Towards the end of their busy return to touring, our journalist Lachlan and president Cameron met up with Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton of legendary Scottish indie band Arab Strap in the Strathaven Hotel of all venues. Their discussion covers the changes taken on by the group since their last material sixteen years before their 2021 album 'As Days Get Dark', the role of lockdown in impelling the album's main themes, and how good it has been to reattach the arab strap again.
LACHLAN: Returning from sixteen years since your last material and reattaching the Arab Strap and its undeniable position in Scottish music: how good is it to be back? And back to Lemon Tree shenanigans (we had been discussing a recent gig).
AIDAN: It’s funny, it’s not like we stopped working. [Malcolm] must have played Lemon Tree alone a couple times, I did it with a few different bands. But getting back with the Arab Strap stuff, Lemon Tree was a weird one, it was like a warmup for the tour.
MALCOLM: Kind of weird vibes as well. A couple of years ago we had our worst ever gig at Lemon Tree. It was part of an all-day festival or something. We were playing last but had our sound check at ten o’ clock in the morning so we sat in the restaurant all day. I don’t know why we didn’t go out and do something else but we sat drinking in the restaurant. And then had our worst ever gig. And at the time there was that saying that “you’re only as good as your last gig”, and that was our last gig for a year. We had these terrible hangovers. It was so bad that Barry from Mogwai, who was playing keyboards with us, had to play TV theme tunes quite a lot because we didn’t know what we were doing. So, between songs he’d play Eastenders or theme from Taxi when, I don’t know, things broke or something else happened.
AIDAN: It was just a terrible, terrible gig.
MALCOLM: It’s been better since; we’ve lifted the curse.
AIDAN: Was that not the one… . Did you not hit somebody?
MALCOLM: No, I did have to chase someone out of the dressing room.
AIDAN: Exciting Times.
LACHLAN: At Lemon Tree, it was great seeing the setlist chopping between old material and new. Regarding writing, has the process been the same with this new album or did it materialise differently? How great a root did lockdown have in its root messages?
AIDAN: A lot of it was chance, I think. Most of it had been written or started before the pandemic happened. I think that, just when the pandemic came, the rest of the world came around to our way of thinking. You know, everyone was suddenly miserable and sitting in the house.
MALCOLM: I remember we were sitting in the studio and didn’t know whether we were going to be in the next day because of lockdown and we had three weeks left to finish the record. But then lockdown happened. So, most of it was written before. It does make sense that the themes of the record have kind of been inspired.
AIDAN: With all the touring we wanted to keep going but decided we didn’t only want to only play the old songs and become a ‘heritage rock’ act. Actually, we’ve had a couple of offers from those festivals, you know you get 90s festivals and stuff like that. Who the fuck would want to go out in holiday camps and see us? Like, we have one song that’s about having a good time. No one is coming to that at a festival.
MALCOLM: I’ve heard some of the 80s ones. You know Carol Decker? She does it alone with a backing track.
AIDAN: Does she? Well, if that’s what you want.
MALCOLM: So yeah, for us lockdown was good because, rather than rushing to finish the record, we had time to sit and think about what was good and bad about it or needed added. So, we had lots of perspective on it but it wasn’t a “lockdown album”, it just came out delayed.
LACHLAN: Did you approach the album in the same way you did with older album or are there contrasts in your writing and compositional processes. Is there a main reason for any differences?
MALCOLM: I think life experience. The maturity to write and record. We both did our own solo stuff and collaborations.
AIDAN: I mean we work the same way we always did; it’s just the technology is better. Ideas are more fully formed than the old days. I mean there was more money in music in those days as well. Chemical Underground, who were never a particularly affluent label, didn’t mind us going into the studio with practically nothing ready. Then we would spend a week fucking about and writing the songs in the studio which is really a ridiculously expensive way to do it. But now we don’t have to do that. We have the technology at home to get everything done.
MALCOLM: Which is good and bad. At home, you don’t have the clock ticking like you do in the studio, but then maybe that’s sometimes a good thing because one time, I think it was the song ‘Glue’, I think Big Brother was on telly at the time and Aidan was like, right we’re going to give ourselves a task to record and mix a song in four hours. And we did it. It ended up on the record.
AIDAN: Is that because I wanted to watch Big Brother?
MALCOLM: No, I was just them in the house, doing tasks.
AIDAN: Oh right, I don’t remember that but nice one.
LACHLAN: Does that continue with how infamous you two are for the unforgiving analysis of the shitty shortcomings of modern men?
AIDAN: Over the years since we split up in 2006, I just changed. As you get older the focus of the writing changes. I’m now more interested in telling stories about other people perhaps or insinuating myself into someone else’s story in some other way. Just to be a bit more vague and, hopefully, poetic in the sense that it’s not always obvious what is happening. They’re very straightforward, the old Arab Strap songs, there’s no fucking about. And that’s what I wanted to do at the time but now life frankly isn’t as interesting as it used to be. I’m a middle-aged man with two children, so there’s no exciting songs about going out, getting pissed, and making an arse of yourself like we used to.
When we made the new one, what we agreed on right away was that we weren’t going to try to write the same way that we used to. It was about using the skills that we developed from however long ago it had been. Now I don’t want to sound like the past.
MALCOLM: One of the things we worried about was in 2016 when we were celebrating ten years of the band being apart. One of our most popular songs is ‘The First Big Weekend’, our first single, and we didn’t play that for the last eight years of our career, we played for the first two then stopped because we were sick of it. Then the idea of coming back as older guys singing like we’re twenty again just felt stupid. So, we still do it now but I do think we’re going to stop again. It is good to do it because people like to hear it but being 48 and singing about going out when you were 21 isn’t the best.
AIDAN: We should change the lyrics. I do change some because they get a bit grim and you realise that as you get older.
MALCOLM: When we played it live originally, we never did the lyrics of the single we just did what we had done the weekend before. Sometimes that was sitting at home watching telly, so it didn’t always work.
AIDAN: We did that on tour a lot. I’d just talk about what we did the night before and always had exciting things because we were in our early twenties. But if we did that now it would be largely instrumental, I’d expect.
*laughing*
LACHLAN: Considering the controversial music video for ‘Here Comes Comus!’, has there always been that “shock factor” aspect intended in Arab Strap’s work, from “biggest cock you’d ever seen” onwards?
AIDAN: I think that’s just who we are naturally. Most of the album is about people in need of escape and what they turn to when they need that escape. Which is in a sense what a lot of the old Arab Strap stuff is about as well. Philosophically, I’m of the mind that we never really change. We can suppress ourselves but we’re always going to be the same people underneath. So from a lyrical point of view, it’s still the same person singing the same stuff, it’s just from a different point of view.
MALCOLM: I think you’re exposed now but what you don’t say rather than what you do say. Your older lyrics were direct and blunt and now you’re doing all this poetic stuff but actually it’s the absence of what you used to say.
AIDAN: The video was all the director’s idea. He’s great so we just left him to it. He’s a big horror fan and I’d seen a couple of his short films.
MALCOLM: We did have to cut it because we did have a scene of a guy shoving his dick through a letterbox. And he was like “it’s Arab Strap, they’ll love this”, but we don’t.
AIDAN: There’s an uncut version on Vimeo I think. I mean you saw everything, it was very explicit and it was funny I thought.
MALCOLM: That was the biggest cock you had ever seen.
AIDAN: Maybe not the biggest but it was up there.
MALCOLM: Small letterbox.
AIDAN: I think it’s best to let people do what they want, and that’s one of the best videos, if not the best, that we’ve had. You get the best results if you let people have a bit of freedom.
CAMERON: As multi-instrumentalist, how have you [Malcolm] used your artistic freedom in instrumentation to go about crafting the melancholic and frustrated sound Arab Strap are so well known for?
MALCOLM: It’s a weird one because we used to joke around in the past, we’d try to do something like a Brazilian drum beat or something completely different and it would always narrow down to just sounding like us. There’s no science behind it. For the last album, Aidan brought the intricate drum parts and samples and I brought the guitar bits. It just worked usually.
CAMERON: When it comes to influences, have the same bands you’ve talked about in the past, such as Slint, been in mind or are there maybe some more recent bands that you’ve been impressed by?
AIDAN: I’m the opposite, I don’t look to new bands at all. I tend to discover new things that came out years ago. I’m not that engaged, I used to listen to 6 Music all the time but can’t anymore.
MALCOLM: We both were brought up on 80s pop music as well so I think on the latest album every song has a chorus, one thing that we maybe didn’t always do in the past. I mean I’m not a huge Slint fan but I like David Pajo. You asked for new influences but we did use that again for this album. The working title for a joke was “Disco Spinderland”. Disco beats with obtuse guitars. That didn’t exactly steer us with ‘Bones’ and ‘Compersion’ that was the idea.
LACHLAN: For Aidan, with the timing of Arab Strap’s return and comeback coming parallel to another Scottish indie band, have rumours been blown out of proportion or has there actually ever been any feud with Belle and Sebastian and Stuart Murdoch?
AIDAN: No, Stevie lives in the neighbourhood. I see him quite a lot. I used to be good friends with Stuart but we just drifted apart. I mean I was annoyed with the title of the album but I don’t mind the song. I’m in no position, in my glass house which is smashed to fuck, when it comes to writing songs about people. I was surprised to see it as an album title but it was never that big a deal.
MALCOLM: I was surprised because I thought for years that you were annoyed that there was no permission then I met Stuart years ago under the impression that there was this feud and he’s like Aidan said it was okay in the pub.
AIDAN: I said it about the song.
MALCOLM: It was a big thing taking someone’s name. We’ve got a pretty unique kind of band name.
LACHLAN: I thought Murdoch had said later that he didn’t know an arab strap was an arab strap.
AIDAN: He claims he doesn’t but that’s utter bullshit, he knows full well what it is.
MACLOLM: They used to invite us through to Glasgow to play with them when we had our first single out and I’m sure on the first questions he or Isabel asked was “what is an arab strap?”
AIDAN: The first gig we played when we supported them, we did an acoustic thing, I think it was Mitchell Theatre. And everyone who came to the gig had a little card to read before it. I’m pretty sure it said on that that we the support act were named after a sex toy.
CAMERON: From properly getting back in the saddle with “Tears on Tour” on a wide international scale, from Europe all the way to New Zealand, how have you found Arab Strap’s reach and recognition worldwide?
AIDAN: There are slight differences. There are less than there used to be. I think because the set we’re doing right now is a bit more upbeat and in your face. In the old days when we were doing the old records, the French would always be into the romance, the doomed romance, that very French aspect of it. There was this venue in Toulouse on the side of a mountain. I think it fell down the mountain but they’ve rebuilt it and it has a pool outside.
MALCOLM: It was called “Bikini”.
AIDAN: “Bikini” that’s right. So as you arrive there’s a fucking pool and it’s really always good weather so everyone gets in the pool and has a good laugh. A couple of French guys who had come to interview us were shocked to see us enjoying ourselves. I had my Disco Fever CD on by the pool. What was it they said to you, they expected you to be dressed in black?
MALCOLM: I said it was our day off.
*Laughing*
AIDAN: Japan was always a funny one, we did a few gigs there and there was something more primal in their response because they couldn’t understand it but could get the thrust behind it.
MALCOLM: It’s maybe different in Britain now because of the way, when we started everything was NME-, Melody Maker-centric and they set whatever was fashionable. They set you up and if they ignore you, the country ignores you. In Europe, they’re not as fickle and they’ll like bands for years. We could have declining sales in Britain and still go over for a European Tour and sell it out. The festivals we’ve just played, some will be a small village square near Bruges or somewhere in the south of Italy and they just come to hear music. They don’t care what the band’s called or what the records are, they’re open eared to enjoy it. It’s like that here too in some places.
AIDAN: There is that more respectable attitude in Europe it seems. The UK festivals a lot of the time are an excuse to get fucking wrecked for a weekend, you know. While I’ve had some great UK audiences at festivals, there is something more, maybe sombre, but respectful about European audiences as opposed to the idea that everyone has gone out to just have a good time.
There’s a lot of new and younger people at these gigs. The new songs seem to be doing better than the old ones, which is amazing because we’re fucking fed up of the old songs.
MALCOLM: I saw Iron Maiden about ten years ago in Earl’s Court, London when they had the new album out A Matter of Life and Death. Me and my mate went down and they played the whole album start to finish then two old songs. And we just went “fuck”. You’ve got to respect it but it’s not what you’re there to hear. We’d like to move away from doing old songs but you still have to do them. I was good seeing a newer audience latch onto our new stuff.
AIDAN: One of the bands that convinced me it could be done well was Suede. I’ve always been a big fan of Suede. I went to see them at the Concert Hall when Night Thoughts came out and when they played, they had a big screen in front of the stage and played behind it while projecting film onto it. They played whole of the new album start to finish and it was great and a very unusual thing to see. Then they fucked off for five minutes, the screen disappeared, and they came back and did an incredible set of the best stuff you could want to hear for another hour or so. It’s like what Malcolm was saying, getting the best of both worlds. I think Iron Maiden were a bit cruel that night but Suede were amazing.
CAMERON: On a more local scale, how has the consistent cult following of the band, and how strongly this has been maintained with your return, impacted on the both of you?
AIDAN: Personally, I’d like consistency. We’re actually starting to get a bit bigger than we used to be, which is a strange thing to happen.
MALCOLM: It’s nice to know our own place and own size. Are we any bigger? (indicating to venue).
AIDAN: There is the plan to play slightly bigger venues but that just depends on how the next record goes.
MALCOLM: It’s nice because when we got back together in 2016, we played at the Barrowlands. It was a surprise when it sold out because we had no idea when we booked it if anyone would come or remember us. It was nice having that Scottish loyalty in a fanbase.
AIDAN: It’s difficult because you don’t want to do too well at the start because then you’ll have to come down pretty sharp. It’s all about consistency and we’ve always been at roughly the same level.
MALCOLM: It’s not easy to do that. You have to shoot yourself in the foot. We made a whole lot of bad decisions along the way you know. Be obtuse and do weird things that stop you from getting any bigger.
CAMERON: With the propulsion of ‘As Days Get Dark’, can we expect new music to be on the way?
AIDAN: I don’t know if it will be an album but there’s certainly new stuff coming. It’s all quite full on like a few cuts from the new album, there isn’t that many quiet passages. I think that’s because we enjoyed playing like that, it’s much more fun.
…
LACHLAN: To draw this to a close, when it comes to the band’s intended impact, and how it has changed over the years, is there anything your music is intended to provoke in the listener?
AIDAN: I suppose it must but…
MALCOLM: Musically a lot of the stuff we do is quite calm and relaxed. I think it’s almost like the lyrics are a slap and the music a hug. I don’t mean we want to hit our fans.
AIDAN: And even if you did, you’d be hugging them afterwards.
MALCOLM: I think that’s the juxtaposition of it really: if there’s some scathing word then the music is always something enjoyable and comforting and uplifting.
AIDAN: There must be something like that going on. I mean to me lyrically when we started off I didn’t like men’s love songs because there wasn’t a lot of weakness in them and they were never cunts. No one was ever writing about being a fucking arsehole. I suppose I wanted to be more honest with that sort of thing. Women were doing it, a lot of PJ Harvey’s stuff was a big influence, Babes In Toyland used to be one of my favourite bands. Men always seem to romanticise, well lie. I’ve never been easily embarrassed. That’s the thing with the Arab Strap songs, I’m always the cunt. If there’s one fanny in the room it’s me. It was a way to claw that back from the masculine macho stuff but as Malcolm says the music can be very relaxing and still on the older records so it is some kind of comfort. But these things just happen, I don’t think we’ve ever had a discussion about any particular sound or purpose.
MALCOLM: We’ve never discussed but we’ve said at some point that the albums we make is more for one person listening alone rather than folk sitting around having a party.
AIDAN: That’s what’s changed with the new stuff, you can enjoy it with other people now. The last album is the one you can put on at a party and it won’t clear the fucking room. I think that’s what’s changed in us, with getting older.
We’ve been through the misery, maybe it’s time to have fun.
Comments