Falkirk’s finest team up – and Everything’s Getting Older

No one is likening Aidan Moffat and Bill Wells to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid just yet, but the relationship that the boy with the Arab Strap past has struck up with Bill Wells could nevertheless provide one of the year’s most interesting albums.

Everything’s Getting Older packs a great punch, with Moffat’s trademark wry lyrical spikiness married to Wells’ instrumental landscapes. Moffat is what Serge Gainsbourg might have sounded like if he was from Falkirk and smoked roll-ups instead of Gitanes. Only he could get away with these lines – in a song called Hopelessly Devoted, on his solo album I Can Hear Your Heart – from a conversation with a girl about Grease: “How did it work out for Sandy and Danny? Did she turn out to be a cow and did he turn out to be a fanny?” For all that 2007’s solo album I Can Hear Your Heart was a fascinating ramble through the thought-process of Moffat and the personae he seems to inhabit (Ronnie Wood’s description of Mick Jagger as “a nice bunch of guys” seems appropriate for Moffat), the results from his work with others have an enduring appeal. The First Big Weekend announced Arab Strap’s arrival on Chemikal Underground – and, for the next ten years, their acerbic, low-key, peculiarly Scottish records made Moffat and Malcolm Middleton Falkirk’s most exciting export since Irn Bru. After his solo record and some other excursions with his band The Best Ofs, Moffat now has another musical playmate, known for his work with the Bill Wells Trio and the Bill Wells Octet. You guessed it: Bill Wells. Moffat and Wells have gone under their own names, rather than The Bill Wells Duo, with their debut, Everything’s Getting Older. Wells has already made an album with Isobel Campbell (no stranger to collaborations from her three records with Screaming Trees’ Mark Lanegan, and who features on this single too), and his trio appeared on the Hallam Foe soundtrack with the lovely Also In White. Early results are promising, with the single (If You) Keep Me In Your Heart delivering its own eery charm, and The Copper Top seeing the singer at his most emotionally upfront. “Birth, love and death – the only reasons to get dressed up.” The filmic quality of songs such as Dinner Time suggest if the Chemical Brothers, Trent Reznor and Badly Drawn Boy have soundtracks in them, so do Moffat and Wells. Listen to their session for BBC Radio Scotland’s Vic Galloway here. Last week, Moffat tweeted away the cheerily entitled The funeral you’ve worked your whole life for. With the variety of musical ideas so far, and Moffat’s lyrical fearlessness, as well as some early glowing reviews, this pair are far from having the last rites read to them. This collaboration could be the first fruits of something very interesting.

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