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Music

How Did a Beardy Scottish Folk Duo Write the Best Song About Going Out Ever?

20 years on, Arab Strap's "First Big Weekend" is still the ultimate record about clubbing.
"Went out for the weekend, it lasted for ever/High with our friends it's officially summer."

This article was originally published on THUMP UK.

One of the great joys of going out—and by going out I'm referring to leaving the house with hedonism in mind—is that more often than not, you find yourself coming back in without a story to tell. That might sound strange, but think about it: eventful nights are often stressful nights, and the stories we tell ourselves and tell others—the stories we tell others to tell them about ourselves, as it were—usually involve an element of shame, regret, remorse. We use those stories as a crutch, a form of conversational closure. Good nights out breeze by. You're just fucked enough, you don't spend too much money, the DJ plays the record you've been hammering all week, and you slide into bed at a reasonable time and wake up the next evening with only the mildest of hangovers. That kind of night is barely an anecdote, let alone a story.

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And that's why writing about the experience of going out, of going to a mate's house and then a pub and then a club and then back to another mate's house, is difficult. Life's experiences, despite being processed by them, don't neatly translate into sentences. Not fluid ones, at least. They're garbled and jumbled, a syntactical mess. That doesn't stop us trying, and failing, and trying again, to turn nightlife into a successful narrative. But it's probably why so few songs actually get to the sozzled beating heart of why nightlife actually matters.

If there's one record out there though that does get somewhere close to replicating that strange sense of chemical imbalance colliding with natural high of being with all your friends at once, of being both unreal and as real as it gets at the same time, it's "The First Big Weekend" by Arab Strap.

As Arab Strap, Aidan Moffat and Malcom Middleton spent a decade or so peddling the kind of folk-tinged indie miserablism that seemed to be Scotland's predominant cultural export at the time. These were songs about cigarettes and alcohol that didn't have the bombast of, well, "Cigarettes & Alcohol." and this was music for the kind of people who were more likely to be nipping out for Rizla at 4AM than watching a Riz La Teef set.

Lo-fi Scottish folk isn't normally the kind of thing we write about here on THUMP, but to date, as far we know, as far as we're aware, no one's come close to capturing the queasiness of a proper blow-out bender. The song—the group's 1996 debut single, taken from the aptly named The Week Never Starts Round Here LP—tells the story of a Thursday night that ends on a Monday afternoon. And then immediately starts again.

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Along the way, our narrator meets an ex's new squeeze, goes to The Arches, drinks "someone else's strawberry tonic wine," sleeps through the England vs Scotland match, visits an indie disco, breaks into a children's play area, watches The Simpsons ("a really good episode about love always ending in tragedy except, of course, for Marge and Homer.") goes to the pub and sees another ex, has a nightmare, eventually gets a bit of sleep, is introduced to a previously unfamiliar brand of super-strength cider, and then, finally (but not really finally), he finds himself gearing up for another night on the town.

20 years on from that summer, the band re-issued a slightly updated version of the track that became their calling card. Both the rejig and the original possess a a strange sense of power. They make you really, really, really want to have the weekend the narrator's embarked on for the rest of the summer. You can feel the strange shimmer of heat-haze combining with that perfect four pint buzz—the beer-garden-four-pint-buzz is arguably the greatest any human being can ever feel—and you're there. You're there abandoning any pretence of this being the summer that you're going to go vegetarian, take up yoga, read Descartes and finally start giving to charity, because as good and worthy as those things are, they're just not as good as living in a state of perpetual pissedness. Would you rather spend warm summer days indoors writing frightening blogposts about the future of the Labour party or be down the pub, six pints and two bags of peanuts in, ready to stumble into bed two days later?

The great works of art seamlessly blend specificity with universality, and "The First Big Weekend" is no different. What could have been a vague, meandering, aimless and unfocused wander through a weekend where fags replace oxygen and you start to sweat molasses thick drops of Guinness, is, instead, a rich, deeply detailed, charmingly personal account of a descent into bacchanalian madness. And that's thanks to the specificity of the reference points: the England score, the 24hr cafe, Morag's house, the Merrydown cider that's 8.2% and costs £1.79 a litre, the slide that doubles up as a "urinal for drunk teens." All these moments, the seemingly insignificant small details that are more often than not the crux of any good story, are what makes it the best song about going out ever written.

With just an acoustic guitar and a drum machine, Moffat and Middleton managed to translate the usually untranslatable, and in doing so, they created a record that'll always speak to the part of of us that wants nothing more than to abandon life itself—with its bills and ready meals—and slip into a summer that's never going to end.

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