Stuart Murdoch: “B&S never had a hit record”

I was in a pop band, but there was no glamour. I had given it my best shot, but I had experienced none of the highs that I had perhaps expected a working pop singer to experience. I’m not talking about snorting coke and laydeez. I’m talking about something else … it’s hard to say. Let me just say that at some point I thought that we might have a go at building Motown in Glasgow. A flawed and ridiculous notion, you might say. But it was the only notion I had.

Belle and Sebastian have never had a hit record. Not really. Not a proper hit record. Therefore, Belle and Sebastian have never recorded music with the feeling that anyone was actually waiting to hear it! We have never recorded for an audience. Therefore, we have always recorded music … in a vacuum!

That was an excerpt from a piece Stuart Murdoch recently wrote for The Guardian. Now, Stuart is a playful fella, so who knows how heartfelt he’s being here (especially in light of this interview with Pitchfork a month ago). Something about the whole thing feels a wee bit disingenuous, maybe because it’s difficult to swallow the idea that Stuart started a tweepop band because he thought it would be glamorous. Or maybe he did, who knows.

Then again, maybe what he’s saying is that he’s grown up. He was only 28 when he formed B&S, and he’s now just north of 40. One’s priorities do change as age catches up with them. In fact, he ends the piece by saying he may just quit music and ‘try to help people’. I could argue that by making his wonderful music he’s helping people, but ultimately I think trying to talk someone out of any sort of community service would probably entail some serious karmic consequences, so I’ll leave it be. Besides, I can understand the disillusionment he might feel with the reality of being in a band as opposed to the image we all create in our minds as to how amazing it might be. It’s easy enough to overinflate something to the point that it can never match what we thought it was going to be, no matter how good it actually is.

Of course, the point of the piece and the reason all this has come up is that Stuart has a non-B&S project in the pipeline, called God Help The Girl. Non-B&S in the sense that it doesn’t exclusively feature members of B&S (though they do feature on several tracks). Otherwise, it feels like a very natural exercise. After all, Murdoch has never been shy about his love of the 60s, girl groups and Northern Soul (references: ‘Legal Man’, ‘String Bean Jean’, ‘Lazy Line Painter Jane’).

The primary switchup here is the rotating lineup of vocalists (something that actually harkens back to the early days of Belles & Sebastian). The mostly female lineup features: Catherine Ireton, Asya, Neil Hannon from the Divine Comedy, Brittany Stallings and Dina Bankole (who won a contest, if you can believe it), as well as Celia Garcia and Alex Klobouk (pictured above). Klobouk actually looks as though she were genetically engineered as a B&S cover girl.

The music is very recognizable as being penned by Stuart Murdoch. He’s always been comfortable writing in the third person, and with B&S providing a lot of backing instrumentation it’s obviously difficult to view it without wondering what it might have sounded like had it simply been a B&S album. Stuart says these songs wouldn’t have been appropriate for the band, but I’m not sure why. It could simply be a matter of artistic intent, who knows. But it’s quite good. I think any fans of B&S will certainly be pleased, especially if you enjoy the early records.

The record is due out June 23rd, and a musical feature is supposedly in the works as well, also written by Murdoch.

Tags: belle & sebastian, god help the girl, new releases, stuart murdoch