Songfacts®:

• This is the title track from the third album by Scottish indie-pop band Belle and Sebastian. The inspiration for the title came from the band Arab Strap, who are also from Scotland and briefly toured with Belle and Sebastian. Lead singer and songwriter Stuart Murdoch admitted to Q magazine in April 2011: "It's about Aidan Moffat from Arab Strap. I never really thought about it at the time, but I think he deserves to be a bit peeved that we hijacked the name of their band. But it was an honest thing - I was describing my experiences hanging around with him and the words tumbled out very easily. I remember playing it to Isobel (Campbell, ex Belle & Sebastian) on the piano when I first wrote it and she thought it was ridiculous. She said it sounded like Chas & Dave."
  
  What Murdoch didn't mention is that the band Arab Strap got their name from a sex toy. Moffat got one from a catalog which came free when he ordered a dildo for his girlfriend. They named their band after the device, and Moffat would carry it around with his drum machine for good luck.
• A lyric from the song, "Color my life with the chaos of trouble," is quoted by the lead character in the 2009 movie (500) Days of Summer.
• "The Boy With The Arab Strap" wasn't released as a single but became one of Belle & Sebastian's most popular songs. They play it live at every show, and when they can, they pull audience members up on stage and have them dance along. It's done rather sensibly: Before every show they meet with venue security to make sure it's OK and find out how many people they can bring on stage safely. Belle & Sebastian fans are pretty well behaved so there aren't many incidents.
  
  Stuart Murdoch says the track is like "an old British pub song," which creates the jovial atmosphere where everyone wants to join in.
• Stuart Murdoch added an extra verse that fleshes out the lyric when he performed this song at the Royal Oak Theatre in Michigan in 2019:
  
  She was too good for me
  She worked as a waitress but she had a rich daddy
  She was slumming it
  I wrote her a note, I said:
  "Dear Catastrophe Waitress..."
  She never wrote me back
  She got fired that week
  But that's the way things go
  It's bittersweet
  We got this song at least
  And it's called
  The Boy With The Arab Strap
  
  Dear Catastrophe Waitress is the name of Belle & Sebastian's 2003 album.
  
  This version, which extends to 7:38, is on their 2020 live album What To Look For In Summer.
• Murdoch isn't exactly sure what an Arab strap is. "I know it's something vaguely sexual, but the reference was to Arab Strap, the band," he told The Guardian. "I gave the gold disc for it to my mum, who put it up in her living room. When the minister came round for tea, he was looking at the gold record and reading the label, so there was an awkward moment. After that, she gave it back to me."
• Anything's better than posh isolation
  1 missed the bus
  You were laid on your back
  With the boy from the Arab Strap
  
  Stuart Murdoch was struggling with chronic fatigue syndrome (ME) when he wrote this song. "That meant I had to develop my own way of coping," he told Uncut magazine. "They'd be a certain point when everybody else was carrying on with the party and I would disappear and do my own thing, which usually meant sitting quietly somewhere. As I reference in the song, I would later hear about what happened with the guys from Arab Strap, all the drinking and partying, and have this feeding of missing out. I felt like the jester who came along afterwards and wrote about the things that I'd missed."