Stewart Murdoch

In 2010 Murdoch published his first memoir, The Celestial Café. In 2012–2013 he wrote and directed the musical feature film God Help the Girl, released internationally and online in 2014.

In 2009 Murdoch contributed the song "Another Saturday" to the AIDS benefit album Dark Was the Night, produced by the Red Hot Organization. He was one of the most notable protesters attending a 5 December 2009 march in Glasgow supporting governmental intervention to combat climate change, prior to the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 in Copenhagen.

Murdoch is a vegetarian. He married longtime girlfriend Marisa Privitera on 26 November 2007 in New York City. Privitera is on the cover of Belle and Sebastian's DVD Fans Only and LP The Life Pursuit. Their eldest son, Denny, was born in May 2013. Second son Nico was born in November 2016.

This was also when he began living above a church hall and working as its caretaker, a position he maintained until 2003. In 2004 Murdoch told The Guardian, "I'm not actually a Christian with a capital C. I'm still asking questions. But I had this time when I found myself singing all these old hymns in my kitchen and I couldn't work out why I was doing it. Then one Sunday morning I got up, looked at my watch, and thought, 'I wonder if I could make it to a church service?' It was so welcoming. It just felt like you were coming home. Twelve years later, I've never left".

Murdoch ran the Glasgow Marathon in 1986, and finished with a time of three hours.

Whilst at university at the end of the 1980s, he became ill with myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome, and was unable to work for seven years. Murdoch said that the isolation of these years is what led to his becoming a songwriter: "That was a big desert at the time, a kind of vacuum in my life. From that, these songs started coming out, these melodies where I could express what I was feeling." By early 1995 Murdoch had largely recovered from his illness and began to look for fellow musicians to form a band, which became Belle & Sebastian. Murdoch's struggle with chronic fatigue syndrome is the subject of the song "Nobody's Empire" on Belle & Sebastian's album Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance.

Stuart Lee Murdoch (born 25 August 1968) is a Scottish musician, writer and filmmaker, and the lead singer and songwriter for the indie pop band Belle and Sebastian.