It’s surprisingly cold and I’ve not taken enough layers of clothing to help stave off the biting wind as I cycle alongside the Cam towards the Haymakers pub in Cambridge. Not even the couple of pints I’ve had to help celebrate it being a Friday can help. Tonight is no ordinary night though. No, tonight we’re being treated to An Evening with Aidan Moffat. There’s no Parental Guidance warnings on the posters though, and you get a feeling that they’ll be needed if attendees are not overly familiar with Moffat from his days in Arab Strap, as well as his solo work. On this small trek around the country he’s taken a familiar friend along as a “Very Special Guest”: Mr. Malcolm Middleton, his ex-sparring partner from the Arab Strap days, and it’s Middleton that kicks off tonight’s stripped back, and rather intimate, entertainment.

Middleton was always the master craftsman in Arab Strap, carefully sculpting interesting and evocative soundscapes off which Moffat’s raw and bleak life views hung. Tonight Middleton is performing as Human Don’t Be Angry, and this guise seems to concentrate more on these soundscapes than the pop song variants he’s been releasing to critical success. The first piece morphed out of some simple guitar notes, carefully picked, looped and built upon until Middleton had created a wash of dulcet tones, subtly exploring different niches of sound. When joined with his vocals, the usual dark humour surfaced in his own laid-back style, lacing the sounds with tales of idiotic relationship arguments and the subtle highlights of our mundane existence. There’s an interesting juxtaposition of Middleton’s impressive guitar-wielding skills with his simplistic songwriting approach. As Middleton explores this more eclectic side of songwriting, weaving in the more banal aspects of life into his exploratory sound, it makes them stand out and, being recounted to us, it feels as though he’s tapping into our very souls and helping to explain our own human condition.

Which, of course, leads us nicely onto Aidan Moffat, a fine purveyor (or should that be pervert?) of tales of the darker, dirtier, side of life… The “Evening with” aspect sits perfectly on Moffat’s shoulders. It gives him time to tell tales, spin yarns and recount jokes. They’re liberally interspersed between songs. Tonight it’s just himself, a squeezebox or auto-harp, and the songs. In this environment the lyrics shine through stronger than at any other time I’ve seen him, or Arab Strap, live. Playing mainly new songs (he does apologise), he welcomes us to a “belated Valentine’s” and Comic Relief avoidance gig. We get told his mother doesn’t like him using the “C-word”, so he’s trying to cut it out, and the evening starts with a song about “sex with Germans”. The little waves of music that flow from the harp or box might be a secondary thought, but they are no less compelling. This isn’t a poetry evening after all, and the simple tunes and complex lyrical devices act as an almost perfect mirror to Middleton’s approach that we witnessed earlier. Those uncluttered notes and stripped back rhythms are the perfect, straightforward outline which can be filled in with his fulsome words.

Whilst maybe not, strictly speaking, “comic relief”, the background information about all the songs makes the crowd react not just with laughter, but with nods of agreement too. We might not all have had sex with Germans, but we’ve all had too much to drink, or taken something we shouldn’t have that’s led to ridiculous consequences whilst you stand there thinking you’re the fucking King of Comedy. It’s impossible to see a Moffat live show without getting dragged back into your past. It’s an odd experience, almost an out-of-body one, where you stand, watching this gruff Scottish raconteur, and relive your corresponding misadventures. It’s not quite a tick-list of special occasions perhaps, but it’s this link between Moffat and the audience that’s his stand out appeal. This must be what group therapy is like. And, for the price of a ticket and a couple of pints, this is probably a whole lot more enjoyable.