Stuart Murdoch is a founding member of the critically acclaimed indie band Belle and Sebastian. Formed in Glasgow in 1996, the group took their name from Belle et Sébastien, a 1965 children's book by the French writer Cécile Aubry. They have released eight albums to date and Murdoch has written a memoir, The Celestial Café, and is finishing a film called God Help the Girl. On 27 August Belle and Sebastian release The Third Eye Centre, a compilation of B-sides and rarities covering the past decade.
Book
Carry On, Jeeves by PG Wodehouse
Obviously I love Wodehouse. As funny, laugh-out-loud writers go, he really has no rival. I picked this book because it is the first Jeeves and Wooster book and I love the start of things. I love the way that Jeeves shimmies into Wooster's life and then suddenly everything becomes all right. You get the sense right there that this is the beginning of a great bond, a great friendship. That calms me; I feel that Jeeves has shimmied into my life too and now just like Bertie everything will be alright for me too.
Television
Seinfeld
I do not watch much TV, but what I do watch I obsess about. Seinfeld is very old now and if you were to glance at it you might think it would no longer work. The sets are very obviously sets, the clothes and haircuts are terrible and the set-up appears extremely cosy, almost to the point of cliche. But it does still work – arguably better than it ever has done. Larry David's (Seinfeld writer and co-creator) Curb Your Enthusiasm contains some very funny bits. But for sheer sustained laughs Seinfeld is unbeatable. There is a Seinfeld scene for every situation in life.
Radio
It's this odd little thing that suddenly appears somewhere in Radio 4's Today programme. You get the stocks and shares, you get the weather, you get some politician mouthing off about their latest eye-catching policy and then suddenly you get this little pocket, this little interlude of spirituality. There are people talking about the supernatural right there in the middle of the BBC's flagship news programme every working day. I am a Christian, and I know that goes against the grain, and I know it's not fashionable but I genuinely love it. And not just when there are Christian speakers, I love it particularly when Rabbi Lionel Blue comes on. Am I a Christian apologist? Of course I am – I am a young person who goes to church. But I am also an apologist for Sikhism and Hinduism and Judaism. I will lie down on the metaphorical train lines to defend Thought for the Day.
Film
Day for Night
I have been making a film for the last couple of years and since I had never directed anything before my manual for making a film is François Truffaut's Day for Night, which was recently reissued on DVD and Blu-ray. It was made in 1973 and its French title is La nuit américaine, which is a very poetic title and refers to a particular way of shooting night-time during day. Although by no means his most famous film it is very well regarded and is essentially a film within a film. I watched it a lot as I was making my own film, in order to get the sense of what a director needs to do.
Music
Early REM
I really do not want to be any more specific than that. Everyone knows their later stuff when they went stratospheric, but it's the early stuff, when they were part of the US punk-rock scene that really interests me at the moment. They broke up officially two years ago and everyone kind of shrugged their shoulders because they'd been in decline for some time. But it made me want to go back and hear those very early records. I take solace in those early records, they are punk rock and punk rock was the basic miracle of music. Punk really did change everything – a band such as REM simply could not have existed in the way they did without punk. The same goes for the Specials, the Smiths and us. Because of the way they happened, REM later became one of those huge bands it was OK to like.
Writer
Rudyard Kipling
I don't want to specify any particular novel of his and I know that because of his imperial associations he is not the hippest novelist around but I love him. He is deeply unfashionable but I don't think you could find a purer literary thinker than Kipling. He does not put himself into the narrative, you do not feel his personality but the trade-off is that you get all these wonderful flights of fantasy and go to these amazing places. His short stories and his novels are amazing. I read Kim at a fairly young and very impressionable age and the relationship between Kim and the old man was very touching; it had a profound and resounding effect upon me.
