Arab Strap´s New Album As Days Get Dark includes the single "Fable of the Urban Fox"

If you´ve ever struggled to elegantly express the grim inevitability, unjustness and social violence of the refugee crisis and the poisonous coverage it receives in certain press and social media then don´t worry - Arab Strap have done it with their single "Fable of the Urban Fox".

Asked about the single by Ryan Leas of Stereogum, Arab Strap´s singer Aidan Moffat replied:

"Well, it started with actual foxes. There’s a wee family of foxes around my flat, and I love seeing them — I think foxes are gorgeous. I decided to learn more about them, because I didn’t know much about them besides that they looked cool. I was reading a book — I think it was called Foxes Unearthed — about the relationship with foxes in Britain. There’s a couple chapters about how when foxes started to come into the cities from the country because they were being hunted, they were immediately demonized and looked at as pests. They were just trying to survive.

It’s a very obvious metaphor. What really hit me was the way the newspapers controlled the story. The right-wing tabloid press wrote about foxes exactly the same way they write about migrants, the way they demonized them and the way they completely controlled public feeling about them. [The song is] about migrants, but it’s also about the press and who owns it and where these ideas come from."

He continued

"You could call it a political song, but it’s one about human decency, I think. I don’t think I would’ve written about it before. It’s impossible to not be somehow political. The way things have developed in the last 15 years — which, again, has been because of technology and social media and the way we communicate and how news is delivered to us — it’s impossible to avoid it.

It’s probably the first openly, if faintly, political song we’ve done. You’re supposed to chill out as you get older. I seem to be angrier every day. The constant lying, inadequacy, and idiocy, and racism… over here the conservatives being in charge of Britain has been a disaster, and they’ve been in charge for a long time. It’s been 10 years of this. Every day, their decisions appall me."

Read the full interview giving the story behind every song on the album here

www.arabstrap.scot

Foxes Unearthed by Lucy Jones