Arab Strap, ABC, 4 December

Went to see Arab Strap on Monday with Liam and Neil. I'd promised the Morning Star a review, this is what I sent in.

REVIEW:

Arab Strap, ABC, Glasgow
Monday, December 4, 2006
By Malcolm Burns


So, the Arab Strap farewell tour ends here at the Glasgow ABC. There's quite a few plump guys with beards in for the last ever gig. You get the feeling Arab Strap - aka Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton - know their audience.

The recorded intro is a radio report describing how the band once shocked the citizens of their hometown, Falkirk. It features a local burgher who claims: "There's two ways to get on in showbiz, one is to be outrageous, the other is to have talent, and obviously they have nothing of the latter."

Then they're off: beat beat beat beat - rock. If you were expecting post-folk, as they are often labelled, you didn't get it (almost till the encores). With drums, bass and second guitar, this "last Arab Strap band" whip up a hefty rock show. Well, it would be, if it wasn't for the fact that Moffat is singing his Scots vernacular poems of shiftless ordinariness in a deep, almost tuneless voice, somewhere between Leonard Cohen and Irvine Welsh. It's low key - literally - even though he looks like a pop Pavarotti, plump, bearded and wiping sweat with a cloth wrapped around his wrist.

They scoot pretty much through the recent Ten Years of Tears retrospective/retirement album.

Among the "old songs", Moffat introduces Gilded, which stated some variously fulfilled ambitions: "We did make the cover of the NME, though we've never had any hits, as such, and I've never snorted coke off a supermodel's tits - much though I'd like to."

There Is No Ending, closing song from the final album The Last Romance, is a cue for thanks to their record label, Chemikal Underground - to cheers. As the gig reaches its peak, balloons fall from above and the punters pop them.

And then The First Big Weekend returns from 1996 like Groundhog Day at the end of the Arab Strap adventure. "Went out for the weekend and it lasted forever..."

Their first encores are an acoustic mini gig. In the second encore, it's finally just the two of them again, Aidan and Malcolm.

Moffat dedicates Packs of Three to his mother. The audience sings along to the better known bawdy bits. Nice boys, eh?

And there they go, the bearded laddies. Talented, but not, any longer, outrageous. Laconic, not demonic. Ironic, certainly. Iconic? Maybe... in a downbeat, low key, indie kind of a way.


ends
408 words


web links:

Arab Strap site:
www.arabstrap.co.uk

Chemikal Underground
www.chemikal.co.uk

Article by Aidan Moffat in Sunday Herald
www.sundayherald.com
"I suppose you have to get it out of your system when you're young but it doesn't take long to realise that good manners and kindness are the way forward."
"We never did become the kind of rock stars we'd read about, but I would genuinely rather mean a lot to a little that a little to a lot, and at least we have the sense to split up while we still sound good."