were having a sword fight. We'd borrowed old swords from one of these reenactment societies, but we bloody broke it. As soon as they started sparring, one of the swords broke and half of it flew off. Mick impaled Chris with the broken sword and it looked like something had gone in, so I snapped that.’
As the band's profile grew, Murdoch began to push the boundaries of his DIY visual ambitions after his original ideas for 2000’s Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant were rejected for being too overtly political.
‘The record was going to be called Belle & Sebastian Support The Work of The Clydeside Hunt Saboteurs,’ Murdoch recalls. ‘I wasn't scared of an unwieldy title back then and it was before the fox hunting ban came in. We wanted to be a little bit political for once, but somebody in the band felt it wasn’t the right time and place to make that kind of statement.’
Rejected artwork for the album that became Fold Your Hands Child
His pursuit of another specific visual eventually led Murdoch to Iceland, chasing a symmetrical concept inspired by twin musicians Gyða and Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir of fellow indie band Múm.
The contact strip for Fold Your Hands Child
‘I went all the way to bloody Iceland to shoot the pictures,’ he laughs. ‘I took my props with me – this big gold gilt frame – and set it up like a mirror.’
The logistical absurdity of it all was not lost on his subjects.
‘I remember their mum saying to me, “So they don't have twins in Scotland?”’ he laughs. ‘I was pouring my life into every record we were doing and I carried that into the artwork. I was so invested that I was like, “Yeah, there are twins in Glasgow, but not like your twins.” You see something and it wouldn't have been the same with other people.’
Unused Fold Your Hands child photography
The 2000s saw a transition to more art-directed photography, which came with its own set of creative challenges. Reflecting on 2003’s Dear Catastrophe Waitress, Murdoch admits to a rare moment of dissatisfaction over its imagined scene of a disgruntled waitress tending to the band. When the album was reissued in 2014, he put forward a single image of the titular waitress instead – an act of revisionism that brought the design more in line with the rest of the band’s visuals.
Unused Dear Catastrophe Waitress photography
2005 compilation Push Barman to Open Old Wounds, meanwhile, features a monochromatic visual inspired by the cynical wit of graffiti found in the toilets of the Glasgow School of Art. The resulting artwork eschewed the band’s usual colour-wash treatments for the first time.
‘I thought it was genius,’ Murdoch enthuses, recalling the daubed slogan. ‘The sign says, “Push Bar To Open” and some WAG had written, “Push Barman To Open Old Wounds”, so we were just recreating that idea. We ran some colours through and then decided to go with black and white. There's quite a lot of information on that sleeve, a little bit like the original 'Catastrophe Waitress', so we thought, 'let's keep it black and white.' But it definitely puts the concept across.’
2006’s The Life Pursuit marked a departure from Scotland’s domestic interiors, moving toward a stylised aesthetic that mirrored Murdoch’s growing interest in film. He subsequently led a creative team, including his future wife, Marisa Privitera, on a weekend-long odyssey through the Scottish Highlands.
‘I had a scenario about these three models that were sent out to show Scotland up as a good place, but in the end they end up being tired and bitchy towards each other.’
The record was originally intended to be titled Rest and be Thankful, named after a famous vantage point near Glencoe.
Alternate artwork for Rest and Be Thankful
Alternate artwork for Rest and Be Thankful
‘I always thought that was a beautiful name,’ he states. ‘I got the perfect picture and we put that on the sleeve, but one of the band felt the name made it sound like it was going to be our last record.’
As the band moved into the 2010s, Murdoch traded his reliable Olympus OM 10 for the sophisticated, albeit temperamental, medium-format Hasselblad. 2010’s pastel pink artwork for Write About Love subsequently saw him leaning on the expertise of his wife, a freelance filmmaker and photographer, for a shoot that felt like a return to the candid simplicity of the early years.
‘I just wanted to make this one easy and actually enjoy the process,’ he says. ‘No lights, no chasing up lots of people, no reflectors, just using a medium format camera on a sunny day in Glasgow.’
The intervening years saw Murdoch’s burgeoning film career, which culminated in the 2014 musical God Help the Girl, begin to seep into the band’s visual world. 2015’s Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance marked his first studio shoot, featuring a cast of characters ‘coming out of the Second World War and finding new freedoms’. Perhaps their most radical visual statement arrived in 2018 with How To Solve Our Human Problems, which saw Murdoch inviting 50 fans and volunteers to a shoot at a London studio, turning the lens on the audience that had sustained the band for over two decades.
With three decades of visual world-building behind him, the question of a favourite sleeve remains a complex one. For its atmospheric resonance with a bygone Glasgow, Murdoch cites the band’s second B-sides compilation, 2013’s The Third Eye Centre, as a definitive Belle & Sebastian artefact – its elegant, sepia wash layered with script graphics that distil the feeling of its namesake, a much-missed Glasgow cultural institution.
‘If you have the gatefold in your hand, it’s a very satisfying package,’ he states. ‘It was the kind of place where you went to see a play by an up-and-coming person, or some mad Icelandic dance music. I was just remembering a vibe and then trying to recreate it. Stevie [Jackson, guitarist and vocalist] was very complimentary about that one. He was like, “You got it. I don't know what it is, but you have it.”’
He holds a similar fondness for the hometown homage of Write About Love-era 12-inch Come On Sister’s artwork; the result of a shoot with friends that saw them striking yoga poses against a brutalist backdrop.
Come on Sister artwork
‘It’s very Smiths-y,’ he notes. ‘We went around Glasgow doing poses in funny, post-industrial, concrete, brutalist surroundings. It just has a little contrast, so I think it works really nice.’
With recent albums A Bit of Previous and Late Developers returning to the classic single subject formula, Murdoch very much appears to have reached a point of aesthetic clarity.
‘As the years go past and less and less people listen to your records, the design gets better,’ he jests. ‘You get sort of better at your job, at planning and the overall design.’
Three decades after he first began imagining record sleeves, the process remains a driving force, of sorts.
‘I think it's a device for creativity,’ he states. ‘We all work on memory and nostalgia. We’re always drawing on that… It’s the icing on the cake.’
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