The film was to be called God Help
The Girl, and the man behind the project was Stuart Murdoch, founder of
Scottish chamber-pop ensemble Belle and Sebastian. Murdoch had, in his
decade-long career, written songs about white-collar crime, middle-aged
sex, martial artists, track stars, cyclists, priests, bookworms and
awkward teenagers. The cover of his band’s first album depicted a woman
breast-feeding a stuffed tiger. By his standards, a phantom soundtrack
wasn’t especially odd.
Murdoch had been auditioning women for months. To find them, he’d
placed an ad in a Glasgow newspaper: “Girl singer needed for autumnal
recording project. Must have a way with a tune.” The ad never mentioned
Murdoch’s name, but it did affectionately reference The Ronettes and
suggest that wannabe Celine Dions “save your breath.”
In Belle and Sebastian, Murdoch composed melodic rock songs that
unfolded like one-act plays, miniature comedies and tragedies
punctuated by strings and brass. For God Help The Girl, a musical about
post-adolescent soul searching, he would combine the luxury of
orchestral arrangements with the shoo-bopping, eyelash-batting
sensibility of 1960s girl groups. His idea was to make the soundtrack
first and shoot the film later. But after a dozen auditions, he still
hadn’t cast the lead voice, the part of Eve, a budding
singer/songwriter.
So he turned to Ireton, who sang smoky vocals in a pop band called
Elephant. Ireton had a musical-theater background, so she knew how to
sing in character; at her all-girls high school, she had played the
role of Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar, then turned around the following year and portrayed Mary
Magdalene. At the time of her audition for Murdoch, she was a college
senior who kept busy directing one play while starring in another, and
she knew almost nothing about God Help The Girl. The project was, at
that point, still percolating in Murdoch’s head, and he hadn’t bothered
explaining it to her in advance. All Ireton knew was that she had a
chance to sing for the frontman of Belle and Sebastian. So on that
particular grey afternoon in March, having flown over from Dublin, she
walked through the fringe of Glasgow's West End and down a busted
cobblestone path to the band’s two-story headquarters, a ramshackle
building with a corrugated roof and a constituency of stray cats. She
climbed the stairs, sat on a couch and waited for her big moment while
sipping tea from a Belle and Sebastian mug.
Murdoch arrived, shook Ireton’s hand and showed her to a cozy
rehearsal space halfway below street level. Several of his bandmates
were there, too, and Ireton momentarily swooned. “Belle and Sebastian,”
she remembers thinking. “Here I am!”
Murdoch is not conventionally famous, but he inspires feverish
devotion from his followers. His fans are more like acolytes. He’s a
well-known fixture in Glasgow, so it’s not at all unusual for admirers
to show up and try to make his acquaintance. One American fellow, for
example, tattooed Murdoch’s lyrics on his arm and moved to town long
enough to befriend the singer before eventually being deported. Ireton
hadn’t reached that point, but Murdoch was the first person she’d ever
met who’d successfully made a living through music. That counted for
something.
He asked her to sing two songs: the dreamy title cut from God Help
The Girl and a leisurely Belle and Sebastian kiss-off called “Dress Up
In You.” Ireton didn’t think she was particularly nervous. But when she
went back and listened to the audition tape, she noticed her voice was
trembling.
Still, Murdoch was impressed. Despite her nerves, Ireton sang with
deadly accuracy. And when Murdoch asked her to make her voice less
folky, she did just that, which meant she could take direction—an
important trait for whoever was tasked with singing his songs. After
the rehearsal ended, Murdoch took Ireton on a walk through nearby
Kelvingrove Park and casually mentioned that he’d like her to return to
Glasgow for another recording session. Ireton agreed to return. Six
months later, she moved to Scotland.
On a brilliant spring afternoon, Murdoch is out for a
drive in his little black hatchback. He’s 40 years old with a ruddy
face and a toothy grin. His eyes and hair are matching copper. He has
the mind of a grad student and the coiled energy of a jock. He’s
dapper, favoring snug sweaters and coats that drape off of his figure.
He often sports a vintage fedora. Today he’s wearing sneakers, frayed
jeans, a denim jacket, a stubbly beard and chunky sunglasses. His wife,
American photographer Marisa Privitera, sits in the passenger seat
applying makeup. Privitera and Murdoch married in New York in 2007.
She’s currently shooting a documentary about the soundtrack to the film
that still does not exist. She intends to keep filming until her
husband’s picture begins production, tentatively next summer. God Help
The Girl will be set in Glasgow, just as most Belle and Sebastian songs
are set in Glasgow. Despite its reputation as a scruffy cousin to
princely Edinburgh, the city is Murdoch’s muse, conversational
lubricant and songwriting fountainhead.
Murdoch stops the hatchback near a train station and Ireton slides
into the back seat. Four years have passed since her audition. In that
time, she’s become close friends with Privitera and, officially, the
voice of Eve. Just last night, she received her very own advance copy
of the movie soundtrack. She carried it home, bought a good bottle of
wine, turned out the lights, sat on the floor with her boyfriend and,
at last, listened.
In its finished form, the album is a plush symphonic suite written
mostly by Murdoch and sung mostly by women: There’s Ireton, of course,
and also Dina Bankole and Brittany Stallings, singers Muroch found
through the online music service Imeem. German graphic design student
Alex Klobouk contributes background vocals on a track called
“Perfection As A Hipster.” Celia Garcia, who responded to Murdoch's
newspaper ad, performs on loping album closer “A Down and Dusky
Blonde,” which also features Asya, the guileless singer from teenaged
Seattle duo Smoosh. All seven members of Belle and Sebastian play on
the record, too—making it less of a solo record and more of a side
project that could just as easily be called The Softer Side Of Belle
and Sebastian. With sweeping arrangements that recall vintage Burt
Bacharach, God Help The Girl is the musical equivalent of a long,
lovelorn sigh.
Murdoch steers his car toward the outskirts of town. He’s headed to
the countryside, a Saturday tradition. With Glasgow receding from view,
he pulls around a curve, and the city’s low-slung skyline appears in
panorama. On the scale of inspirational urban vistas, this one ranks
fairly low. The city’s once-mighty shipbuilding industry is long gone,
along with much of Glasgow’s architectural charm—so much of the
historic city has been demolished that an entire book, Lost Glasgow, is
devoted to its former glories. And yet, landmarks from Murdoch’s career
endure. “There’s Stow,” he says, and below us in an industrial building
is Stow College, the school that sponsored and released Belle and
Sebastian’s debut album, Tigermilk, back in 1996. “There’s St. Teresa’s
church,” the setting for the title track of the band’s second album, If
You’re Feeling Sinister, a folk-pop classic Murdoch wrote while
wandering town. Off to the left, Murdoch points out a canal that
figures into the plot of God Help The Girl. To tour greater Glasgow
with Stuart Murdoch is to see his catalog in three dimensions.
We breeze by a whiskey distillery, wind through tiny villages and
drive past rolling pastures of grazing sheep. Murdoch parks on the
banks of Loch Lomond, about an hour outside of town, and everyone gets
out to stroll alongside the harborfront. Privitera stops for ice cream.
A gentleman walks by in a tuxedo jacket and a kilt. “My love for my
particular city,” Murdoch says, “goes beyond a reasonable sentiment for
a lump of concrete in the middle of the Highlands.”
Murdoch was born in Glasgow in 1968, the middle child of a maritime
engineer and a midwife. He spent most of his childhood in the coastal
historic county of Ayrshire—the
18th-century
home of Robert Burns, Scotland’s national poet—before leaving in his
late teens to study physics at the University of Glasgow. “I didn’t
really know what I was doing when I was 16,” he says. “I just wanted to
get out of Ayr.” In the city, Murdoch’s obsession with music was
unabashed. He was the kind of college DJ who would play a song, run out
on the floor to dance, and skip to the next track via remote control.
He tried to dye his hair silver to look like ’60s-era Sinatra, only to
have it turn out blue. He once hitchhiked to London to see obscure
indie-rock band Felt, and he interviewed Sonic Youth frontman Thurston
Moore for a nonexistent fanzine, tape-recording their conversation with
a giant boom box. “I was shit,” Murdoch says. “I couldn’t think of any
good questions. The first question I asked Thurston Moore, he yawned.
He literally yawned in my face.”
In his early 20s, Murdoch began to suffer from chronic-fatigue
disorder, which stalled his life for seven years. He’d always been
athletic, even running a marathon, but his illness left him sidelined,
literally and figuratively, to the point that he couldn’t work, play
sports or summon the strength for much of anything. Sapped of energy,
he moved back in with his parents and stewed. “There was nothing I
could do but listen and watch and daydream,” he once told me. “So you’d
be imagining interesting scenarios, inventing people, inventing
characters you would want to meet—because you would never meet them.”
He joined a support group. He meditated. In time, he regained his
strength, wrote songs and formed Belle and Sebastian, a ragtag group of
musicians that eventually congealed into a tight, ambitious and
influential band. Murdoch, who couldn’t write songs at all before his
illness, was suddenly inspired. He sang in clear tones—with a
choirboy’s voice—and he used Belle and Sebastian as a vehicle for
stories about lost souls and lonely hearts. The people he wrote about
were peculiar and frustrated, crippled emotionally the way he’d been
crippled physically. His tunes, especially his earliest, were almost
unbearably fragile and characterized by anachronistic earnestness.
“Nobody writes ’em like they used to,” he sang, “so it may as well be
me.” Glasgow, with its failed dockyards and busted cobblestones, was
his setting. Its citizens were his characters. Here was a misfit town
full of misfit boys and girls. Ayrshire had Robert Burns; Glasgow got
Stuart Murdoch.
We hike up a hill to an overlook, with the massive lake spread out
below. In a little while, we’ll all climb down to the shoreline and
skip stones across the cool, clear water. Ireton and Privitera will
wade in, and Murdoch will stay on shore reciting a list of great
Scottish inventions (the telephone, the television, tarmac). For now,
everyone relaxes on the mossy hilltop, taking in the view. We can see
sailboats on the horizon and cliffs through the distant mist. The lake
is shimmering. “I think it’s the biggest inland body of water in the
British Isles,” Murdoch says. “It goes up north and gets quite narrow.
I think it has something like 44 islands in it.”
At the overlook, Murdoch tells me the story of Hyndland Parish
Church, his place of worship, which has attained mythical status to
Belle and Sebastian fans. As a fledgling musician, Murdoch lived in the
church caretaker's suite, performing odd jobs in exchange for free
rent; the church has been a tourist destination ever since. “I just
started going to the church randomly,” he says. “I think because I was
a young person, they wanted to catch me. They put me in the choir
before I knew what the hell was going on.”
Murdoch remains devout, rarely making a major decision without
prayer, but he’s since moved out of the church hall and into a West End
home with hardwood floors and a bay window looking onto a row of cherry
blossom trees. He still sings in the church choir and leads the youth
group, and his old sleeping quarters are now occupied by a Belle and
Sebastian fan who moved to Glasgow after meeting Murdoch at a show in
Toronto. Apparently, Murdoch told her after the concert that she should
let him know if she ever needed any help, and then one day she showed
up in town and said, “Here I am.” A lot of artists might consider this
grounds for a restraining order. Murdoch gave the girl furniture.
When Murdoch started Belle and Sebastian, he wrote songs for
daydreamers and eccentrics, the sort of music fans who’d do anything
for a human connection, the sort of fans who needed a voice on the
radio to make them feel like they weren’t alone. He could relate to
fans like this. Not so long ago, he was a fan like this.
Privitera is patient with the artist/fan dynamic, but she worries
about her husband. “I’m just more strict than you because I’m scared of
the John Lennon scenario, and you’re not,” she tells him. “The John
Lennon scenario,” Murdoch scoffs, considering the sensitive souls that
listen to his music. “What’s somebody going to do, beat me to death
with their knitting needles?”
On a blustery Sunday morning, Murdoch strides into
Hyndland Parish wearing a seamless black overcoat, then disappears
through a side door into the vestry. The congregation numbers about
100, maybe less—mostly senior citizens. The church, which takes up most of a suburban block,
certainly has room to spare. It’s a sandstone structure, rusty in
color, with an alabaster pulpit. As the service begins, everyone rises
as a Bible is presented. An organist plays. The ceiling is vaulted into
a dramatic arch, supported by great wooden beams. Light filters through
stained glass.
The service commences, and Murdoch enters the sanctuary in a
single-file line with the rest of the choristers, all of whom are
draped in burgundy robes. The choir sits in two short pews by the
altar, with Murdoch posted on the end closest to the congregation,
presumably so that he can be better heard. And yet, when it’s time to
lead the congregants in hymns, his tenor becomes just another voice in
the choir, blending with everyone else’s and rising to the rafters in a
mass reverberation.
The minister is Craig Lancaster, a puckish Scotsman with a buzzed
haircut, protruding ears and an air of exuberance. He’s only the ninth
reverend at Hyndland Parish since 1878, and he infuses the place with
energy. After the gathering prayer, he charges into the pews and
distributes fish sticks—known in Scotland as “fish fingers”—as a kind
of visual aid to the day’s reading, Luke 24: 36-48, which describes
Jesus visiting his disciples after the resurrection. The disciples were
afraid at first, the reading says, and Jesus wanted to put them at
ease. So he requested a snack, and the disciples produced a piece of
broiled fish, which he ate before their astonished eyes.
Lancaster finds the passage deeply resonant. He says it illustrates
Christ’s humanity. It suggests that Jesus is earthly as well as divine,
that he eats just as his disciples eat, that he is human as they are
human, that he lives not above his admirers, but amongst them.
After church, Murdoch meets me in the domed greenhouse
at the Botanic Gardens near his house. He used to come here to write
during the winter, he says, since it was the warmest spot he could
find. Today the rotunda is teeming with people, and we decide to go
somewhere quieter. On our way out, we pass a marble statue of a woman
with waves of hair cascading down her back. She’s mostly nude, covered
only by leaves. A rectangular sign bears her name: Eve.
We walk across the street to an anonymous hotel, a spot where a
younger Murdoch took refuge from the city while pretending to be a
guest. He buys us whiskeys and sits by a window. One of Privitera’s
girlfriends passes by, and Murdoch points her out amidst the bustling
streetlife. I tell him I’m impressed by the number of places I’ve seen
around town that have wound up in his songs over the years. He laughs
nervously. “There’s many, many more known only to me.”
Fellow countrymen recognize Murdoch’s ambassadorship for his
hometown. At one point while working on this story, I call Scott
Hutchison, who sings in Scottish indie-rock band Frightened Rabbit, and
who first heard Belle and Sebastian’s music drifting across the room
while he was a student in high-school art class. “I grew up in a small
town and moved to Glasgow,” Hutchison says, “and one of the things that
first dawned on me when I first got there was Belle and Sebastian’s
back catalog. And it’s an important thing to happen, as well: You move
to a city, and then you hear the music of that city.” Since then, even
while touring with his own band, Hutchison has noted the long shadow
cast by Murdoch and Belle and Sebastian. “Especially for a lot of
people in the U.S.A., it’s the absolute classic Scottish band,” he
says. “And he’s the classic Scottish guy.”
Murdoch is also a champion of Glaswegian music. Sunday night, he
and the rest of the city’s music community descend on Barrowland
Ballroom—a 1,900-capacity venue in a sketchy part of town—for a
homecoming gig by beloved local band Camera Obscura. Vaselines frontman
Eugene Kelly is there; so is longtime DJ and scenester Tam Coyle, and
also Francis Macdonald, who manages Camera Obscura and drums for
Teenage Fanclub. Belle and Sebastian guitarist Stevie Jackson watches
the show wearing a velvet suit and black glasses, looking like a young
Elvis Costello. Keyboardist Chris Geddes works the merchandise table
downstairs with his girlfriend, Fiona Morrison, who also handles merch
orders for Belle and Sebastian.
Murdoch stands off to one side. He has personal attachments to
Camera Obscura, having produced their early single “Eighties Fan” and
photographed their second album cover. Before meeting Privitera, he
dated the band’s lead singer, Tracyanne Campbell. He still clearly
loves the band’s style. Camera Obscura started out as a shambling
twee-pop collective, but the musicians have grown in confidence.
Tonight, they incorporate two percussionists, plus string and horn
sections. They make cinematic, wistful pop music with female vocals and
an orchestral flourish—which is another way of saying they’ve followed
in Murdoch’s footsteps.
Murdoch watches the show intently. So intently, in fact, that he
can tell who’s running the stage lights just by watching how they move.
Murdoch knows the lighting guy. He knows everyone in this town.
As the show goes on, I notice that Murdoch is standing a few feet away
from the people around him, as though surrounded by a force field. It’s
a strange dynamic: He’s in the crowd, but also alone. A mentor, but
also a fan. If his band hadn’t forged the path, Camera Obscura might
not even exist. Everyone in the room would be somewhere else tonight.
Murdoch has, arguably, created the entire scene around him.
Then again, the tenderhearted music fans here at the Barrowlands
would exist with or without Belle and Sebastian. They’ve always
existed. They’re the reason Murdoch started writing songs. So maybe he
didn’t create this scene after all. Maybe it created him.