God Help the Girl is a musical project by
Stuart Murdoch, leader of the Scottish
indie group
Belle and Sebastian, featuring a group of female vocalists, including
Catherine Ireton, with Belle and Sebastian as the accompanying band. The project has released a self-titled album, an
EP and several singles. Central to the project is a
musical film, featuring songs from the project's recorded releases. The film is due for release in 2014.
The songs of the project
God Help the Girl belong to the genre of indie pop and resemble the other output of Belle and Sebastian in tone – two songs (
Funny Little Frog and
Act of the Apostle)
were taken directly from the earlier repertory of this group. However,
contrary to the earlier work of Belle and Sebastian (a group dominated
by male performers), female vocalists (who are not members of the group)
play the main role in the project. The songs themselves also tell about
the problems of young girls entering adult life.
The author of the project
God Help the Girl is Stuart Murdoch, lead singer of the
Glasgow-based Scottish indie pop group
Belle and Sebastian. In 2004, during a tour promoting their album
Dear Catastrophe Waitress,
he came up with the idea of writing a series of songs telling about the
life of girls and young women which could be sung not by his group but
female vocalists. Thinking about this project, he started writing new
songs which were shelved for the time being; after some time the idea of
arranging them in a logical whole and making a film occurred to him.
Looking for performers for his songs, Murdoch placed an advertisement
in a local magazine in Glasgow in 2004. The first vocalists who joined
the project were
Celia Garcia from
Edinburgh, Scotland, who responded to the advertisement placed in the magazine, and
Alex Klobouk from
Germany, who met Stuart Murdoch on the
Dear Catastrophe Waitress tour. Stuart Murdoch also held an open audition on the
imeem community portal – the candidates who wanted to work with the group were to send in their
demos of two Belle and Sebastian songs:
Funny Little Frog and
The Psychiatrist Is In.
Brittany Stallings and
Dina Bankole
from the US were chosen out of about 400 applications; in February 2008
they were invited to a trial recording session in Glasgow. Eventually
Funny Little Frog was sung in the project by Brittany Stallings, with Dina Bankole performing some of the other pieces.
In 2008 and 2009, some other vocalists joined the project, including Asya from the
Seattle-based group
Smoosh, Linnea Jönsson from the Swedish band
Those Dancing Days; there was also one man in this group:
Neil Hannon from
The Divine Comedy.
The main discovery of the project turned out to be Catherine Ireton,
with whom Murdoch had established contact by chance in 2005. Catherine
Ireton comes from
Limerick in
Ireland, she was studying Drama and Theatre Studies at
University College Cork between 2002 and 2005. There she was the vocalist in the pop-jazz group elephant,
with whom she published the album
In the Moon
in 2004.
The band broke up in July 2005, but before that the songwriter
and guitarist of elephant, Michael John McCarthy, moved to Glasgow to
do a post-graduate course and passed the album
In the Moon to his
friend who showed it to Stuart Murdoch. When Stuart Murdoch heard the
album of elephant, he invited Catherine Ireton, who was in her final
year at university and both directed and played in theatre performances
in Ireland at that time, to Glasgow in March 2005, held a trial
recording session for her and afterwards asked her if she wanted to work
with Belle and Sebastian. The singer agreed and moved to Scotland in
the same year. She joined the project along with other vocalists,
singing and recording demos of nearly all the songs.
Catherine Ireton appeared on the sleeve of the
EP The White Collar Boy as early as 2006 even though she did not perform any songs on it. Finally she appeared as the vocalist in the single
Come Monday Night and then in the main album
God Help the Girl, both released in 2009. Out of 14 pieces on the album, Catherine Ireton performs (solo or with other singers) in 10 songs.
