Artist Spotlight – The Narcissist Cookbook
We’re thrilled to welcome The Narcissist Cookbook to Tolbooth on the 10th April for a unique, intimate, warm-up show ahead of their 2026 USA/Europe tour. Before this sold-out hometown performance, we caught up with Matt to chat about his music, his creative journey and what it’s like to be an artist in Stirling.
The Narcissist Cookbook
Hi! My name is Matt Johnston, I’m a songwriter and performer from Stirling and I perform under the name The Narcissist Cookbook.
My music is a mix of punk, folk, and spoken word, weaving elements of therapy sessions, cosmic horror, and stream-of-consciousness monologues.
I had been writing and performing for about ten years under various names until I lost my singing voice in 2015. I was so freaked out by the idea that I’d never be able to perform again that I started writing monologues and accompanying them myself on guitar just so I could have a fallback plan. I eventually got my voice back after a year, but I’d found incorporating monologues into my music so rewarding that I kept doing it.
I was quietly making albums in my flat and putting them out into the ether for a few years, and a couple of times a week I’d get someone reaching out to say they loved it and had shared it with friends, but I didn’t really believe I had fans until I was booked for a show in Seattle. I landed at about noon, and later that day I was on stage in front of a few hundred people who knew the words to all of my songs, and I was just speechless. There was one person in Seattle I think I made panic because I recognised her as the first person to ever comment on one of my songs on YouTube. I just ran up to her and was like “it’s you! you were my first ever fan!”
Then the packed out shows kept happening – the same thing happened again in Portland, and Los Angeles, and Boston and New York and Chicago, and then it started to happen back in the UK too. Every year the shows get bigger, and the fans get louder, and a lot of them all know each other now. There’s a real community.
Plus, for the last two years I’ve been doing this songwriting podcast with my tourmate Bug Hunter, called Jam Mechanics, where we have to write and record a song from scratch in a couple of hours – we’re just wrapping up season four now, and Jam Mechanics has started regularly breaking into the top music podcast charts, so that’s bringing in even more people. It’s crazy.
“Stirling is such a perfect place to make art for someone like me.”
I grew up on a tiny Scottish island, and Stirling is like an island in the middle of the country. I’m always just a few minutes from nature, a few minutes from the city centre, and less than an hour from Scotland’s two biggest cities.
At the tail end of March I start going out for walks every day, I traipse around the backwalk or I go out across the river to Cambuskenneth, and I’ll be writing in my head or practising monologues out loud to try and get them memorised. A lot of the time when I’m nervous about wandering around nattering to myself I’ll hold my phone to my ear so it looks like I’m talking to someone.
My last album, MYTH, was half found-footage horror designed to sound like it had been recorded over an old cassette tape of children’s stories, and one section of the album required me to be lost in a forest – and I couldn’t possibly recreate that in the studio, so I just went up into woods under the Wallace Monument and recorded myself reciting this fairytale while wandering through the undergrowth in midwinter. There’s no amount of pretending to talk to someone on the phone that would have made that look normal.
I love the music scene here too. I run an open mic in Nicky Tams every Wednesday, and I go along to another open mic once a week to try out new songs I’m working on, and the talent here is staggering. When the Narcissist Cookbook started taking off there were some discussions about whether I should give up hosting duties of the night I run to someone else so I’d have more time to focus on writing and touring, but they’ll have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands. It’s a gift to be able to go out into the heart of it every week and hear what people have been working on.
Every year I’ve put a tiny warmup show on in Stirling Books to testdrive new tracks in front of an audience before I fly out for tour, and every year it’s sold out in less than a minute. So this year I took a deep breath and booked the Tolbooth, which is quite honestly one of my favourite venues full stop. The live sound is unparalleled, the building is gorgeous. I thought, oh, this means everyone who wants to go to this show can go. Apparently I’m still in denial about having fans because it sold out two months in advance. There are people flying in from across the world for this show. It doesn’t feel like a chill little warmup show anymore, it’s just the biggest hometown show I’ve ever played. Nuts.
