Before going into the studio to record their first album as Arab Strap in 15 years, Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton embarked on a thought exercise. Could they name a band that had released a decent comeback record? The list they came up with was ominously short.
“Aidan said Suede. I said Ride,” says Middleton. “Beyond those two we couldn’t think of a band that had not f***ed it up.”
This countdown of worthwhile reunion LPs is about to admit a new member. On As Days Get Dark, Arab Strap’s irresistible blend of angst, poetry, electronica and student disco pop is buffed up to a shiny new polish. The Pet Shop Boys of bearded miserabalism are back.
And not before time. They’ve been missed hugely since breaking up in 2006. Through the 1990s and early 2000s, nobody combined wit and melancholy quite like the Scottish duo. “The most perfect pop song ever” was BBC DJ Steve Lamacq’s assessment of their break-out single, The First Big Weekend. From there they only got better, Moffat’s half-sung, half-drawled incarnations of despair finding the perfect foil in Middleton’s tempestuous soundscapes.
With As Days Get Dark they pick up where they left off, while letting some middle-age ennui in through the cracks. Consider the track Another Clockwork Day, whose narrator pores over porn downstairs after his wife retires for an early night. Later, he creeps up and joins her in the bed. Quietly donning his pyjamas, he catches his missus in the half light and is struck by her beauty. It’s a midlife crisis and a rumination on the caustic effects of porn crammed into 3½ heart-breaking moments. By the end you don’t now whether to laugh or cry.
A mix of depression and horror similarly infuses Compersion Pt 1, which is about watching your partner be intimate with a stranger. “Watching your partner be intimate with a stranger” is the kind of sentence you tend to end up writing when discussing Arab Strap.
“The internet barely existed when we broke up,” says Moffat. “Now there is such a plethora of online porn. There are two kinds of sex: the instant-gratification kind and the laying-the-foundation kind. There are a few songs on the record really influenced by the internet.” He pauses as if struck by something. “There aren’t many songs out there about middle-aged men wanking.”
Past tensions
Moffat chuckles as he said this. Middleton cuts a relaxed figure, too. They have seemingly pushed past the tensions that led to their break-up and overshadowed their farewell tour (playing Dublin’s Button Factory in 2006, they scarcely interacted with one another).
But what exactly were those tensions, which caused them to put Arab Strap on hiatus and embark on a sequence of solo projects? Here, they might agree to disagree. Moffat feels that these two friends from Falkirk had merely gone a bit stale creatively as album led to tour and tour to album. “We didn’t feel there was much else we could do,” he says. “We were bored with the routine.”
Middleton frames it in starker terms. “We kind of grew apart while the band was still together,” he says. “We weren’t mates any more. We were two people in a room or on a bus that didn’t want to be next to each other.”
Arab Strap were never quite indie superstars in the same league as Scottish contemporaries such as Belle and Sebastian, who appropriated the duo’s name for their 1998 LP, The Boy with the Arab Strap (Moffat gave the band his blessing in the pub one night, then forgot he had done so). However, they had a talent for conveying the warp and weft of everyday life with a profundity few artists manage. Alongside this was a dollop of sexual obsession – just what you would expect from a group named after a sex toy.
A quintessential early Arab Strap moment is The First Big Weekend, which chronicles a bender at the end of a thankless week working a wage-slave job. Yet it isn’t merely a celebration of cutting loose when you’re off the clock (though it certainly is that). It also captures the white heat of youth: the ache that comes with being young but not so young that you aren’t beginning to feel age creeping up on you. It later featured on a Guinness ad – after which Arab Strap refused to play it for a decade.
Downbeat and defiant
There’s no First Big Weekend 2.0 on the new record, which was largely completed before the first lockdown last year. This is a relief. Moffat and Middleton are in their 40s, each married with kids. It would be ridiculous, if not slightly pathetic, if Arab Strap were still entertaining us with tales of Merrydown cider and drugs snaffled in pub toilets.
That the new Arab Strap won’t be a rehash of the old is confirmed on the first first track of the new LP, The Turning of Our Bones. “I don’t give a f*** about the past, Our glory days gone by,” mutters Moffat, downbeat and defiant. As the song goes on, it becomes clear he’s singing not about Arab Strap but about a relationship run aground on the rocks of middle age (the lyrics are inspired by the Famadihana ritual of the Malagasy people of Madagascar, who dance with the corpses of family members).
But when a great lurching beat drops, accompanied by the friskiest sax solo this side of Bowie’s Suffragette City, it’s as if Arab Strap are on a rooftop, shouting. They’re back, just not quite as you remember. In that regard, it feels significant the project’s working title was “Disco Spiderland” – suggesting a groove-infused updating of Slint’s post-rock classic, Spiderland.
“It’s about death and shagging,” laughs Moffat. “We hadn’t intended it to be about the band.”
He expresses the hope that “a lot of people will discover us for the first time”. “With The Turning of Our Bones, a lot of people, they hadn’t heard us,” he says. “And if they had heard us, they thought we were this miserable, gloomy doom-rock band or something. But there are people who have grown up with us, too. And we’re doing exactly what we were doing the first time around. I write about me in the now. There’s no point writing about me in the past or me in the future.”
Speaking to Moffat, you are reminded of what a warm figure he is on Twitter. Wry and big-hearted, his social media feed offers a refuge from the madness and mean-spiritedness of the internet. It certainly presents a contrast with the narrator of The Turning of Our Bones crooning “Let’s squeeze the maggots from our flesh, like tiny poison pustules”.
“A friend of mine used to work in a recording studio and he had a theory. Everyone who came in and made a happy record was a miserable bastard. And everyone who made an emotional record seemed happy, friendly and open. There’s a kind of truth to that.”
Wicked animals
Moffat feels a natural affinity with Irish people. He tweeted recently about a Disney movie he was watching with his daughter in which all the wicked animals had Irish and Scottish accents and all the virtuous ones American and English.
“It’s interesting so many Americans are proud of their Irish heritage,” he says. “And they seem to think it’s just about getting drunk.”
The same could be said about the caricaturing of Scottish people as weak-willed boozers with short fuses and high cholesterol.
“They think we’re all crazy as well,” says Moffat. “I remember I was at a gig in Alexandra Palace in London, and this big guy locked eyes with me. I thought I was going to get absolutely battered. He asked where I was from and I said ‘Glasgow’. He said, ‘Oh it’s quite nuts up there’. I said, ‘Aye, it’s f***ng mental’. I just pretended I was mental as well, and it worked. They think we’re all savages.”
Twitter is also where he vents about Brexit and its negative impact on Scotland. He thinks Scotland is drifting towards independence, having been left with little alternative.
“I’m still angry. It’s a f***ing nightmare. The whole thing was built on lies and controlled by the right-wing press. I’m under no illusions that [Scottish independence] might not be easy for a while. I can’t see we are left with any choice. There’s just no opposition in England. I literally cannot imagine anyone but the Tories ruling for at least 30 years.”
In the shorter term, Arab Strap are looking forward to an autumn tour that will, in theory at least, include a visit to Vicar Street in Dublin on September 5th. “Hopefully they’ll go ahead,” says Moffat. “We have fingers crossed. The gigs could be pulled the night before the tour. Who knows? We’ll see where we get to.”
As Days Get Dark is released March 5th. Arab Strap are due to play at Vicar Street, Dublin, in September
