ON THE RISE
VICTORIA, BC — Mr. Esq grew up in a small port town on Canada’s southwest coast named Esquimalt, and that community gave him his stage name.
Now he’s working to help young people avoid the problems he had and mistakes he made while as a youngster in Esquimalt with his latest album, ‘Esquire’ coming out July 14.
“This is my first album with the label Predominate Studios, this will be my 18th album in the last three and a half years,” Mr. Esq said. “This album, 20 tracks for the label, it’s my reintroduction to the hip hop scene with this label backing me and I wanted to do something a little more creative and different.
“The topics of this, there’s a bunch. It goes from ‘Rich Problems,’ I wrote a song about my mother, ‘A Mother’s Day.’ There are songs about abusive relationships, COVID, Black Lives Matter, the indigenous people and the babies that were found, and there’s a whole spectrum about content songs. Songs about the youth and the direction they’re going. I’ve got something for everybody. Then there are some clubby, banging songs, songs for the ladies, I talk about sexual abuse, I talk about all kinds of things.”
Mr. Esq said his time in prison and a child he lost more than 20 years ago are helping feed his music today and helping him mold his message.
“I spent 10 years in prison,” he said. “I was 18 years old, I was part of an escort agency, selling drugs for certain people. I got a girl pregnant, she moved away and I went with her, then she lost all the amniotic fluid six and a half or seven months into the pregnancy and it forced her to go into labor. My son passed away at birth. That sent me down an even darker path at that point, just drinking more and being more violent, hurting people. It’s ultimately what led to my incarceration.”
After he got out of prison, he worked hard to change his life and a happy coincidence helped along the way.
“I met a girl and I had a daughter with her,” Mr. Esq said. “The doctor told me the due date and it was the exact same date my son passed away. Ten years to the day my daughter was born on the same day my son died 10 years apart. So we celebrate both their birthdays on the same day, she wears his ashes and she knows all about her big brother. The worst day of my life was changed and now it’s the best day of my life
“It’s crazy how the universe works because what kind of father would I have been at 18 years old selling drugs and being a knuckle head, as opposed to now, my daughter is my world, she means everything to me and everything I do every day is to provide her with a life that I never had and make sure she never walks the path that I lived when I was growing up.”
Mr. Esq said his latest single, ‘Rich Problems’ was the result of a fun collaboration with a friend, the rapper and artist Madchild.
“So a buddy of mine Madchild, he's a really really good artist and he’s made some huge new moves in the community of hip hop,” Mr. Esq said. “So I grew up listening to his music and we became good friends and he pulled up to my house in a G-Wagon (a Mercedes G-class SUV) and I said, oh, you’ve got Rich Problems. We Kind of laughed about it and then we ended up going to the studio and that beat came on and I started going through the beat in my head and seeing what comes and Anything you really got is a Rich Problem. That’s the first thing that came to my head and we started writing and we just made magic from there.”
Mr. Esq said “Rich Problems” is about having complaints that really aren’t that serious in the wider scheme of things.
“A lot of people have complaints about their relationships or girls or the pandemic or gas prices, shit like that, it’s like I want to have Rich Problems,” Mr. Esq said. “I’ve got too much money, I need to figure out what to do with it. That’s kind of what the song is about, when you have rich problems, you have no more problems, everything’s just taken care of. Maybe one day I’ll have those kinds of problems, but really it was just a fun song to make with my buddy Madchild, and it turned out to be pretty good. I like how it came together.”
To listen to Mr. Esq’s music, or to follow him on social media, please visit the following links:
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ON THE RISE
As Belle & Sebastian share their buoyant 2026 Scotland World Cup anthem ‘It Only Takes One Lion’, frontman Stuart Murdoch has spoken to NME about capturing the feeling back home and his hopes for the team since childhood.
Released today (Tuesday June 2), the Scottish indie heroes’ bid for their nation’s tournament anthem was written after the team’s surprise 4-2 qualifying win against Denmark.
“I felt like we were watching history in the moment, like the hand of God from the old National Lottery adverts was pointing at us,” Murdoch told NME about that game-changing victory. “It was meant to be. Scotland aren’t a terrific team and Denmark are better, but it just felt that day that Scotland were destined to win. Three out of the four goals were things of beauty.”
Produced by and co-written with Pete Ferguson and premiered at the band’s recent London Royal Albert Hall show as part of the anniversary tour for their classic first two albums ‘Tigermilk’ and ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’, the soaring song is intrinsically Belle & Sebastian as it morphs from a hymn to a an orchestral disco jam as Murdoch sings of a nation’s hopes and his own boyhood dreams.
NME spoke to Murdoch from the band’s North American tour, where we found him in a graveyard in Texas. “I was just looking for a park because Austin is a pretty scary place downtown now, so I’ve ended up in the Texas Cemetery,” he shared via Zoom.
Was there anyone famous buried there?
“I was looking around and I found the founder of Austin City Limits, which is pretty cool as that’s where we’re playing tonight. I’m looking at one now and it just says, ‘Martin: he loved the law’. Then underneath it says, ‘Billie Louise: she loved the lawyer’.”
We joke that there’s the opening to a Belle & Sebastian song if there ever there was one. “It’s great! It’s given me inspiration.”
For now, read the rest of interview with Murdoch below as he tells us about Scotland’s chances, 30 years of hurt, if fans will be singing it at the top of their lungs in Canada, the US and Mexico this summer, and what’s next for the band.
NME: Hello Stuart. Here we are with ‘It Only Takes One Lion’ Who needs three?
Stuart Murdoch: “Who needs three? Good question. I wouldn’t know!”
What’s the mood been like in Scotland since you qualified?
“It’s funny. I’ve noticed this everywhere: with the World Cup there’s a mixture of cynicism and anticipation. When the actual tournament starts, everyone will get excited about it. Because of FIFA, the peace prize, the ticket prices, people seem quite down about it. I found that in Mexico. They were quite fed up with the general hype about it. I’m in the States just now and you shouldn’t believe all the hype: people are people. The States are just as ‘great’ as ever. We love coming here, we love the cities. The general sense of North American optimism will make for a good tournament.”
“With Scotland though, people will definitely be excited about it. You have to understand, it’s been 30 years since Scotland qualified so I think everybody and their dog has written a song for the team.”
How do you meet the challenge of penning a World Cup anthem, when there have been so many legendary bangers and absolutely shite duds?
“I never planned it. I woke up with a tune in my head and a feeling. That’s the way it should always be for songs. I couldn’t control myself and it was quite straight-forward. I wrote this initial bit about how I felt about the current World Cup team and the qualifying game. It was more introspective.
“When it starts off with, ‘The days are dark and long…’, it’s just my general feeling about football. I’ve been going to see my own team quite a lot recently. It’s my little anthem for how I feel about football and following Scotland for the last 50 years, just the ups and downs. It’s quite a heartfelt thing. When I was eight or nine, the Scottish team meant so much to me, it the thing I was most invested in. There’s a line in there about how I used to memorise the whole squad before ‘78 and 82.”
Tell us about lyric: “This is Scotland, where everyone knows you start with nothing… where you can join an army for peace”…
“My wife made the video for it and she said, ‘I’m not sure I like that line about everyone starting with nothing’. Our first game is against Haiti and they really have nothing. Their country is pretty poor and they’re going through hard times. It was almost a throwaway line and I’m not sure what I meant by it, but in a footballing sense every game starts with nothing. Even if it’s against Brazil, you’ve always got a chance!
“The army refers to The Tartan Army, which has really been quite a remarkable institution for the past 30 years. We changed from drunken buffoons that used to wreck things to this excellent supporting brigade.”
It’s not your standard football sing-along. Can you see it being sung in the terraces?
“I’m not sure, I didn’t cynically design it for that. Many people have said to me in the past, ‘None of your songs have a chorus, you need to write one’. ‘This is Scotland’ is a chorus! They things need to happen organically. I’m sure the fans will still be singing ‘Yes sir, I can boogie’ for years to come.”
What do you actually think of Scotland’s chances right now?
“With the last Euros, they maybe got stage fright or didn’t have that tournament experience. I think Andy Robertson [captain] will be telling them, ‘We really need to produce our best stuff’. If they do and we see them actually playing football, then I don’t really care about the results that much. I just want to see Scotland exceeding our expectations of them. That Denmark game was so crazy that everything after just feels like a bonus.”
If miracles do happen and Scotland make it to the final, how will you celebrate? A free gig in Glasgow?
“Of course, yes! Free everything. If we even got close, I think the whole country would shut down for a year and the GDP would drop. We’d go into a massive recession but no one would care.
“We were playing a gig in Mexico City and I told the crowd, ‘It’s you and us, Mexico and Scotland in the final’. Mexico have never really got close either. I told them it would be five goals a piece, even after everyone takes a penalty and we have to share the trophy. I would settle for that.”
You released two albums in quick succession with 2022’s ‘A Bit of Previous’, 2023’s ‘Late Developers’ and then your debut novel Nobody’s Empire in 2024. You’ve been busy! Is there any progress on new material?
“We went through a period where we recorded a lot and we said, ‘Let’s not record for a while and give ourselves a couple of cycles off’. We’re doing these 30th anniversary shows so we’re just going to lean on the back catalogue and cruise for a while. We’re doing a year on and a year off so everyone can focus on different things.
We’re not looking at new Belles stuff for a while. I’m meant to be developing Nobody’s Empire into a film, so that’s my next task. It’s a long way off from being made but I’m going to write the script for that.”
Scotland’s first World Cup tournament match is against Haiti on Sunday June 14, before they go on to play Morocco on Friday June 19 and Brazil on Wednesday June 24.
The band’s ‘Tigermilk’ and ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’ anniversary tour continues throughout the summer, performing the iconic albums in full during across the UK, Europe, North America, Mexico, Australia, Singapore and Japan. Visit here for tickets and more information.
