Arab Strap Press Release
ARAB STRAP | TEN YEARS OF TEARS
Farewell compilation album released 27th November 2006
After six studio albums, three live albums and countless gigs, Arab Strap are to split up. A book-end compilation album and a celebratory farewell tour will mark the end of Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton’s ten year relationship. The Last Romance, released in 2005, will remain their final studio offering.
“There’s no animosity, no drama. We simply feel we’ve run our course,” explains Aidan. “The Last Romance seems the most obvious and logical final act of the Arab Strap studio adventure. Everybody likes a happy ending.”
Titled Ten Years Of Tears (a nod to the critics who frequently pegged Arab Strap as ‘Falkirk miserablists’), the compilation is by no means a traditional ‘Best Of’ collection. Comprising B-sides, demos, remixes, new recordings, live tracks and Peel sessions, it’s a handpicked selection designed to give a full picture of this unique band.
“The idea of the compilation is to capture the essence of the band over our ten year career,” says Malcolm. “Sometimes the albums were a bit stifled because we were worrying too much about making a good album. I think that live versions of songs and b-sides etc show a truer, more relaxed side to the band. Ten Years Of Tears can serve both as an introduction to Arab Strap and also a fitting finale to those people who have followed us along the way.”
Acquaintances on the Falkirk scene, Aidan and Malcolm became friends in 1995. They soon began making music together, telling twisted tales of messy sexual encounters, shit jobs, titanic drinking sessions and the twisted chemistries of human relationships. They called themselves Arab Strap after a sex toy Aidan spotted in a porn mag. And it wouldn’t be the same without a farewell tour, ending appropriately at the venue where the Strap played their first gig: View tour dates
Signing to Chemikal Underground, they released their debut single, The First Big Weekend, a tale of Aidan and Malcolm’s adventures on the weekend Scotland were knocked out of Euro ’96, in September of that year. A cult classic, it’s included on this compilation along with a recording from their debut live performance. Over the years that followed, we were given countless glimpses into the intimately private lives of our two protagonists, whether they were pondering the risk of STDs (Packs Of Three) or wondering if they’d get to shag that friend of the cellist from Belle & Sebastian (I Saw You).
“No one really writes honest, hateful love songs,” Aidan once said. “The kids never hear it like they should hear it. They should know of the farting, the fighting and the fucking. The pain and the pleasure.”
Together, Aidan and Malcolm have created some of the most beautifully observed and brutally painful music of the last ten years. The album ends, appropriately enough, with the triumphal There Is No Ending. The story continues with Malcolm’s solo career (he’s currently recording his new album with Tony Dougan at The Castle Of Doom in Glasgow) and Aidan’s recordings as his alter ego L. Pierre (new album ‘Dip’ released early 2007) and a spoken-word album and tour in late 2007. And then there’s this album, which serves as a key to that astonishing back catalogue. Future generations who want to know about the farting, the fighting and the fucking will hopefully know where to look.
Further information from David and Will at In House:
0161 228 2070 || info@inhousepress.com
The Last Romance Press Release"I've never been miserable in my life."
Aidan Moffat
So there you have it – a bold and somewhat controversial statement from the frontman of Arab Strap. If the bitter and often savage chemistries of human relationships are ripe for exploration, they constitute a road well travelled by Aidan and his musical accomplice Malcolm Middleton. Aidan's blunt assertion that he isn't the curmudgeon most people expect him to be is hardly surprising given the media's constitutional appraisal of Arab strap as “Falkirk miserabilists”.
Such preconceptions are formed over a period of time and there is no doubt that over the course of their last five albums, Arab Strap have mined a rich vein of material from the seamier side of human nature. To say however that Arab Strap are an unstoppable juggernaut of despondancy would be disingenuous at best - Aidan states the case for the defence:
“People who say we're miserable clearly haven't listened properly. There is far more humour in our music than most people accept, in fact, The First Big Weekend was a joke from start to finish.”
Maybe so, but it was a joke that would become a cult classic. As debut singles go, The First Big Weekend was as bold and original as they come: a bleary-eyed recollection of a monumental weekend in the summer of ‘96. Hyper-real storytelling and capricious musical styling was a template Arab Strap would develop and experiment with over the course of five albums including Philophobia (1998), The Red Thread (2001) and Monday At The Hug And Pint (2003).
The other half of Arab Strap is Malcolm Middleton, co-creator and musical foil to Aidan's social commentaries. Malcolm's musical input has been instrumental in elevating Aidan's anecdotal lyrics to the level of elegaic lament and bruising epiphany. His take on Arab Strap's cheerless reputation is more philosophical:
“I don't really care about being called miserable: if it's not happy, if the tempos aren't upbeat, then what is it? It's probably more melancholic than miserable though.”
Beyond their Arab Strap careers, Aidan and Malcolm have pursued their own individual projects: Aidan constructing sample-laden electronica as alter-ego Lucky Pierre and Malcolm with two beautifully soul-searching long players under his belt. His most recent release, the mordantly upbeat Into The Woods has been lavished with critical acclaim. In most cases, such respected solo projects would sound a death knell for the band, not so Arab Strap. In fact Aidan seems positively thankful for their respective sabbaticals: “If we didn't have our solo stuff to do, we'd have ended up fucking killing each other.” OK then...
When it was time to regroup Arab Strap, it was clear that The Last Romance would be approached differently. Clocking in at just over 35 minutes, it's shorter than previous Arab Strap outings and with songs like Dream Sequence, Speed:Date and There Is No Ending we're confronted with a more buoyant, upbeat and driven Arab Strap than we've heard in quite some time. While retaining Arab Strap's knack for vivid and eloquent storytelling, The Last Romance barrells out of the speakers with an assured urgency – engagingly melodic and in some cases, floor-fillingly danceable.
Aidan is clear about what he wanted to achieve with this album: “I wanted it to be shorter, more immediate. If our previous albums could be considered ‘hard work', I wanted this one to be a slap in the face. I felt it was important we didn't make the same album over ten years, so this one was going to be more digestible and a lot louder.” As with most things in life though, working partnerships are often fraught with disagreements and it's hardly surprising that Aidan and Malcolm didn't always see eye to eye during the sessions for The Last Romance. Malcolm takes up the story...
“It was probably a reaction to going into the studio so soon after finishing Into The Woods, but I was keen to make the record quite dark and moody. I find slower, darker songs quite comforting, so as far as the tone of The Last Romance is concerned, it's fair to say that it was a battle I lost and Aidan won.”
If Malcolm lost the battle, then Arab Strap have won the war: The Last Romance is a spectacular piece of work. From the elegantly bittersweet opening of Stink, the eccentric haze of Chat In Amsterdam, the urgent gallop of Speed:Date and the stunning, piano-driven coda of Dream Sequence, The Last Romance is an album that demands repeated listens and emphatically shatters the myth that Arab Strap are dedicated purveyors of doom and gloom.
It's a rare thing to have an album as lyrically provocative as it is musically intrepid: from the reflective appreciation of Fine Tuning to the album's triumphant conclusion in There Is No Ending, The Last Romance is anything but an exercise in misery. When asked if he had any regrets about the way it turned out, all Aidan could mourn was the album's lack of handclaps. “It's a lot more upbeat but still deals with some of the darker aspects of relationships. It's like the dark side in Star Wars though – quicker, faster...more seductive.”
After five critically acclaimed albums and a brace of solo projects, Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton have conspired to produce an album that reaffirms their status as uniquely gifted songwriters and maverick artists in an increasingly benign musical landscape. Ten years into a gloriously prolific career, it's fair to acknowledge that if familiarity doesn't necessarily breed contempt, it is certainly capable of inciting indifference. With The Last Romance, Arab Strap have provided us with the perfect opportunity to fall in love with them all over again
Monday at the Hug & Pint Press Release"but when we attacked, it was never swiftly we must have been locked in combat for years our new hardwood floor was the perfect battleground so I suppose the bullets were our tears"
ACT OF WAR
We need bands like Arab Strap. In these times of production line pop stars and cognate, corporate clones, Aidan and Malcolm’s music remains unique, observant and callously honest. Listening to their material can be both uncomfortably voyeuristic and engagingly provocative in a way that so few of their contemporaries can even hope to approximate. Over the course of the last seven years, Arab Strap have displayed an innate lyrical talent which explores the intimacies and the pathologies of relationships: attraction, lust, jealousy, infidelity, rejection and loss, delivered with brutally stark honesty and set to a soundtrack which elevates their music beyond the miserable to the level of an elegiac lament for loves won and lost.
Monday at the Hug & Pint finds Aidan and Malcolm returning to Arab Strap after their respective sabbaticals with Lucky Pierre and Malcolm’s solo album. Bolstered by the full time involvement of Stacey Sievwright and Jenny Reeve on violin and cello the album navigates a journey which many of us have travelled: there are highs and lows; dark nights and false dawns; getting fucked with your friends and feeling fucked on your own; an album of love, loss, depression and hope; more musically diverse and schizophrenic than anything they had done before. As with many albums though, the real bastard was finding a title and there were many contenders: How Not To Meet People; The Cunted Circus; Loop; all relevant in their own way but never quite suitable – if the tales contained within the album were to be given an appropriate context it might as well be a pub. The Hug & Pint.
The best pubs, as you all know, are populated with all manner of life: the loud-mouthed optimist and the silent brooder; scrums of friends and pockets of loners; the buoyant and the deflated; the worldly-wise and the wide-eyed innocents. Arab Strap, with this album, have taken enormous leaps in capturing the waves of elation and despondency that accompany us from one night to another. Musically capricious and stylistically indiscriminate, there’s a bold diversity at work here, audacious and self-assured: swirling strings; dance beats; cacophonous distortion and subtle, acoustic arpeggios; sampled bagpipes; lilting piano and doleful trumpets. Joined in the pub by Conor and Mike from Bright Eyes, Bill Wells from the Bill Wells Trio, Barry Burns from Mogwai, and Jenny and Stacey, Arab Strap steer us through club disco, piano ballads, pitch-black, spiteful guitars, wistful Scottish folk and glassy-eyed bar-room sing-a-longs in a seamless 46 minutes, full of musical quirks and shot through with an individuality that is truly unique.
The real magic of Arab Strap can be found in the reliance between Aidan’s lyrics and Malcolm’s musical vision: one enhances the other and if the music on Monday at the Hug & Pint is fearless and evocative, it simply transports the lyrics to another level. Aidan’s lyrics go far beyond that of alcohol-soaked contrition: it’s the attention to detail, the insight and the honesty to articulate emotions and incidents that we can all relate to but rarely mention in public. Sophic prose for the post-club comedown, the art lies in the commonplace and no-one expresses our frailties and vices more eloquently or bluntly than Mr. Moffat.
For those of us who have lived any kind of life with all its attendant regrets, joys and embarrassments, Monday at the Hug & Pint is a companion to be cherished. Proof that you are not alone and that we all share the same inadequacies and hopes for the future. If the Hug & Pint does exist, I’ll bet the toilets stink but the beer’s fantastic and it’s only £1.50 a pint.