Making Stuff Up...

A brief time-capsule on the creative process

Jun 04, 2025

From the earliest that I can remember I’ve created stuff. It starts simple enough with things like Lego. You follow the instructions and you build the Death Star, and usually that’s enough. However, for the select few of us - you then break Lord Vaders castle down and use the pieces to create things from your imagination. You build a small version of the Delorian from Back To The Future (with the doors that open from the bottom), you build Ziggy, the small handheld companion of Al from Quantum Leap, or maybe you just build a fortress for your other toys to battle in!

I remember in year 4 we were studying the Egyptians at school, and this sent a fascinated young Murdock running home to destroy the cereal box and make a Tutankhamun headpiece! Although I didn’t appreciate it at the time, the desire to build something that wasn’t there before seemed to perpetuate most things I was doing. I drew stuff! I made fantasy worlds to play in with friends, we would play video games then play as those characters on the streets with my friends. We were little deeebs and we loved it.

When I was rather young, my parents thought I was deaf (or stupid), and so they took me to the Dr’s who arranged for me to have some grommets stuck into my ears. I remember waking up in my hospital bed and the sound was horrendous. It felt like everyone was shouting and I couldn’t bear it. For a little while afterwards my parents began introducing me to different things, and it was then that I heard War of the Worlds for the first time. I could have only been about 7/8 years old, but this was the game changer. Electric guitars everywhere! Synths and string sections breaking your heart and warning us all of the invasion coming that we’re powerless to stop. It introduced me to Thin Lizzy & The Moody Blues! It introduced me to incredible work of Richard Burton. And most importantly - it made me want to become a musician.

From then on every decision I made was to further my knowledge of music.

Secondary school hit and with music came the fascination with record collecting, reading bizarre books my favourite songs were based on, attempting to draw the incredible album covers I was looking at (Frank Zappa, Yes, Deep Purple etc). My school books were littered with band logos, the Stormbringer horse, and a slightly new fascination - comics!

I can pin point the moment it happened. I was in year 9, I was teaching myself the guitar and all of my friends would come in with what they were learning. It became a battle of who can learn the licks the fastest! Well one day my mate John came in and bet me I couldn’t learn Surfing With The Alien. That weekend I went into our town centre, waddled straight to the Music Zone (3x CDs for a tenner! The dream!) and grabbed a copy of the album, hit the guitar shop for a copy of the tab book and ran home to get to work.

While I was in the guitar shop the owner made a passing comment about the front cover of the album being The Silver Surfer. Something that at the time I thought nothing of, until later that week when I’m showing the lads how the Herculean task was going, and the conversation again turned to The Silver Surfer. This time with a website link that I could read comics people had scanned into the computer. That was it. That was the week I got into excessively noodly guitars and comic books.

Smash cut to today. Today I stand before you - man! A man that has spent his entire life dedicating to his music career, a career that has me currently working in a music college down here in Brighton, and working on my indie comic.

I’d like to take an opportunity to drop the first arc of my silly little book, and the first of many “Art-Beats” I’ve been working on!

It’s a small start - but this little seed is gonna grow, and if you’d like to come on this journey with me then be sure to follow the links down below!!

Make more art!

Make more music!

Make more comics!