Where You're Meant To Be @ Glasgow Barrowland, 19 Feb

“That's what I like about it: there's no resolution. No-one's learned anything.” So says Aidan Moffat toward the end of a brief but spirited live set, performed to mark the unveiling of his and director Paul Fegan’s "funny wee film about music and death." The sell-out event has already seen the man reopen wounds left by the Scottish independence referendum and use the neck of a plush Loch Ness monster doll to simulate masturbation. Now we find him poised to tackle one of traditional folk icon Sheila Stewart's signature songs. As Where You’re Meant to Be makes abundantly clear, this isn’t a gesture the late veteran would have appreciated.

Moffat obviously feels an affinity with folk music, the dour, sexually frank narratives common among the genre corresponding with his preoccupations as frontman of Arab Strap and beyond. His decision to rewrite public domain material, transplanting it to the seedy urban milieu in which he’s most comfortable, was logical but not something his forbearer could support.

The documentary shows a meeting between the artists, recorded during the early stages of the project. While Sheila navigates the winding roads of rural Scotland, the indie raconteur sits in the passenger seat beside her, cautiously presenting the septuagenarian with the fruits of his labour. Tightening her grip on the steering wheel, she wastes no time in heaping scorn upon them. To her, the songs are sacred, too far removed from Moffat’s coddled city life for him to comprehend their power and symbolism, much less do them justice.

Born in a barn to a travelling family, those songs represent a link to Stewart's ancestry, a rootless, misunderstood people, the survival of whose culture and history has largely been reliant on oral tradition. The last in her dynasty, Stewart's has grown protective of her repertoire and snaps at our hero with amusing ferocity. When she shares the stage with Moffat at the film's cathartic climax, she impresses an unlikely audience with her passion, sincerity and resilience.

As Sheila is shown to revel in the rowdy display of appreciation from a crowd of Glaswegian drunks, we're reminded that folk music, for all its sociological and academic significance, was never intended to be precious or stuffy. The exploration of a generation gap that the film seems to promise manifests itself only in a few brilliantly barbed insults, the star's encounters with Stewart comprising only a small part of what is essentially an offbeat Scottish travelogue. The country is mined for all its charm, tragedy and eccentricity; the film's details, some curious, some profound, serving as context for Moffat's music.

---

 Aidan Moffat on Where You're Meant to Be

---

When he takes to the stage tonight, it’s hot on the heels of Danny Coupar and Geordie Murison, wrinkled folkies introduced to us by the movie. Their lyrics’ socialist sentiments and full-throated call and response roused the crowd into singing along, but Moffat doesn't aim for quite the same effect. Instead, he creates a no less communal mood through the ribald economy of his writing. Some of his more light-hearted numbers resemble limericks in their bawdiness and insistent rhyme schemes, but these tales of late night wonder and despair are unmistakably authentic. Most build to bittersweet comic punchlines, but there are moments of straight faced clarity that leave the Barrowlands awestruck, most notably a ballad about child abduction.

Stewart’s material may not be safe in Moffat’s hands, but surely even she would applaud the man's confrontational, unsanitised vision as he belches into the microphone during The Parting Glass.