With big thanks to Mike from Magic, Murder, Mania & Manta Rays for the photo
Glasgow ABC – Monday 4th December 2006. The last gig for Arab Strap. Why not let a real writer describe it??
The Arab Strap live experience has taken a wayward road since the small-town raver’s elegy of The First Big Weekend saw them stumble into mass consciousness, Guinness adverts and a litany of bad sex, broken hearts and terminal romance.
From humble beginnings at a works canteen quiz to this farewell tour which, to the deadpan amusement of singer Aidan Moffat, has seen them “booked into places we’ve never even been to before”, the past decade of one-night stands has seen them deliver the shambolic and dabble with the epic before getting very good indeed at what they do. And they said it would never last.
Now they’re finally bowing out and, unlike the roll-call of love-lorn chancers who populate their songs, there’s no mess, no huff. Nobody’s marching off in front. Nobody’s perturbed or disturbed by the other’s past. Moffat and guitarist Malcolm Middleton aren’t likely to be unduly bothered by the company the other keeps. It’s not as if it’s like having a girlfriend, after all. Ah, girlfriends. Whether ex, current or possible, it’s the irrationally clingy mind games and the pains of being taken for granted that have proved enough not just to drive a man to drink, but to pen a few verses too.
It ends, as it must, with an acoustic encore, Moffat as personably dignified as a diplomat, Middleton happy to surrender the limelight by perching himself on a knee-high stool and just getting on with it. The audience – as ever, with a healthy percentage of women – sings along: “Another sniff of romance I’ll forget/We promised to ourselves before we came out/ We’d do something we’d regret”.
It’s funny, and not at all girlfriend-recalling ironic, but tonight’s the first time you realise just how much Arab Strap don’t actually sound like anyone else. Or, as future residents of Falkirk nursing homes will proudly put it: “Moffat and Middleton? They made Lennon and McCartney look like a pair of numpties.” Cheers, then.
Those were the words used by award-winning author Gordon Legge in reviewing the gig in Edinburgh last Friday. Every word is just as valid for last night.
A quite magnificent show and a quite magnificent occasion.
Joy and hysteria as the balloons came down during ‘The First Big Weekend’, but more than anything, the memories of the acoustic encore will endure for a long long time:-
Here We Go / Loch Leven / Blood / Amor Veneris / Packs Of Three/Soaps
And then the last song that Arab Strap ever played:-
Mp3 : The Shy Retirer (acoustic version)
Stunning.