Here Comes Comus!
seedy, hypnotic, half-admiring and half-repulsed
Arab Strap personify a nightlife archetype — part drug dealer, part seducer, part self-mythologising rake — by naming him after Comus, the mythological spirit of revelry and misrule. The song tracks him moving through a club or party, enticing strangers into drugs and sex with a line of practiced charm, while the narrator watches with a mix of disgust, envy and complicity.
seduction and manipulation drugs and nightlife excess loss of control/will moral hypocrisy the glamour of danger
Who's speaking
A third-person narrator observes the title character working a crowd, occasionally shifting into a direct, accusatory second person aimed at the people he seduces — at times implicating the listener as one of his marks. The narrator's own position is ambiguous: too detailed and fascinated to be purely a bystander.
What happens
The song opens with Comus entering a party scene, established through his look and manner. Each verse escalates the transaction he offers — flattery, drugs, sex — and each chorus restates the listener's inability to resist, as if hypnotised. By the later verses he's moved on to a new target (the sister), and the final verses show the toll: he vanishes, leaves people scarred, and the chorus recurs almost verbatim, suggesting the cycle repeats endlessly rather than resolving.
How it's built
Built on a loose verse-chorus pattern with a recurring hook that functions like an incantation rather than a pop chorus — its repetition mimics the trance-like compulsion it describes. The structure doesn't develop a plot so much as circle the same seduction from slightly different angles, verse by verse, before a bridge-like 'all hail' passage elevates him into a mock-deity, raising the stakes before the final verse brings the comedown.
Section by section
Opening verse
Comus is introduced purely through surface details — his clothes, his eyewear, his performative flirtatiousness — establishing him as all image and charisma, with nothing underneath confirmed yet.v
Second verse
“you follow like the hound you are”
The dealer/seducer dynamic becomes explicit through drug imagery, and the comparison to an obedient animal signals the narrator's contempt for the willing complicity of his targets, not just the predator himself.
First chorus
The hook turns persuasion into ritual, with short imperative phrases that mimic the rhythm of being talked into something, while acknowledging the listener's own desire plays a part in the surrender.
Third verse
The seduction escalates into something more explicit and transactional, staged in a degrading setting that undercuts any romance in the earlier flirtation — pleasure and humiliation sit uncomfortably close together.
'All hail' passage
“all hail the false enchanter”
The mock-coronation elevates Comus into a false god of the scene, a title that's both admiring and sarcastic — it names the collective complicity of everyone who keeps worshipping him despite knowing what he is.
Final verse
The focus shifts to consequence: the serial, noncommittal nature of his pursuits and the suggestion that his own performance of pleasure masks real unhappiness, hinted at through an image of disguised tears.
Closing chorus
The returning refrain, now following visible damage, reframes the earlier hypnotic chant as something closer to an addiction cycle — the same temptation offered again as if nothing had been learned.
Craft
- mythological allusion
- Naming the character after Comus — the classical god of revelry and, via Milton's masque, a figure who tempts travellers into a den of beastly transformation — frames a contemporary party predator as an archetype as old as myth, giving sleazy nightlife behaviour a timeless, ritualistic weight.
- second-person address
- Shifting into 'you' implicates the listener directly in the seduction, collapsing the distance between observer and victim and making the song's warnings feel personally aimed.
- refrain as incantation
- The repeated chorus about taking a sip or a hit functions less as a narrative chorus and more as a chant that enacts the hypnotic pull it describes, blurring persuasion and description.
- irony/paradox
- The closing lines about sin only existing in daylight invert ordinary morality, suggesting the night suspends conventional guilt — a logic the predator exploits and the victims willingly accept.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats Comus as a composite figure for the seductive, self-mythologising manipulators found in club and party culture — charismatic men who weaponise intimacy, substances and performance to extract pleasure from others while remaining emotionally unavailable themselves. A secondary reading hears the song as partly self-implicating, with the narrator's fascinated, detailed voice suggesting he recognizes something of himself or his own circle in Comus rather than speaking from safe moral distance — Arab Strap's lyrics elsewhere often blur judgment and complicity in exactly this way.
Context
Arab Strap, led by Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton, built their reputation on blunt, often sordid depictions of Scottish nightlife, drink, drugs and sex, usually narrated with a mix of disgust and dark humour rather than romanticism. This track fits that lineage, using a classical/mythological reference (Comus, god of revelry, later central to Milton's masque about chastity under temptation) to give a familiar nightlife predator archetype literary heft. I don't have specific information about when or why this particular song was written, so biographical context beyond the band's general style should be treated as uncertain.
Listen for
- the shift from third-person description to direct second-person accusation
- the repeated chorus functioning almost like a chant or spell rather than a conventional hook
- the mock-religious language ('hail', 'enchanter') elevating the character ironically
- the contrast between the glamorous surface details and the degrading specifics underneath
- the final verse's hint that the seducer's own confidence may be a performance masking something darker
About Arab Strap
Arab Strap are a Scottish indie rock band whose core members are Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton. The band were signed to independent record label Chemikal Underground, split in 2006 and reformed in 2016.
1995 - present / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue