MALCOLM MIDDLETON may have announced he’s taking a break from recording solo albums for a while, but he’s not finished touring and this first rate songwriter is coming to Galway at the end of the month.
The former Arab Strap man will perform his solo acoustic Long Dark Night show upstairs in the Róisín Dubh on Saturday January 30 at 8pm.
Middleton was born in 1973 and raised in Falkirk, Scotland, a town that has also been home to such other notable Scottish musicians as Aidan Moffat, the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser, and Calvin Harris.
In 1995 Middleton joined forces with Moffat to form the great Arab Strap, who for the next 10 years released a number of very fine albums dealing with loneliness, sexual frustration, affairs, kinky sex, and the difficulties of being human, all through a particularly Scottish brand of black humour.
Middleton released his first solo album in 2002. It was not until 2005 that he truly began to hit his stride with the highly acclaimed Into The Woods, setting the stage for an extremely strong run of albums - A Brighter Beat (2007 ), Sleight Of Heart (2008 ), and Waxing Gibbous (2009 ).
The best way to sum up everything Middleton is about is found in one of his best solo songs - ‘Week Off’: “It easy hating yourself, it’s harder making it rhyme/Gonna sit on top of a hill for a day/play my guitar and folk my troubles away.”
Middleton’s view of humanity (and of himself ) is often extremely bleak. “Found myself hoping for the destruction of mankind/nothing bad you know, and not out of spite,” he says in ‘Total Belief’ while ‘A Happy Medium’ begins with “Woke up again today/realised I hate myself/My face is a disease.”
Yet his music acknowledges that love gives meaning and redemption to existence: “Give me time and you will see/I’ll show you what you mean to me/so don’t ever leave/and I’ll never leave,” he tells a woman “with dark brown hair” on ‘Hey You’. In return ‘Fight Like The Night’ finds Jenny Reeve saying Malcolm can “be my hero by not letting me down”.
Middleton’s view of music is an idiosyncratic one. He loves Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath, yet his songs are mostly acoustic and draw strongly from the folk-rock tradition of Britain, despite his admission he hates the term ‘folk-rock’ and does not really like that kind of music.
However his finest album may be his most folk orientated. Sleight Of Heart was a stripped down affiar, with just Middleton on vocals and acoustic guitar for most tracks. ‘Total Belief’ featured a rippling, complex finger-picked guitar of which any folk veteran would be proud.
Last year saw Middleton release Waxing Gibbous. It was quite different from its predecessors in its ambitious song structure, changes in mood and tempo, and sound textures. This was typified by the lead single ‘Red Travellin’ Socks’ which the artist described as his ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.
At the time of the album’s release, Middleton stated it would be his “last solo album for a few years”, which struck fans as strange, given the quality of his output over the past few years.
On his Myspace page though, Middleton assured fans that “I’m not quitting, I just think that Malcolm Middleton has said enough for the time being...I think I’m getting to the point where Arab Strap were, where we felt like we couldn’t do much more once we were placed in our pigeonhole.”
He added: “I’d like to do something different, whether it’s under a different name or start a new band or something. I’m starting to feel like I’ve done as much as I can with this creative voice.”
As we wait for Malcolm’s next move there is his show in the Róisín Dubh to enjoy and he is also working with Aidan Moffat on the Arab Strap boxset to be released on Chemikal Underground later this year.
Tickets are available from the Róisín Dubh and Zhivago.
