“It’s a bit ****ing swish this, isn’t it?” asked Aidan Moffat, Scotland’s Leonard Cohen, a compellingly gloomy lyrical poet, as he looked around the venue.
“We’ll do our best to bring the tone down.”
Later on this first night of Arab Strap’s new tour, he mentioned two gigs held in the main hall of V&A Dundee before – one by Andrew Wasylyk and the other cringeworthily rapped by Jeremy Strong as Kendall Roy in Succession.
“I look more like Brian Cox,” laughed the white-bearded Moffat. “I should have learned the rap. I’ve let you down.”
Congratulations to Glasgow-based promoter 432 for taking a chance on the V&A, because it felt atmospheric and sounded perfect. More gigs definitely need to happen here.
Moffat and Malcolm Middleton, his partner in Arab Strap, are touring their second album Philophobia (or “my diary”, as Moffat described its revealing content) in its entirety to celebrate its 25th anniversary.
It remains a painfully frank and darkly humorous piece of work, with Moffat’s lyrics concerned mainly with sex and the many ways in which he and his partners are going to let one another down.
Here it sounded sparse and affecting, with Middleton’s distinctive, emotive guitar the main accompaniment to gruff Arab Strap favourites including Packs Of Three and New Birds.
Moffat introduced an ambling drum machine pulse on Here We Go and church-like sampled chimes to The Night Before the Funeral.
He described I Would’ve Liked Me a Lot Last Night as being in tribute to his worst hangover ever and noted that his doomy predictions for the romance described in The First Time You’re Unfaithful all came true.
The encore contained a couple of old songs in Girls of Summer and The Shy Retirer, but it was the new music – The Turning of Our Bones, Bluebird and Fable of the Urban Fox – which really leapt out. Symphonic, rhythmic, telling new kinds of stories, they sounded fresh and immediate.
“A very quiet celebration,” was how Moffat described the show. “An exorcism, a purge, a way to say goodbye to the old Arab Strap.”
Not goodbye to the new Arab Strap though, we hope, because they’re still very compelling originals.
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