Aidan Moffat And Malcolm Middleton – Live At The Arches, Glasgow

Margins Festival

Margins is a book festival with a difference, promoting the best of Scottish literature and music to boot. The Saturday night event sees those two old sparring partners in misery from Arab Strap, Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton, sharing a stage in Glasgow’s cavernous Arches.

Moffat performs first, with Bill Wells on piano, accompanied by a violinist on a stage littered with lampshades, an appropriately domestic setting for his haunting songs about the mundane. Moffat has flourished since leaving Arab Strap, the pairing with Wells, a consummate jazz pianist, perfect, pushing his lyrics to ever greater heights. The set ends on ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’, which is certainly the greatest song about starting a family I have ever heard, leaving us all on a – perhaps uncharacteristically – uplifting note. The old animosity between the two, and their different approaches to performing may be evident when he cheerfully puts a little dig in at Middleton saying “I would like to say that Malcolm’s set will sound great, because I heard the sound check, but I don’t get up at nine in the morning.”

Perhaps ironically, especially for a man so well known for his lyrics playing at a literary festival, but with characteristic perversity, Middleton’s first two songs are instrumentals, ploughing a kraut rock vein with synth flourishes. He’s behind a keyboard, strapped with a guitar, feeding his Gretsch through an array of FX pedals, with a band. For this is his new project, Human Don’t Be Angry, which is a long way from his troubadour of acoustic gloom past.

The Human Don’t Be Angry theme is even funny, and the highlight of the set, with samples burbling playfully in the background. And Middleton doesn’t sound angry anymore, but some of his new music doesn’t have the intensity of old

Human Don’t Be Angry sounds like a promising departure for Middleton, and bodes well for the upcoming album; I just don’t know if it was a good idea to follow the man who has become Scotland’s greatest lyricist since Burns playing with the country’s greatest jazz pianist ever.

Words by Brian Beadie
Photo by Hannah Grzesiak

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