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Artist News
Arab Strap cover Slow Club
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 4 August 2011
Arab Strap’s Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton have reunited to record a cover of Slow Club’s ‘Two Cousins’. Although Moffat is keen to stress that this is not a proper reunion, just two guys who happened to be in a band together recording a song that sounds like that band.
Explaining that he’d been asked by Slow Club’s Rebecca Taylor to remix or cover their latest single, Moffat said: “I decided against a remix; I couldn’t see how I could make it work. So my only option was a cover, but there’s no way my voice could sing this song without sapping the fun from it. And then I remembered an old Arab Strap joke we used to make, about how we’d take someone else’s song and just add a drum machine, slow it down and make it miserable, and hey presto, it’s an Arab Strap cover”.
He continued: “So, I decided it could be fun to make it sound like a recording my old band made years ago, but I couldn’t possibly do that without Malcolm Middleton, and we’ve been professionally separated for five years now. But I asked him if he fancied it, and he did, and that’s all there was to it. It’s not an Arab Strap performance as such, rather it’s the two guys who used to be Arab Strap recording their own, informed pastiche; think of it as an extremely accurate tribute band. Like the song itself, it was good fun, but it’s not as good as the original”.
Listen to the results, here:
Aidan Moffat & Malcolm Middleton – Two Cousins 1999 by theQuietus
