Dear, oh dear, Arab Strap's world is a messy place indeed. One full of romantic rivalries as well as plentiful drink. And you can hear all about it on their new album, 'Philophobia'. Caught in a strap: John Robinson (words) Martyn Goodacre (photos)

Anyway, so Aidan was there on this couch in the club with her, and they were just kissing. Everything going very nicely, thank you, in this Falkirk nightclub: the music loud, and Aidan's there minding his business and getting, as Barry White would say, it on. Then she stands up in the middle of it, and just like that she says, "God, I hope my boyfriend's not here."

Boyfriend? Right, Boyfriend. She's got two as far as Aidan remembers: there's that guy Ian, and then there's The Policeman, and that's the sort of dispute you don't want to be entering into lightly. So he thinks for a bit and says wait here, and she'd been going to go to the bar anyway, so he decides to go and get the drinks.

He's at the bar, and he's lost sight of her, but he gets them in anyway. He pays, and he takes the drinks back to the sofa where something quite beautiful was about to happen, and she's not there, so he waits for a minute. Then he catches sight of her just as she's leaving. Not with Ian, or with The Policeman. She's leaving with Malcolm.

That was the night Aidan Moffat first encountered Malcolm Middleton, who are now in a band together called Arab Strap, a name taken from a device seen advertised in a pornographic magazine, used to sure up an unstable erection.

They write a lot of very sad songs about girls.

The first words that you hear Arab Strap say when you go to visit them in their London hotel are, "Don't tell me. There's no fuckin' Tia Maria."

This is Malcolm. He is 24, and is drinking reassuringly expensive Stella Artois lager with a chaser of Tia Maria, from which combination he liberally drinks while having his photograph taken and insulting the band's singer.

"Move yer fat arse," he says.

"My arse," says the singer, pained, "is no' fat."

"Aye, I'm sorry," relents Malcolm. "It's big-boned."

The singer is Aidan, and he's 25, but looks 32. This could be down to the beard, or equally down to the incipient brain tumor he is sure is daily growing in strength inside his skull, which he has got by exposing himself to the radioactive waves emitting from his mobile phone. He pulls prescription painkillers from insides his denim jacket, pops two in his mouth and washes them down with lager.

The phone rings. He answers it.

"Oh hi," he says. " Did you buy shoes?"

Malcolm grins, while Aidan converses with his girlfriend. "Just tape this," he says, "and you've got the third album."

For now, there's a new, second, Arab Strap album to be going on with. It's called 'Philophobia' - loosely, the fear of falling in love - and quiet and beautiful. It's the product of young lives spent drinking, avoiding gainful employment, forming relationships and taking drugs. It's preceded by a single called 'Here We Go', which is about having a row with your girlfriend. Simple as that.

Arab Strap tell you what happens to them, and they put it to music. When they go out in Falkirk and meet ex-girlfriends, you'll find there'll shortly be a song about going out in Falkirk and meeting ex-girlfriends. When they have jobs in pubs, you'll find there'll be a song about having jobs in pubs. Whey they overindulge and wake up one morning to find they've shat blood, there'll be a song about finding you've shat blood.

You meet their friends. You drink in their pubs. You hear about their weekends, like 'The First Big Weekend', and adulterated version of which you might have seen on the telly advertising Guinness. Their music isn't touched by anything like poetry, but is the blunt facts made exquisite. It's their news, it's just that it's chiefly the bad news.

The sound tells you a lot, too. In the same way that they were drunkards who discovered Ecstasy, so is their music a strange mix of saloon bar confessional and post-rave winddown: some tunes, some desultory plonks, and some strangely articulate mumbling.

Their lives are their art. It's just that sometimes the two get too close for comfort.

Aidan beeps his phone call to a close and holsters his mobile.

"Well," he says. "She's in a mood."

And his pint, like the last, slowly sinks.

To tell the story of Arab Strap, and of Malcolm and Aidan, is also to tell the story of Gina.

"She was lovely," says Malcolm.

"She still is lovely," says Aidan.

It was like this. Two-and-a-bit year ago, Aidan and Malcolm, apart from their cursory meeting with the girl on the sofa, were basically strangers. At the end of the night you would find them in the same houses, on the same floors, on the same drugs, looking for more of the same drugs, but they were in different bands: Aidan working with a Dictaphone and other musicians, Malcolm avoiding boredom as best he could. Malcolm had been seeing Gina for two years.

"You know how when you're splitting up with someone it takes ages to actually end it?" he says.

"Well, Aidan walked in and ended it for me. And then he had the cheek to ask me to fucking play for him, which is why I've had a chip on my shoulder ever since."

How long ago was this?

"Two years."

"Ah, it's longer than that."

"It's two years, Aidan," says Malcolm.

"We ended up both shagging her at the same time," he continues, turning to Aidan, "but you were so thick you didn't realize what you were doing to me. You started phonin' me up all upset about your relationship, and it was like: 'You're askin' the wrong person.' And you took offense at that, like I wasn't you friend. But you'd just fucked me over with this girl."

"Ah, if I'd known it upset you that much..." says Aidan, "...but you never said..."

"I did," says Malcolm.

There is silence.

Gina is the subject, pretty much, of the first Arab Strap album. Aidan ended up chucking her, and then wishing he hadn't, because it meant that he now had to go out and spend his weekends looking for someone else.

Groundwork, however, had been accomplished. While she may have provided the most difficult circumstances ever for the inception of a band, Gina was a hugely important milestone on Arab Strap's road to ultimate candor. 'Philophobia' parades a procession of girls that have walked into the life of Aidan Moffat, and then just as rapidly walked out again into the arms of dickheads, and it is they who have given the record its bleak but beautiful hue.

"I don't like writing happy songs," he says.

"Because I just feel like a complete prick. I only really feel inspired to write when I'm really upset and really annoyed. And I do like happy music. I'm perfectly happy just now. It's just I feel like a fanny writing about being happy."

Luckily, there have been girls. And over the next half hour, what develops is a slightly confusing and non-temporal sweep over the landmarks on Aidan's emotional landscape, where the songs take their shape.

There's one called 'One Day After School'. It goes: "...and you wank me off."

"Susan," says Aidan. "Wee Susan. Last time I met her she ended coming back to my house and sleeping in my bed. And she was like: 'Aidan, nothing's happening. We're just pals.' It was later I found out that she'd been telling people that when I was 18 I beat her up quite regularly. She told me that she had been very mistreated by her boyfriend before me, and then she went out with him after me. She just lies."

Malcolm sighs. "The first time's always the worst."

"I dunno," says, Aidan. "I've had stuff hurt me more than that. Lynn was terrible. That was the worst time."

Lynn features in a song called 'Piglet', which features the lines: "And you said he stayed on the sofa in the kitchen/He's like one of the girls, good fun for bitching."

"When in fact, he was shaggin her senseless," says Aidan, and sighs. "Ahhhh dear. She's away somewhere, doin' archaeology."

"In Australia," says Malcolm. He grins. "You always said she was good down under."

"Actually," says Aidan, "one of the lines I'm most proud of on the album is, 'the words you used to use to turn me on made me laugh' and that was perfectly true. You could not believe the suppressed laughter when she was tryin' to talk dirty Just hilarious: 'SUCK MAH C-!; "Come here I want to SUCK YOUR COCK!"

Gina appears again, and so does Laura, Aidan's current girlfriend, who's the subject of 'Here We Go', which felt a bit weird, writing about someone with whom you are happy.

"And there's Nicola..." says Malcolm.

"Well if she finds out about that one, I'm fuckin' dead," says Aidan, ruefully.

"Basically, there's four birds on the album, and four chords," says Malcolm.

And some blokes who fucked them over. Aidan begins to outline the faults of one of them, in a way that is perhaps insensitive to the company he's in.

"Prick," he says. "Shagging my girlfriend."

Malcolm stops and snarls.

"Yeah. Imagine shaggin' someone's girlfriend, eh?"

He drink a draught.

"Still, I'm not bitter."

Four pints and chasers later, a strange picture begins to emerge. An hour-and-a-half has passed.

While Aidan visits the toilet, Malcolm leans forward and wonders why the questions have been so concentrated on the lyrics. He hopes people aren't buying the records just for that, because Arab Strap are after all, a band. Then you realize that everything here isn't quite what you expected, that though you might expect Aidan, the one that writes these songs, to be morose and vaguely depressed, he's in fact the one who's self-possessed, who's in control of the situation. Really, he's the happy one.

And Malcolm?

Aidan returns. The question turns to whether Arab Strap drink to forget.

"You can't just have a sociable drink," says Malcolm. "You can't. You can't have a sociable drink without throwing up in the toilet the next morning. When was the last time you said, 'This is my sociable limit'?"

"But I don't think we drink or take whatever to forget anything," says Aidan. "It's because we enjoy it."

Malcolm : "I'm not saying there's anything deep about it. It's just - what else is there to do?"

Aidan: "What else would you be doin'?"

"Nothin'," says Malcolm. "But if you were that fucking happy, you wouldn't need it."

"That's a complete fuckin' myth. I don't take it to get happy, I take it because I am happy."

"Personally," says Malcolm, "if I was happy I wouldn't need it."

"I think that's bullshit."

"I'm lying?"

"All I'm sayin' is the reasons you do it are very far removed from the reasons I do it."

"I've known that for ages. We're not the same person."

"Your reasons seem to have a lot stronger root, personality-wise, than mine," says Aidan. "It passes the time. It's like having a wank. If I'm bored I'll go have a wank. I just thought you drank because you liked having a good time."

"I do like having a good time."

"Do you think you can achieve happiness in some other way?"

"Aye, I do."

"Why haven't you done it yet, then?"
Malcolm stops and hisses. "Don't start interviewing me like that."
Aidan sits back in his chair. Malcolm starts to say something.

"My sister goes hill-walking," he says. "I'd rather do that."

Malcolm stand up and look suddenly very young, very disappointed, and slightly pissed.

"I'm going for a lie down," he says.

And there we leave it.

Aidan is reading the paper.