Stuart Murdoch

Born in Scotland in 1968, musician Stuart Murdoch grew up in the suburb of Alloway, Ayr, best known for being the birthplace of Scottish lyric poet Robert Burns. Aside from piano lessons, the extent of Murdoch's childhood musical involvement was forming a band with his classmates at the age of 12. During his years at the University of Scotland, Murdoch became a radio DJ for Subcity Radio, a station based out of the university. Murdoch's transformation from a steward of music to a creator came during a period of illness. At the end of his time at university Murdoch fell ill with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, a condition that prevented him from working for seven years. Following his recovery, he found that he had become interested in forming songs from the melodies that had come to him during that period of extreme isolation. He began a search for band members and formed the group that would become Belle & Sebastian. The band released its first album Tigermilk in 1996 in a small independent pressing. Their second album, If You're Feeling Sinister, broke the band on the international indie pop scene and made them stars to a fervently devoted cult audience. Over the course of the next two decades, Belle & Sebastian maintained a steady pace of new releases that included fan favorites like Fold Your Hands, Child, You Walk Like A Peasant (2000), Dear Catastrophe Waitress (2003) and Write About Love (2010). In 2009, Murdoch released a self-titled album under the project name God Help the Girl. The album's 14 songs, written by Murdoch and sung mostly by unknown female singers he had discovered via auditions and classified ads, were presented as the soundtrack to an as yet unproduced film. Murdoch then wrote and directed the film "God Help the Girl" (2014), a musical drama telling the story of a young girl who travels to Glasgow with hopes of becoming a musician. Rising stars Emily Browning and Hannah Murray starred in the film, which received generally positive reviews noting its resemblance to the kitchen sink dramas of the 1960s.