Love-sick Moffat is at it again

The Sick Anchors are a new band featuring Moffat, Stuart Braithwaite of Mogwai and a keyboard player known as Sheepy. They have recorded an EP of covers. One is Whole Again by Atomic Kitten, another Bill Is Dead by the Fall. It is, Moffat claims, a romantic EP - if he’d managed to get out of bed in time, it would have been released for Valentine’s Day. As it is, it will be coming out on new Glasgow label Lost Dog Records in April. "There is a love theme, but only insofar as Whole Again reminds me of being on tour having just split up with my girlfriend," Moffat says. "And me and Stuart used to listen to Bill Is Dead a lot when we’d fallen out with girls."

What does it sound like?

"The usual: me being miserable singing songs about girls. But Stuart will be stepping up to the mic for the next one."

Moffat likes his dirty joke band names. He released a 12-inch as Lucky Pierre, this being the name of the middle chap in three-way gay sex (but you knew that). But he denies that the Sick Anchors’ name is a reference to the Boys’ Brigade - although surely a dipsomaniacal take on Will Your Anchor Hold? is a song waiting to be written by a poet as jaundiced and sleazy as Moffat. Will You Hold My Anchor? anyone? Indeed, says Moffat, the band’s name comes from a phrase of Braithwaite’s that does, in fact, reference his penis. "Something about dropping his sick anchor in any available bay."

For a perhaps less embittered - and let’s face it, less icky and more tuneful - take on love, Moffat has also compiled a Valentine’s "Seduction DJ Set". Available for free download on Mogwai’s website (www.rockactionrecords.co.uk) yesterday and today as part of their series of radio sessions, the set kicks off with Gladys Knight’s Every Beat Of My Heart, and closes with the Ronettes’s When I Saw You.

"I’d been meaning to do something for the site for ages, and I was gonna do a guide to the most miserable and depressing songs I could find. But then I was watching a lot of soul programmes on the telly, so it became more a compilation of my favourite soul songs.

"The only Caucasian lady on it is Dusty Springfield, but it’s something off Dusty In Memphis so that doesn’t count. Then I realised it was Valentine’s Day coming up. And seeing as how I’ve not got my own Valentine, this’ll do."

Is it fair to say that Moffat’s generally unhappy in love?

"I always expect unhappiness. The Miracles’s Oh Baby Baby is beautiful but at the end of day it’s about messing up. I realised after I’d done the set that it wasn’t so much sexual as dour. There is," he says brightly, "no getting away from it!"

Aidan "Dr Love" Moffat awaits you online; he’ll show you the truth about love.