No More Despair - Malcolm Middleton

“We’re all going to die, what if there’s nothing? We’ll all have to face this alone. There’s a when not an if inside everybody, mortal thoughts like this can make you feel so alone. You’re gonna die, you’re gonna die, you’re gonna die alone, all alone…” chirps Malcolm Middleton over a weighty bass line and manic electro-pop synths.

He might now be skipping to a slightly brighter beat, but Middleton’s less than cheery side saturates ‘We’re All Going To Die’, the opening track of the former Arab Strap guitarist’s third solo effort. There are glimmers of hope that shine through the grey haze, however. ‘Fuck It, I Love You’ sees Malkie give in to his heart, before the fear and self doubt creep back for ‘Four Cigarettes’. 

‘A Brighter Beat’ bolsters Middleton’s solo work, building on the perfection of 2005’s ‘Into The Woods’ and acknowledging the raw honesty of 2002 debut solo effort ‘5:14 Fluoxytine Seagull Alcohol John Nicotine’.

Middleton’s first record is a tortured, bleeding wound of a record, full of dark depression, misery, loneliness and self-loathing. He admits he has difficulty with it, and that he wouldn’t ever listen to it. “There’s songs that I’ll definitely never ever play again live, either I just don’t like them or I don’t want to sing about that stuff,” he confesses. “If I listen to my first album I cringe quite a lot. I think I was too… I did write that for myself and when I was writing it I didn’t expect other people would hear it. I must have done at some point, but I always managed to put barriers up so I wouldn’t think about what other people were thinking.”

‘A Brighter Beat’ isn’t a massive move away from Malkie’s earlier material, but it certainly feels like a new chapter. Musically, it’s meatier, with bursts of sanguinity that battle with the sadness.

Despite being a constantly failing perfectionist, Middleton is happy with his latest collection of work. “I remember when I finished the album… I was happy with it and I was also really confused about it, it took me a few weeks to get into it and enjoy it because I spent so much time doing it I think. I’d never spent three months making a record before,” he recalls.

“I do like it, I’m looking forward to playing it live. I think in the last couple of weeks that I’ve listened to it again… it’s just like hindsight basically because I don’t just want to be a perfectionist, but there are a few things that I would maybe change. But I’m not going to say what they are!”

Middleton doesn’t write when he’s happy – boredom mainly fuels his creativity. With this album he feels things have changed slightly, becoming a little less introspective. “There’s still the macabre stuff there, maybe talking about depression or bits like that, but it’s not as wallowing as the previous albums,” he says. “Sometimes it’s fun to wallow and then it’s fun to laugh at yourself for wallowing too much. I like to think that with this one other people can maybe get a bit more from it rather that just seeing what I’m doing y’know.”

In November of last year, Malcolm Middleton and Aidan Moffat played their last gig together. After ten years of tears, the story of Arab Strap had reached its conclusion and Falkirk’s finest musical pairing came to an end.

The decision to dissolve the band was mutual. “I phoned up Aidan, we’d just finished a long American tour and I was phoning him up to say ‘I don’t want to do it anymore’. I phoned him and he said to me first that he didn’t want to do it anymore,” Middleton recalls. “So it was quite easy and we kinda had a laugh about it and went and had a beer and said it would be good to do something together again in the future, but we just don’t want to be Arap Strap anymore. We don’t want to be the band, we don’t want to do the kind of music that Arab Strap had been doing.”

The band had had its run for the pair. “We couldn’t do anything else worthwhile and we didn’t really want to, and we were both enjoying music outside of Arab Strap. I really got a lot more satisfaction from my last solo album than I did from the last Arab Strap album.”