Report: God Help the Girl Live in London

Was there ever a band that sounded this good? The Belle and Sebastian offshoot, featuring Stuart Murdoch, charmed the collective pants off London's 100 Club on November 21.

By Meryl Trussler

The 100 Club is one of those legendary London clubs in which punk germs and jazz greats alike have germinated throughout some 67 years; so it feels strange to queue up in the plush, wood-panelled hallway upstairs, all the more eerily quiet without the musak its appearance would seem to substantiate. Also, it would be a little white lie to say we were all here for God Help the Girl so much as for the trickled percentage of Belle and Sebastian in its midst. But whatever scraps of rock history ectoplasm we are looking for by being in this place are soon forgotten, replaced by God Help The Girl's explosion of what is new, and old, and equal, and different.

These songs (a self-titled album and an EP's worth, by now, leading eventually to a musical film) have Stuart Murdoch at their heart and thus share plenty with that selfsame B&S - the casually literate, underdog-monologue lyrics, the Spector touchpoints and the galloping acoustic guitar that the diminutive ginger Stuart Murdoch himself sits and plays at the side of the stage - but they are condensed, oversaturated and lacquered into, well, the stuff of a musical. That is: as soon as the triumvirate female singers trot on, gorgeous and hideously talented, and launch into ‘Act of the Apostle' and ‘God Help the Girl' itself, every unshaven jumpered man in a ten-foot radius begins to dance and lip-synch with eyes ecstatically shut. There's high drama, high characterisation, and meowing, girl-band call and response, even if the only prop in sight is the looming white 100 behind them.

Despite StuMoch's* swooning instrumentation, and the best-laid plans of the players, these women - hush soprano Alex Klobouk (pictured, below), sublimely honeyed Catherine Ireton, and Celia Garcia, a sprite of sass - completely own the show. They sing with a mix of giggly modesty and pure competence, gasping for air and dancing like a bold new generation of Supremes, and it makes me so proud to be a chick. Ireton is a china doll with a voice bursting with maturity: she barrels through the incredible ‘Musicians, Please Take Heed' with the kind of girl guts torn out of everyone from Gloria Gaynor to France Gall. "Can you see the girls?" interjects Murdoch. "Then you've got your money's worth." (Very droll, our dearest Mr Indiepop Prodigy, but hearing them is the blessing.)

The set continues to feel a very special candied treat for this 350-something strong crowd, as the band scroll through all the album favourites like ‘I'll Have to Dance With Cassie', and mix in some songs from the newer release, the Stills EP, such as the sweet serenade ‘The Psychiatrist is In'; they even debut a special treat for the London crowd - ‘Saturday Night is the Loneliest Night of the Week', and not the Rat Pack kind either. They are as excited and reverent of the gig as the crowd is, with the backing band being about 3 years absent from the stage, and the girls ever in awe at the providence of the entire GHTG project, having been picked competition-style to sing on the album. They are thrilled. For the final song, ‘Perfection as a Hipster', Murdoch takes on the crooning male half of the vocals (sung on the album by Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy) as the girls sashay and catcall "What happened? I want to go home / Where am I? What have I got on?" back at him.

Oh, bliss and satisfaction. Boys and a sirens' song. Belles and a Scottishman. Was there ever a band that sounded this good? I cannot recall.

*The author advises against using this term in front of approximately anyone.