God Help The Girl God Help The Girl May 12, 2009

God Help The Girl’ is a story set to music, which Stuart Murdoch has been working on intermittently for the last five years, its origin in some songs that were written while Belle and Sebastian were touring ‘Dear Catastrophe Waitress’ in 2004. Stuart explains:

"I was out for a run and I got this tune in my head and it occurred to me that it wasn't a Belle & Sebastian song. I could hear female voices and strings, I could hear the whole thing, but I just couldn’t envisage myself singing it with the group.”

As more songs emerged, a shape and theme began to develop, before the music was actually recorded, or the vocalists found to take on the parts.

“All the time I was touring with Belle and Sebastian, I was putting aside songs for certain characters,” he says, “and at one point I realised, that it would make sense to string them together to form the backbone of a musical narrative.”

The hunt was then on to find some great new voices to put to use during the recordings. A competition where singers could add their vocals to the demo recordings of ‘Funny Little Frog’ and ‘The Psychiatrist Is In’ was posted on the iMeem social networking site and attracted around 400 entries. From these, Brittany Stallings (Olympia, Washington) and Dina Bankole (Jackson, Michigan) came to Glasgow in February 2008 to rehearse and record some parts, Brittany making the lead vocal part on ‘Funny Little Frog’ her own.

Among those who auditioned early in the process was Catherine Ireton, who had moved from Limerick to Glasgow, a friend of a friend, who had previously appeared on the sleeve of Belle and Sebastian’s last single, ‘The White Collar Boy.’ She took on the lead vocals for the majority of the songs on the record.

The recording continued during 2008, with a total of nine different singers (including Neil Hannon from the Divine Comedy and Asya from American teen trio, Smoosh) joining the members of Belle and Sebastian over the course of a few months. During this, Mick Cooke’s orchestral arrangements were recorded in London with the orchestra before the finishing touches were applied in Glasgow.

The result is a breathtaking record from one of pop’s most singular voices, combining the strengths and feel of the early Belle and Sebastian records in a broader musical palette, which draws equally on musicals, sixties’ girl groups, eighties’ indie and, most of all, classic pop records. And, in Catherine, Stuart has found a rare talent - her clear, lilting vocals bringing to life the characters in Stuart’s imagination and making for an ambitious and engrossing musical journey.

The album will be released on the 22nd June (23rd US) preceded by the single 'Come Monday Night' on the 11th May.

The BBC Sessions November 18, 2008

Matador is releasing a compilation of Belle and Sebastian's BBC recordings from 1996 – 2001 on November 18, 2008.

The album tracks the group’s development from their first live radio recordings for Mark Radcliffe’s show in July 1996, shortly after the release of their Tigermilk album, through to a batch of four, much bootlegged songs recorded for John Peel in 2001, none of which have previously appeared on CD or vinyl.

After the initial support on Radcliffe’s ‘Graveyard Shift’ show – when the band twice travelled to Manchester in 1996 and played live into the show at Manchester’s Oxford Road studios – Belle and Sebastian moved to the earlier evening schedules in 1998, playing new songs, including an alternative version of ‘Lazy Line Painter Jane’ and a definitive version of ‘Slow Graffiti’ for Steve Lamacq’s Evening Session. A subsequent Lamacq appearance was recorded in the less austere surrounding of a Radio 1 tour bus outside Barrowlands in Glasgow.

Despite featuring in John Peel’s Festive Fifty every year during the period and being played regularly on his show, the band’s first Maida Vale Peel session did not take place until 2001 – the first of four subsequent Peel appearances which included a visit to Peel Acres and a legendary, sixteen song Christmas gig at Maida Vale, both in 2002.

The four songs from 2001 – ‘The Magic of a Kind Word,’ ‘Nothing In The Silence,’ ‘Shoot The Sexual Athlete’ and ‘(My Girl’s Got) Miraculous Technique’ – never made it on to subsequent albums, and are the last studio recordings to feature Isobel Campbell. They capture the band on the precipice – ending one part of their history and at the start of another.

By the time of the recording of the Christmas show some six months later on December 21 2001 in Belfast (which accompanies initial copies of the sessions album as a bonus disc), things had changed.  Bob Kildea had joined on bass and guitar, and playing live had moved much further up the group’s agenda.

The Belfast show is full of relaxed seasonal cheer, with requests, guest vocalists from the audience, and three cover songs – The Beatles’ ‘Here Comes The Sun,’ Thin Lizzy’s ‘Boys Are Back In Town’ and the Velvets’ ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ – sitting alongside perennial live favorites like ‘The Boy With The Arab Strap,’ ‘The Wrong Girl’ and ‘The Model.’

The full track listing is as follows:

Disc 1 – Radio Sessions:  The State I Am In,   Like Dylan In The Movies,   Judy and the Dream of Horses,   The Stars of Track and Field,   I Could Be Dreaming,   Seymour Stein,   Lazy Jane,   Sleep The Clock Around,   Slow Graffiti,   Wrong Love,   Shoot The Sexual Athlete,   The Magic of a Kind Word,   Nothing In The Silence,   (My Girl’s Got) Miraculous Technique

Disc 2 – Live in Belfast:  Here Comes The Sun,   There’s Too Much Love,   The Magic of a Kind Word,   Me and the Major,   Wandering Alone,   The Model,   I’m Waiting For The Man,   The Boy With the Arab Strap,   The Wrong Girl,   Dirty Dream # 2,   Boys Are Back in Town,   Legal Man

The Life Pursuit February 7, 2006

After making seven albums, Belle and Sebastian have just made the most forceful record of their career. Most people may think they’ve got them pegged as fey cuties, but the band have cut the feet out from under everyone with a record of startling clarity, accomplishment and impact. 'The Life Pursuit' is nothing short of a revelation.

In truth, these changes have not been wrought overnight. The decision to partner up with producer Trevor Horn for the last record (Dear Catastrophe Waitress) was a clear statement of intent – “Think we’re lo-fi underachievers? Think again - we’re working with the guy who does Tatu”. What is now clear – with producer Tony Hoffer back at the helm – is that DCW was but a stop on the way. And what that album started, ‘The Life Pursuit’ delivers in spades.

Decamped for the duration of recording to Los Angeles, Belle and Sebastian found the focus to fully realize what the late John Peel correctly identified as their “surprising muscularity” at Glastonbury three years ago.
Of course, to those paying attention, it was always clear that in chief songwriter Stuart Murdoch we had a treasure in waiting. Perceptive, humane and hilarious, his writing has always had a voice as discernible as a Cocker or Morrissey, but perhaps the bushel obscuring it was a little more, uh, capacious. On ‘The Life Pursuit’ this individuality seems to have reached its apotheosis of heartbreak and humour.

One of the chief pleasures of listening to this record is to follow the lives of Stuart’s engaging cast of characters. You may never be quite sure whose “voice” it is you are listening to, but unlike, say, Morrissey, it would be a mistake to assume that it is always “Stuart”. “Dress Up In You”, for instance, despite being sung in the first person and starting with a line about being “the singer in the band”, seems, at its conclusion, to be about female rivalry. Of course, with typical Belle and Sebastian contrariness, its bitter war is played out against the tenderest of musical backdrops, so the kiss-off line of “they are hypocrites, so fuck them” feels like a stroke on the cheek. Swearing sotto voce is something at which Belle and Sebastian excel.

Elsewhere, Stuart revisits the echoing school corridors and drafty church halls of his back pages. Religion, shorn of dogma, permeates much of ‘The Life Pursuit.’ Here, the choirmaster who’s a “bastard”, there the Good Book as an excuse to skip school (“the bible’s my tool/there’s no mention of school”), and on “Act of the Apostle Part 1” a girl seeming to have an Old Testament fantasy.

On “Funny Little Frog” we start with what seems to be a functional relationship (“Honey loving you is the greatest thing / I get to be myself and I get to sing”), before it becomes clear that we are more in ‘Just My Imagination’ territory (‘You are my girl and you don’t even know it”) and then perhaps the striking idea that he could be addressing an icon of the Madonna (“You are my picture in the hall / You are the one I’m talking to… I don’t dare to touch your hand / I don’t dare to think of you in a physical way”). If this is a hit – and it surely deserves to be - then it will be one of the most cryptic hits since “Walk on the Wild Side”.

The other thing about “Funny Little Frog” – and the whole album, in fact – is the way it feels both familiar and strange at the same time. There is a powerful aesthetic at the heart of the ‘The Life Pursuit’ that places it at some time in the early-to-mid Seventies without ever specifically sounding like anything you can put your finger on. It is more “muscular” than previous Belle and Sebastian albums – and there is a gravitation towards a more live, beat-oriented sound – but unlike any of their peers, it is impossible to reduce their influences to a few key sources.

Belle and Sebastian pull in stuff from all over the place, so that Sly & the Family Stone/Funkadelic inflections (“Song For Sunshine”) sit side by side with the classic bubblegum riffs and call-and-response vocals of “White Collar Boy”; the “Queen Bitch”-era Bowie stylings of “Sukie In the Graveyard”; the glammy T-Rex of “The Blues Are Still Blue”; the prime-time miserablism of a Terry Hall (“Mornington Crescent”) and the irrepressible rousing piano drive of “The Price Of A Cup Of Tea” (which quotes fellow Glaswegian Bobby Gillespie in its opening line).

Writing in his occasional diary on belleandsebastian.com, Stuart has been trying to contextualize the band’s current position within the realm of other what Stuart considers to be “late blooming” artists. Referring to the point at which Jagger sang “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, he continues:

“Never been a ‘consistently’ big Stones fan, but I just loved the production on this track, and the ambition, and the soul. And the groove. It struck me that I felt some parallels with the Stones around that time. Now this may seem extremely presumptuous and all that, but a boy has to dream. It seems to me that they started making some of their best records around that time. I add that to my mental list of groups that had been kicking around for a while, but somehow still had to make their decisive move (Stones, Bee Gees, REM). Less for the Stones, more for REM.”

With ‘The Life Pursuit’ Belle and Sebastian have decisively made theirs.

Belle and Sebastian are:

Stuart Murdoch – vocals, guitar, piano
Stevie Jackson – guitar, vocals
Sarah Martin – vocals, violin
Chris Geddes – piano, keyboards
Richard Colburn – drums
Mick Cooke – trumpet, guitar, bass guitar
Bob Kildea – bass guitar, guitar

Albums released to date (all Matador except Dear Catastrophe Waitress, Rough Trade):

Tigermilk (1996)
If You’re Feeling Sinister (1996)
The Boy With The Arab Strap (1998)
Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant (2000)
Storytelling (2002)
Dear Catastrophe Waitress (2003)
The Life Pursuit (2006)

Storytelling June 4, 2002

An extended meditation on one of the year’s most talked about films; 34 minutes of instrumental film score and six new vocal tracks from the soundtrack to Todd Solondz’s “Storytelling.”

I’m Waking Up to Us November 27, 2001

The second of two new EPs from Belle & Sebastian follows June’s “Jonathan David.” Like its predecessor, “Iım Waking Up To Us” contains three songs and will be released simultaneously on CD5, 12" and 7" vinyl. A teaser for their forthcoming soundtrack to controversial director Todd Solondz's upcoming New Line picture Storytelling (due out later this fall), though none of these tracks will be on the soundtrack album or in the film.

Jonathan and David June 12, 2001

Belle & Sebastian return with the first of two new singles, entitled “Jonathan David.” It includes three previously unreleased tracks, “Jonathan David,” “Take Your Carriage Clock And Shove It” and live favorite “The Loneliness Of A Middle Distance Runner.”

“Jonathan David” is the first new material to be released by Belle & Sebastian since last yearıs single “Legal Man" and the critically acclaimed album ‘Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant’ which followed. Vocal duties on the lead track fall to Stevie Jackson.

Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant June 6, 2000

Belle & Sebastian are Isobel Campbell, Richard Colburn, Mick Cooke, Chris Geddes, Stevie Jackson, Sarah Martin, & Stuart Murdoch. ‘Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant’ is their 4th album. Like the other three, it was recorded at CaVa Studios in Glasgow, and, like the last two, recorded by Mr. Tony Doogan. Errant bassist Stuart David has left the fold — strange timing, considering he had finally mastered the art of turning the pages of a book with his feet, thus eliminating the need to stop playing while he was reading. He plays on most of this album.

“I Fought In A War” was written by Stuart M. It should be noted that this is a work of fiction, and questions regarding Stuart’s involvement in this supposed war should be avoided.

“The Model” is also a Stuart song. It is unclear whether there really is a “Girl next door who’s famous for showing her chest.” As his home is sandwiched in-between a Scout Hut and a nursery, it seems unlikely. Perhaps he means further down the road. If so, he’s kept it bloody quiet until now.

“Beyond The Sunrise” was written by Isobel. It is the third of her songs to be on a B&S record, and the first to feature Tubular Bells--in keeping with the rumors that Yes albums were spotted in the studio during recording.

“Waiting For The Moon To Rise” is Sarah’s first songwriting contribution to B&S. Let’s hope it’s the first of many.

“Don’t Leave The Light On, Baby” is a joint effort between Stuart & Chris — Wee Beans did the slinky Wurlitzer part & Stuart wrote the lyrics. The string arrangement comes courtesy of Mick, Stevie & Beans. One for the ladies.

“The Wrong Girl” is a Stevie number. It’s been part of the live set for a while now, but has been transformed with the addition of strings. You know it must be good when the notoriously self-effacing Stevie let it go on the album. On a happier note, since writing the song, Stevie has found what we believe to be the right girl.

“The Chalet Lines” is another Stuart number. It’s quite slow and sad.

“Nice Day For A Sulk” is also Stuart’s. When I saw that written in Isobel’s diary I didn’t realize it was a song, and presumed it was just her schedule for that day. As it turns out, it’s a short, poppy number, with Beans providing the Blackpool Funfair organ.

“Woman’s Realm,” another Stuart effort, will doubtlessly be labelled as a “stomper.” It’s got a big string thing going on, and I believe the Tubular Bells managed to worm their way on again, despite it’s distinctly un-prog mood.

“Family Tree” is written by Stuart & sung by Isobel. It’s been played live once before, but will be a new experience for anyone outside Dublin. Foxy, the chef at Nice’n’Sleazy’s, took a break from the fajitas to do some twiddly flute. Again, Stuart wasn’t literally thrown out of school, though he wasn’t so lucky when he tried University. 3 times.

“There’s Too Much Love” is Stuart’s final contribution & the last song on the album. Another dancey number, its most notable feature is Stevie’s impression of a choir of angels doing “Steve Harley and the Cockney Rebel.”

The Boy With the Arab Strap September 8, 1998

If You’re Feeling Sinister February 2, 1998

Tigermilk July 13, 1999

Belle and Sebastian were formed in an all-night café in Glasgow, January 1996. Stuart Murdoch (singer/songwriter) and Stuart David (bass guitar) met on a government training scheme and recorded some demos, which found their way into the ears and hearts of a Stow College Music Business Course. The course, run by ex-Associate Alan Rankine, produces and releases one record every year on the college label Electric Honey Records, usually a single. However, in the case of Belle and Sebastian they had enough songs to record a whole album, and so the elusive Tigermilk was born. Recorded in three days and one thousand copies released on vinyl only, it now changes hands for up to £400 per copy.

Belle and Sebastian then signed to Jeepster in August and the critically acclaimed LP “If You’re Feeling Sinister” (JPRCD/LP/MC001) was released November 18TH. A support slot for the Tindersticks ICA Gigs, followed by a headline show at the Borderline in early November, brought the joys of Belle and Sebastian live to the south of England for the first time. The band then set about with the plan of spending the summer of 1997 releasing EPs, the first of these being “Dog On Wheels” on April 28th. This release contained early demos of the band, previous to all the current members joining, including the demo version of “The State I Am In.” Mark Radcliffe had played the mastered Tigermilk version of this track relentlessly and for those without a copy of the vinyl masterpiece, the Dog EP (JPRCDS/12/7001) appeased the fans thirst enough to put the single in at Number 59 on the UK singles chart.

The second EP “Lazy Line Painter Jane,” was released on July 28th, the Week of the seminal Union Chapel gig in Islington, London. Despite the poor sound, the band had the crowd dancing in the aisles (and pews) of the chapel. For most, this gig was their first B&S gig and a religious experience was shared by all. The “Lazy Jane” EP narrowly missed the UK top 40, crashing in at number 41, much to Chris Geddes (keyboards) amusement, as he had made bets with Jeepster boss Mark Jones that it would not get in. The band played two more gigs on their mini tour of the UK in Oxford and Colchester, preparing them for their American debut.

The “Sinister” LP had been licensed in north America by Virgin subsidiary label The Enclave since February. Belle and Sebastian journeyed over to New York in September to take part in the CMJ (College Music Journal) festival. They played two gigs at the Angel Oransanz Foundation Centre For The Arts, an old synagogue in Greenwich Village. The excitement levels were so high, parts of the ceiling decided to join the band onstage, as Belle and Sebastian — literally — brought the house down.

The band were also invited to play at the Barcelona BAM festival in late September. This time their venue was an ancient courtyard at the Plaza Del Rai, and under a starry moonlit sky, beneath the gaze of a thousand gargoyles they captivated, yet again, another audience.

“3..6..9 Seconds Of Light” was the last of the summer EPs released on October 13th, and the music press finally realised just how important B&S are, when both the Melody Maker and the NME made it their single of the Week. Despite the lack of radio play, it became the bands’ first UK top 40 hit, debuting at number 32 on the charts.

Belle and Sebastian spent the end of 1997 recording their third LP and rehearsing for the Christmas gigs at the Manchester town hall on the 27th and 28th of December.

The late summer of 1998 will see them release their third album and with it, whether they want it or not, they’re almost guaranteed of being heralded as one of the most important bands of our time.