(Friday 08 December 2006)
SO, the Arab Strap farewell tour ends here at the Glasgow ABC. There are quite a few plump guys with beards in for the last-ever gig and you get the feeling that 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. If people were expecting post-folk, as Arab Strap are often labelled, they are to be disappointed, at least not until close to 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 from his body 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, the closing song from the final album The Last Romance, is the 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.
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 minigig. In the second encore, it's finally just the two of them again, Moffat and Middleton.
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 outrageous no longer. Laconic, not demonic. Ironic, certainly. Iconic? Maybe - in a downbeat, low-key, indie kind of a way.
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