Arab Strap - "New Birds" [from Philophobia]
Arab Strap - "New Birds" (live) [from Mad for Sadness]
Arab Strap - "The First Big Weekend" [from The Week Never Starts Round Here]

Earlier this week, Arab Strap announced that they were not going to be recording more music together. "we simply feel," they write, "we've run our course". They were one of the most singular bands of the 1990s and one of the finest Scotland ever produced. They were - and are, as they will be touring in support of a compilation due late in October, - small, crude, beautiful, honest, free, lonely, wild, fucked, shining. Aidan Moffatt murmuring scuffed late-night stories into a microphone; Malcolm Middleton, head bowed, asking his guitar to sound nice. A very strange mix, Malcolm's golden playing and Moffatt's brown-sauce confessions. But a singular one, yes. A fine one. One of those precise musics that catches a person at just the right time and then leaves a mark. You don't forget the moments when Arab Strap was playing exactly what you felt.

My favourite Arab Strap song is "New Birds". Usually my favourite version is the one from the studio, released on the LP called Philophobia. It's about a reunion: a man and a woman meeting after a long time apart. And it captures the perfect glint of a perfect kind of melancholy; the precise gleam of a why-am-i-sad. Moffatt's narrative can at first seem off-the-cuff but no, it's not. Listen to each act, the balance of contemplation and deed. Which moments linger in his tale? The meeting; the walk; that moment face-to-face; the having-parted. "You can see her breath in the air between your faces as you stand in the leaves and she just asks you straight out if you want to come and stay in her flat / But you make sure you get separate taxis." None of the in-between. That's always the part you can't remember. It's the having-done that roars in your chest as you lie in your bed or sit in the dark. As you stare at yourself in the mirror. As the electric guitars rise, yellow.

The live version of "New Birds" is sometimes my favourite. The tom and bass drum hit harder. The crescendo at the end is Mogwai-heavy, full of something much closer to regret. An anger that needs to be played out in full.

And "The First Big Weekend"? It was, and remained, their biggest hit. What kind of hit is this?! Ah, Scotland. It rambles. It drifts. And it moves - forward, forward, forward, on and on, just like that first big weekend, you know the one, you know the one, months ago, and you - just like Aidan - walked through the park and took a shortcut through the playground. All the colours are here: the colour of a man talking just as he gulps down some beer (0:46); the colour of the first violet blush of the night (0:56); the colour of a man pretending he doesn't care (2:07); the colour of a man regretting having been too mean (3:13); the colour of summer's wafting love (4:00). All the colours. It's what scientists call a rain-bow.

Thank you, lads.

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