Aidan Moffat & RM Hubbert
****
Clwb Ifor Bach, Thu 13 Dec
“This is a song about how families break up over Christmas because everything is shite”
So Aidan Moffat says to the crowd. On an unrelentingly cold December night, a gathering of faithful fans of this uniquely Scottish (arguably specifically Glaswegian) artist braved the cold to see the fruits of his latest collaboration with fellow Scot RM Hubbert.
His compadre ‘Hubby’ as he’s known, has his own very respectable back catalogue, a fantastic guitarist and instrumentalist who got his start with El Hombre Trajeado. He aptly describes his style as “Sonic Youth with the left hand, flamenco with the right hand” – the soundscapes he’s built for Moffat across Here Lies the Body, released earlier this year, and the duo’s Christmas album, Ghost Songs for Christmas are warm, spacious and layered, making the best use of their sparsity and innate rhythms to provide the bedrock for Moffat’s stories. Their backup, a drummer and a violinist round out the stage and provide the occasional harmony.
Moffat and Hubby’s onstage chemistry and between-song banter lent the show a wonderful wintry intimacy – the two’s long-term friendship has clearly resulted in a musical one too, and their piss-taking of each other was at times funnier than some professional comedians out there. The two Scots, known for their generally morose music, are more than happy to play fools onstage. Many years ago, one dullard did respond to my DJ’ing an Aidan Moffat song at a party with “how have you not killed yourself yet?” and as much as I love his work, a deadly-serious set would be insufferable – but then again ever since his Arab Strap days he’s shown a glorious streak of dry black humour.
The two albums with Hubby so far have yielded a clutch of superb songs, most of which get an airing here in fairly unchanged versions. The Christmas songs are a great addition – all of them avoiding the sentimentality and cheap emotional manipulation that many of us misanthropists despise about this season. The encore finishes with two covers, including most interestingly, a version of Mud’s Lonely This Christmas, which Moffat refers to as ‘forever being a good song somewhere in there, struggling to get out’. This version is worn-down, as if years of alcohol abuse have rendered its narrator unable to cope with the basic facts of the lyrics. Despite Moffat and Hubby’s best efforts, I left Clwb feeling better than I had earlier. A success, I suppose.
words Fedor Tot