The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

There’s a hell of a lot of fannying around in I Can Hear Your Heart, the first release to feature Moffat’s distinctive vocals since the peculiarly cheery conclusion to Arab Strap’s career back in 2006. You too may have found his L Pierre instrumental project sonically excellent but missed the salacious mumblings. The semi spoken word I Can Hear Your Heart solves that. It’s a fine litany of broken resolution with which to start the year and, in a musical world STILL populated by boisterous shaggy-haired boys singing about fancying girls in chip shops, it sees Moffat looking back on his own early twenties with a typically honest eye.

Although the character portrayed in these 24 tracks and accompanying short story might never learn from his antics (“I don’t think he really gives a fuck, he just keeps going”), the now 35-year-old Moffat insists he’s been attached to the same person now for five years and has forgone Buckfast binges for a more sophisticated choice of brew. “I’m 35-years-old now, man,” he says, “it’s quality German lager all the way.”

Yet while he also says, “The only reason I could feel comfortable about releasing the record is to know that it’s about someone who doesn’t really exist any more,” he admits that perhaps something still lies beneath: “I suppose elements of that personality are always there, but you learn to suppress it, or learn a sense of decorum. That’s the difference between being young and old. Certainly the days of chasing women are long behind me, aye.”

The tale related in I Can Hear Your Heart apparently comes from the early days of Arab Strap. “I found a lot of things that were never intended to be songs - they were written alongside,” Moffat explains. “Some probably go back as far as the late nineties - it was like finding an old diary. But very little was fit for consumption, so I started rewriting. I was embarrassed by much of what I was reading but, at the same time, I was finding it quite amusing. It shaped itself eventually and I thought, ‘This is quite an interesting story to tell.’”

“Quite interesting” is something of an understatement: the events detailed in I Can Hear Your Heart are enough to get your maiden aunt reaching for her smelling salts and Moffat even says he warned his mother about the record’s content, suggesting it was a bit like early Arab Strap. She apparently replied, “Now Aidan, do you really want to go back down that road?”

I Can Hear Your Heart is a brutally honest record that details youthful indulgence. Most men dress up their pasts under macho braggadocio or hide it from the nice sensible girl they eventually settle down with. Not Moffat. He details his visits to strip clubs (‘Super Sexxxy Real Live’), and the infidelity that happens when love has disappeared from a relationship (‘Good Morning’), even the great male no-no of the homosexual experience (‘Double Justice’), without boasting, and without judging either. This cutting lyricism is made doubly effective by the deceptively simple sound collage he uses to carry his narrative. It works precisely because the found sounds - hisses that feel like wind and waves, footsteps, party conversation thrumming through the ceiling - take the listener back to their own feckless youth. The musical interludes - the electronic crunch of ‘I’m Not Bitter’ or the simple roll of ‘The Boy That You Love’ - are similarly effective. Then there’s the drunken rendition of ‘Hungry Heart’ and a boozed-up rendering of a Dorothy Parker poem called ‘A Very Short Song’.

It’s such a sophisticated and witty record that I wonder if the genial chap on the other end of the telephone line gets sick of being portrayed as a boorish, singing Eyeore. “I think it’s very funny,” he says. “It’s meant to be funny and I don’t think people get that at all. Obviously it has a dark edge to it and it deals with failure and things that are supposed to be sad, but I don’t think there’s one track on it that doesn’t try to find some sort of humour.”

But what about the ex-girlfriend(s) and one-night stands who inspired I Can Hear Your Heart? Might they be less amused should they recognise themselves? “There’d be one or two I imagine, but that doesn’t concern me at all,” continues Moffat. “I find it highly unlikely that anyone who the album is about would actually bother to listen to it, though I’d like to think that one or two might. That would please me. I might put a couple in my pocket in case I bump into them. I’ll give them a copy and say, ‘There you go, listen to it, you might like it.’”

Indeed, Aidan Moffat is keen to reiterate that he has no regrets. “I’d be lying if I said that sometimes I don’t think about those times and smile,” he insists. “They’re certainly good memories, but I don’t think it’s the sort of thing I’d want to do again. When I go to town these days for a pint and I’m walking back and it’s full of young folk, I don’t have the energy. Fuck sake, I’m glad I’m not young anymore.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that behaviour and I’m not trying to be judgemental - I think everyone learns from their mistakes.”

So is I Can Hear Your Heart your confession booth? “No, no. I think I’ve done that for 10 years. There’s nothing much left to confess.”