The Scottish singer opens up about his indie musical, the future of Belle & Sebastian, and his hope to eventually write religious hymns.
Stuart Murdoch on the set of God Help the Girl in Glasgow, Scotland.
Stuart Murdoch has spent the better part of the past two decades as the primary songwriter for Belle & Sebastian, the beloved Scottish indie pop band that was instrumental in shifting the center of indie culture away from noisy, ironic Gen X rock and toward the more acoustic, orchestrated, bookish, and sensitive style that was dominant through much of the '00s. Belle & Sebastian has been laying low over the past few years — their most recent album, Write About Love, came out in 2010 — but Murdoch has been hard at work on the most ambitious project of his career: directing Gold Help the Girl, a feature film musical for which he wrote the script and all of the songs. The music for God Help the Girl was released as an album in 2009, but he's only recently completed the movie, which was independently funded and is set to hit the festival circuit later this year.
BuzzFeed caught up with Murdoch in February to talk about the long process of making God Help the Girl, as well as his plans for the future of Belle & Sebastian, who are set to play a U.S. tour later this year.
You've been working on this musical project for eight years now?
Stuart Murdoch: I guess it is that. I said to Barry [Mendel], the producer, the other day, I said I feel like I've been at university. I feel like someone should at least give me a qualification in filmmaking. I've been at university and it hasn't cost me anything. I've had a brilliant education.
What was the starting point for God Help the Girl? I know you were writing some of these songs during the making of The Life Pursuit, and that came out in 2006.
SM: Actually, yeah, that's true, during that time. It's a well-worked story now. At the end of 2003, we were touring the U.K. with Belle & Sebastian; I was out on a run on a dark and rainy night before the show. Suddenly I had a song in my head, it didn't feel like a Belle & Sebastian song, I felt like I could hear a complete song sung by a female and I wondered if it was someone else's song. I jotted down the tune, because I always carry pen with me, and later I wrote down the words and that was the song "God Help the Girl."
When did you realize you had a full story and that it needed to be a movie?
SM: I first thought I was going to try and make a record for female singers, which was new to me, and I thought it would be fun to try and find all these great singers and record an album, and then I wrote another song. After I wrote three songs, I realized it was a particular character writing the songs. I kind of realized perhaps I should try and join the songs up with a story. When I say "try," it wasn't quite difficult; it felt like the songs were all coming from a certain place. In fact the songs very much dictated where the story ended up.
