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.
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