Introduction
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.