The Boy with the Arab Strap

Murdoch said the recording felt very different from the first two albums. The band spent several months on it, where the earlier records had taken a matter of days, and the music was more experimental and more collaborative. Stevie Jackson sings lead on Seymour Stein and Chickfactor, Isobel Campbell sings lead on Is It Wicked Not to Care? and shares Sleep the Clock Around with Murdoch, and Stuart David speaks A Space Boy Dream. Ian MacKay played bagpipes on Sleep the Clock Around, and a string section joined for A Space Boy Dream and Dirty Dream Number Two.

The title came from the Scottish band Arab Strap, who had briefly toured with the group. Murdoch took the cover photograph, which shows Chris Geddes beside the River Ayr near Auchencruive. The album reached 12 in the UK, 7 in Norway, 30 in Sweden and 39 in France, and had sold 200,000 units by 2006.

Reception

Uncut's Robert McTaggart said it marked the band's arrival as a fully-fleshed group. Pitchfork panned the album in 1998, saying the band sounded as though they had decided to parody themselves, and reappraised it in 2018. In that review Scott Plagenhoef wrote that the band truly became a full band here, with four songwriters and voices, and that Murdoch's characters had finally grown up. He pointed to the Fender Rhodes and Northern soul taste that Chris Geddes brought to the arrangements. NME placed the title track at number 130 on its 2011 list of the 150 best tracks of the previous fifteen years. The 2000 film High Fidelity mentions the band and uses a clip of Seymour Stein.