«Once we were morbid. Now we're just pissed off.” There are people who have the gift of perfectly sealing in a handful of words topics – a musical career lasting almost thirty years, for example – which could be discussed for hours. Aidan Moffat is one of these people. Of course it's not all that simple, and certainly the talent for puns and vivid images is not enough to exhaust the complexity of life and in this case not even of music. Moffat knows this well, in fact he grins under the salt and pepper bum as he summarizes in that way the difference between the Arab Strap of yesterday (those of phase 1, as they say: the '90s, the early '00s, those albums steeped of drunken melancholy, decadence, eroticism that sometimes led to pornography tout court, afterhours urban poetry and post rock) and those of today (phase 2 which began three years ago with the excellent return of As Days Get Dark after ten years of artistic separation – between them, not from music – and strengthened by a new album of intense, ruthless beauty).
The corpulent singer of the Scottish duo is on a Zoom connection from his home in Glasgow: relaxed, courteous and talkative, he also physically conveys a philosophical serenity middle aged (she turned 51 the week before) barely veiled in disenchantment. Even the impossible Scottish accent seems to have softened slightly and become a little more understandable (from personal experience: writing an interview with him twenty years ago was more or less like deciphering the Rosetta Stone). The drying rack with the clothes hanging behind her also seems to confirm the assumption of the title of the new album: I'm Totally Fine With It 👍 Don't Give it a Fuck Anymore 👍. «The drummer who comes on tour with us wrote that phrase in the band's WhatsApp chat, I don't remember what purpose anymore, but it made me laugh a lot at the time. I don't know why sometimes I enjoy certain things so much. However it has become a catchphrase among us, so it was inevitable to use it as the album title. There is no particular meaning behind it, even if now everyone will say that we have become nihilists.”
Accompanying Aidan, as usual, is his not as talkative (but equally kind and witty) Sancho Panza, or Malcolm Middleton, the musical mind of the couple, directly from the remote fishing village in which he has taken refuge for some time now (“I I started the lockdown three or four years before”, he jokes).
Let's go back to that thing of yesterday's morbidity and today's anger. Aidan specifies that «perhaps anger is not the right word, but today in writing I am certainly motivated by despair at how the world has become and by resentment towards those who have the greatest responsibility for making it this way. For example, the corporations that dominate our lives through social networks and the Internet in general. The Zuckerbergs, the Elon Musks and those others whose names you don't know but who in fact decide everything, impacting politics as never before. These alpha males of Silicon Valley have concretized the basic concept of Thatcherism: society does not exist, we are just a mass of billions of people who work for free for them and to make them increasingly filthy rich.”
«But obviously the anger is also aimed at us who have voluntarily handed ourselves over to this domination. Me first. I was literally addicted to social media, during the pandemic I was glued to Twitter all day, until I realized that arguing 24/7 with strangers online wasn't the best for my mental health. It is a worse addiction than alcohol and drugs, also because it devastates the psyche of millions of otherwise very normal people. I've stopped, although every now and then I still go for a ride on X. You know, like the ex-alcoholic who allows himself a drink every now and then.”
In I'm Totally Fine With It the theme recurs in several songs. The initial Allatoncenesswith its decidedly heavy riff (“it was the last piece to be recorded but it came naturally to us to put it first in the setlist, it introduces the mood of the album well”, explains Malcolm), talks about social media using the pronoun “they” : evil (not even so) occult persuaders who profile us down to the last cell because selling us stuff is the ultimate goal anyway (“They attracted your attention, the groomers and the swindlers, and each of them did their own research / They attracted your attention, they have irritated fanatical fans, while Nazis and rapists sell merchandise”), and what is worse with our now resigned and stoned consensus (“All these clever stimuli / oppression and disapproval / you would think I could rebel, you would think I could crying, instead I'm here, damned numb”).
In Sociometer Blues instead the “you” is used, a more refined rhetorical strategy that alludes to the unhealthy relationship with the online sphere: the first verse reads “I woke up this morning and I opened you with a squeeze and a tender caress”, but it is not a partner talking to each other, but rather about the smartphone. Aidan: «If you think about it, there is something subtly erotic in that ritual of opening Facebook, WhatsApp or any other messaging service as soon as you wake up. There is the anticipation of something, the waiting, the hope of being gratified by any comment. In the end the relationship with online becomes extremely personal. Which is obviously scary, it's all a very dangerous illusion. You delude yourself into knowing people with whom you have no real relationship, you think you have established a closeness that in fact doesn't exist, it's all mediated by a screen and a mask that we constantly wear when we connect. Damn, this is terrible. For this in Allatonceness I say that “I want to suck a stone, feel the salt of evil, rest in the arms of a tree”. I feel a very strong need to recover the physical dimension of reality, of interactions. The contact, the management of the space between one person and another, the smells. Smells are amazing, right? Well, oh god, not always (laughs)”.
Among the many dark sides of the online experience there is also the appalling misogyny that characterizes too many of what Aidan calls “hopeless cowards”. Theme that is addressed in Blisswhich musically is also one of the most darkly electronic (even if perversely “danceable”) songs in the history of Arab Strap, and which is not surprising to be one of the highlights of a record in which, says Malcolm, «we used fewer guitars than in any our other work.”
Women, as well as the elderly and psychologically fragile people, are one of the human categories most exposed to anonymous cruelty online. And what about young people? How aware are they of what Aidan was explaining? «I believe they are, in the end much more than us. Ours is the last generation to have a precise memory of what the world was like before social media and the Internet. When I see my 10 year old daughter or my teenage son I understand that for them that world is something prehistoric that they can't even imagine. The last thing they would use a cell phone for is making calls, they prefer the distance of a written or voice message. Worrying, but understandable. That doesn't mean they don't know all too well the dangers of this way of interacting. They suffer enormous social pressure, and the statistics say so. Here in Britain one in four teenagers has attempted to harm themselves physically, the phenomenon of self harm it is also the result of this continuous pressure. Hatred of women on social media is another serious problem, I recommend reading a book like Penance by Eliza Clark to realize the drift we have ended up in. There's a song on the record, Haven't You Heardwhich I wrote trying to take the point of view of those who are younger and exposed to depersonalization and online bullying.”
In the lyrics of the album you can find some of the most genuinely chilling moments ever to appear in Moffat's songs, which normally have never shone with brightness. An example is Safe and Well which tells the story of a lonely, elderly woman, who died at home during the pandemic and was found only weeks later because no one had bothered to look for her. «I took inspiration from a newspaper article, which rarely happens to me. It spoke of the horrible end of this woman, which confirms what we said before: the illusion of the connection that unites us all, but in reality we are atoms dispersed in millions of different solitudes. The saddest part is that this person had left practically no traces on the internet, except for a post from a long time ago in which she was looking for a friend.”
More text chilling is that of Molehills, which ends with a female voice explaining in the neutral tone of a scientific documentary how moles usually paralyze their prey with poison, keeping them alive and immobilized in their burrows and then consuming them later. A metaphor to underline that even that nature and that physical reality to which we should ultimately return can be just as evil as the virtual one? «I hadn't thought of this interpretation. I actually had in mind the old adage “what's behind a smile?”. It is a text that talks about appearance and hypocrisy. You know, here the mole is the cute animal par excellence, it appears in a lot of fairy tales and children's fiction, and when I read about its habits I said to myself “oh fuck””.
Aidan and Malcolm talk about how this was one of the records for which they spent the most time in the creative phase, but also one of those born more relaxed. «Contrary to the past we didn't have too many pressures or deadlines. It's been a long time because we've spent the last two years playing around and so we've used our spare time to both write and record. We bounced around ideas and suggestions in an online folder and we continued like this for me. But I think this was good for the songs, and also for our mental health (laughs)”.
Speaking of touring, in 2023 they took the songs of Philophobia, Arab Strap's second album and one of the most loved by fans, which marked its 25th anniversary. How was the experience of returning to those places of memory? «Well, memory is a key term», explains Aidan. «I was distressed at the idea of not remembering the lyrics of the songs, and instead, incredibly, I didn't have to make any effort. Even I was amazed at how much those words are embedded in my subconscious. As we get older we tend to forget the lyrics, and in fact I'm having a terrible effort with the ones on the new album, perhaps because there are many more words than in the past. I'm afraid I'll have to use a music stand live, after all if Nick Cave can do it I can do it too. Instead the pieces of Philophobia…bam! They still come to me automatically.” For Malcolm, however, «taking those songs on tour was nice, I wouldn't go so far as to say cathartic, but it certainly symbolically closed a circle. It wasn't an exercise in nostalgia. The strange thing is that we noticed certain flaws in that record, like for example in One Day, After School there was a completely off organ chord. Now at least we play it right!
In a song from the penultimate album, Tears on TourAidan imagines being “the opposite of a stand-up comedian” and doing shows in which, following his natural predisposition to the side gloom of life, sits on an armchair and cries with the spectators, equipped with handkerchiefs specially distributed to the merchandisers. It wouldn't even be a bad idea, all things considered. «Maybe I will (laughs). There were moments in the past when while I was singing on stage I realized how sad the stories I was telling were and I said to myself “no come on, it's not possible…”. Anyway, why not? It would be liberating to have a good collective cry all together, right? The smile behind the beard makes it clear that she is joking. Today, even for Arab Strap, it is a time of anger, not melancholy.
