How 'God Help The Girl' Sped Up Their New Album's Release

“I wouldn’t think it gets any easier as a writer, but as musician, the more you learn, the more you can do, and in that respect, it is.” Geddes is casually chatting away in his thick Scottish accent about the band’s ninth studio record. “There’s a better chance of finding something that works. I like to think that experience makes it better.”

Geddes has been a member of the prominent indie-rock act Belle & Sebastian since 1996, the year the band released their first full-length, Tigermilk. After signing with Jeepster Records in August that year, they released their second album that November, If You’re Feeling Sinister. They reached critical acclaim with 1998’s The Boy With The Arab Strap and from there, they worked through the noughties with a number of successful works.

Their upcoming ninth studio album, Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance, is their first studio record since 2010’s Belle & Sebastian Write About Love. In between, the band members have been doing a bunch of different things including, earlier in 2014, working on a film, with frontman Stuart Murdoch actually directing it. God Help The Girl recently enjoyed a limited release run in Australian cinemas after sold-out screenings at MIFF 2014. It was a great experience for him, Geddes and the rest of the group, who all lent a helping hand, and the film helped speed up the process of putting the new album together.

“Most of the band were on the musical side of God Help The Girl, so the requirements were different. Stuart definitely treated it like a side-project thing rather than a band thing. The main thing about working on the movie was just how many people you had to work with and how much you had to go through just to get the film made – there was a lot of work. And coming back to the band, it was kind of like, with only a couple of people around to help out, we felt like we could go about making things quicker after that experience.”

"Coming back to the band, it was kind of like, with only a couple of people around to help out, we felt like we could go about making things quicker after that experience."

The band acquired the assistance of Ben H Allen, who’s helped produce their previous records and worked with the likes of Cee Lo Green, Bombay Bicycle Club and Matt & Kim. As a keyboards player, Geddes explains he really enjoyed the sense of freedom Allen brought to the table. “He just created a good, friendly environment where it was okay to just try stuff out. On some songs he was like an extra band member on this record. He did a lot of programming and effects, for me personally. What was really an eye-opener was the way he worked those effects while I was actually coming up with a part – we’d be getting this immediate feedback. He was able to keep the big picture going while focusing on the smaller things. It was a lot of fun.

“[The new album] was a pretty organic experience. Along the way and in the process of getting the songs together, we definitely played around with a few concepts and we realised it would just come to us naturally if we worked on a song-by-song basis. You kind of go into it like that. You tend to resist being too self-conscious about what you’re doing.”

And you’d imagine a band would have to be after such a long time together. Approaching the 20-year mark, the notion of legacy must inevitably be brought up. Geddes has a chuckle. “One of the guys from a band made this glorified playlist of the reissued back catalogue, and it would play in the office and songs would come on and it’d be like, ‘Ah, I’d forgotten about that,’ and that was kind of cool, but really, you just try to be the best you can and from that you can end up with a legacy in itself... For me, it’s just about letting things happen. I don’t have a plan. The goal is to just keep making music because I don’t really have anything else I can do or want to do.”