Live Review: Aidan Moffat and RM Hubbert - Grand Social

The laughter was bittersweet, the emotional rollercoaster wild and rollicking (and also bittersweet) as ex-Arab Strap leader Aidan Moffat and ex-computer scientist RM Hubbert brought their stark and sometimes hilarious collaboration to Dublin.

Several lifetimes ago – also known as the ’90s– Arab Strap explored 20-something angst through a prism of humour and despair. Not a great deal has seemingly changed in the interim for Moffat, though the beard is greyer, the banter better rehearsed and also more tragic (he spent the previous evening dancing his head off to Erasure in a Galway nightclub, to the terror of all the young people).

As with Arab Strap, however, the bonhomie was merely an overlay atop bottomless wells of man-pain. Amid anecdotes about Brexit (against), Scottish independence (for) and the trials of parenthood (comic book aficionado Moffat is quietly aghast at his son’s love for Pokemon), the rain fell heavy as the pair proceeded through their 2018 album Here Lies The Body – a jolly concept record about a mother abandoning her family.

‘Keening for a Dead Love’ featured a recording of Celtic keening – a banshee wail with Scottish-Gaelic lyrics – over which Moffat hummed and declaimed and Hubbert (who once played in a band with Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos) strummed ominously.

The misery ratio was raised higher yet on ‘Quantum Theory Love Song’, one of the set’s many tracks “about shagging" while opener ‘Cockcrow’ featured vocals from opening artist Siobhan Wilson. It was dark, it was funny, it made you wonder about the meaning of life and wish you were joining the pair for a kebab at the chipper across from the venue after the gig.