IT has been written that Mogwai make music to tear down the stars, rip holes in the sky, shred audiences like scarecrows in the teeth of a gale. And so on. But the band do not hyperbolise themselves, unless they are being satirical. This afternoon in a Japanese hotel bar, bass player Dominic Aitchison looks out of the window towards mighty Mount Fuji, and promises to make that volcano explode tonight. “For our epic finale … ” he begins, a few hours before Mogwai’s headline performance at the Metamorphose Festival in Shizuoka. “We’ll be jumping out of the crater,” continues multi-instrumentalist Barry Burns. “Screaming ‘Young Team’!” adds drummer Martin Bulloch, who keeps his face straight while the others are cracking up.
Fifteen years have passed since the band formed in Glasgow, tagging themselves and their first album Mogwai Young Team, in the tradition of local street gangs. They have since been asked in many other countries how Scotland affects their music. Stuart Braithwaite invariably answers: “We’ve never come from anywhere else, so how would we know?” Frequently taken for a frontman or spokesman, Braithwaite is not the boss. “This is a total democracy,” he says. “We are five people, and if three of us want to do something, the other two just have to suck it up.” He shares all the songwriting duties with Burns, Aitchison, and fellow guitarist John Cummings. Except they don’t often sing, and they aren’t really songs. Mogwai have never had much use for lyrics or vocals, which allows them to bypass any language barriers, if not demolish them completely.
“It definitely helps,” says Braithwaite. “They’re friends of mine and one of my favourite bands of all time, but I don’t think that Arab Strap could ever have had the same effect outside Scotland. There are cultural references in those songs that people listening in Japan, or Brazil, might not appreciate in quite the same way. Whereas the nuances in our songs have no language whatsoever.” Unless you consider their titles. Earlier today, before the gates opened, I heard Mogwai sound-check two new tracks from their forthcoming seventh album on the nearby site of the festival – an open-air velodrome built into a high mountain pass on the Izu peninsula, southwest of Tokyo. The first song was fast and comparatively light, and apparently they’re calling it How To Be A Werewolf. The other was slow and heavy, an elemental riff that started on Braithwaite’s guitar and added instruments with each repetition, gathering invisible mass above the Japanese landscape. This piece was formerly known as Sludger, but they just changed it to Rano Pano, so recently that the original title has been crossed out and substituted on tonight’s set-list. The new name is a coded reference to a football score that only like-minded Celtic supporters might care to figure out – Martin Bulloch drapes a team scarf over his drumkit – and has no bearing on the music itself.
“It’s just music,” says Bulloch. “Get your head around it.” His point being that it has no specific meaning, which is more or less what Mogwai tell everyone who wants to know their secrets. “Some people seem to really need the story behind a song,” says Aitchison. “They can get quite angry when you say that there isn’t one, and it’s not about anything. They think you’re lying.” Wandering around the site as the various ramen noodle bars and yakitori stalls are setting up, considering potential food options for later this evening, the band are also trying to think up possible names for the new album. John Cummings has suggested Scottish Tea, and the others are debating whether this is would be the worst title of all time. Aitchison remembers the forgotten Glasgow indie band Boyfriend, who once put out an album called Hairy Banjo. “Unacceptable,” he recalls. “Although I’m only saying that because I’m raging that they beat us to it.” Burns is distracted by a display of new Roland keyboards and equipment. “Can I get one please?” he asks the Japanese attendants. Bulloch checks the sound effects on one of the shiniest units. “See if it’s not got a dog and a tiger on it … ”
Shortly after they return to Scotland, they will get a better idea for a new album name from an anecdote told by a member of Errors, the younger Glasgow band signed to Mogwai’s own fledgling record label, Rock Action. One evening in his local off-licence, he heard the shopkeeper refusing to serve a clearly underage miscreant, who responded with the following immortal words: “Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will.” Whether meant as a threat or a philosophical statement, the speaker was presumably referring to “happy hardcore”, the superfast electronic dance music favoured by a certain class of urban youth. But when the new album is released under that title on February 14, it will probably take on other meanings. Some might interpret the name as a roundabout acknowledgment of the US hardcore punk scene that evolved to produce such studious and deliberate noise-makers as Fugazi and Slint, who in turn formed some of Mogwai’s earliest influences. Others might read in it an oblique note of triumph.
At this point, Mogwai have outlasted almost every band they ever loved or hated. “We never thought we’d outlast anyone,” says John Cummings, back at the band’s hotel, where Martin Bulloch is now literally lounging in a traditional Japanese robe known as a yukata, which is issued as standard to guests. (“I’m not trying to be funny,” he tells the others. “I just like it, it’s comfy.”) But Stuart Braithwaite has been thinking about “longevity”, as opposed to the “flippancy” of most popular music, since he founded the band with Bulloch and Aitchison in 1995. (Cummings was invited to join almost immediately, and Burns was drafted in for second album Come On Die Young in 1999). Braithwaite used both of those words in one of his first interviews, at the age of 20 and the height of Britpop mania. “There is so much shite out there … ” he told the NME, and applied that term to many contemporaries over the next few years, Blur being the most highly-publicised example. “We were really gobby when we were young,” he says now, knowing that he was probably the gobbiest. “Some bands we slagged off in the press had actually disappeared by the time the article came out. So we stopped doing that. You’re wasting your breath, when you could be talking about bands that you like.”
The Stooges, Joy Division, The Cure, My Bloody Valentine, even their friends from Falkirk, Arab Strap – few of their favourites have made more than two or three great albums without fading, dying, breaking up, or substituting original members. Some have since got back together, “but I always think that something’s been lost”. “I just want us to be constant,” says Braithwaite. “Being constant kind of forces you to keep trying, and better what you did before.” They must be aware that many fans have come to rank Mogwai among or above their own musical heroes. “Aye, because people have told us,” says Barry Burns, “and we can’t not believe them.” “I do get a slight Scottish reflex when I hear that,” says Aitchison. “I want to tell them to shut up, or maybe to expand their record collections.” Those fans might well retort that recordings do not always give the fullest account of a band, and in Mogwai’s case perhaps only half of it. Burns would be the first to agree. “I’ve said it a million times: we sound better live.” Aitchison views this as a technical issue. “Our dynamics don’t always translate that well to albums, so we’ve learned to treat gigs and records as quite separate things.” “Make a mistake on record and you can fix it,” says John Cummings, who did the most painstaking studio work to bring out Mogwai’s sound on last year’s masterful live album, Special Moves. “Make one on stage and you’ve got four guys laughing at you.” Braithwaite hesitates.
“It’s hard to put in words without sounding conceited. I would say that we make good records, but we play very good concerts.” Their original ambition was to be “the loudest band on the planet”, and many guests of past gigs would attest to their success. Mogwai veterans tell war stories of reeling from the Barrowlands Ballroom in ‘99, the Rothsay Pavillion in 2001, or the Royal Albert Hall in 2006, ears and hearts ravaged by Mogwai’s capacity to deliver melodic pathos at tremendous volume. The band remembers some of those concerts very differently – for the pint thrown at their guest cello player in the Barras on a Saturday night, or the sheer expense involved in bussing and ferrying fans to the Isle of Bute. “A great day out, but the gig was crap,” says Aitchison. “We’ve listened to the tape. We were terrible.” Their own proudest moments range from their first performance at Glastonbury to their first time playing live in Santiago, Chile. Different nationalities make for different crowds. The Chileans, for example, starved of high-grade rock, “went insane”, according to Braithwaite. The Japanese, by contrast, tend to stay quiet. Almost too quiet. “They were eerily silent when we first played here,” says Barry Burns, who was new to the band at the time. “It was a bit off-putting. We thought they hated us. Eventually, we realised they were actually just paying attention. After that, we loved it.” The Japanese way is perhaps the best way to appreciate Mogwai’s music, which is notated, arranged and performed with classical attention to detail. They don’t play quite so loud anymore, in part because, as Braithwaite puts it “we don’t want to hurt anyone”. “Above a certain volume people can’t hear what’s going on anyway.” In Europe, however, new legislation has begun reduce that volume even further.
“We’ve played some disgustingly quiet gigs there recently,” says Braithwaite. “France and Switzerland are the worst. In some venues the limit is set at 95 decibels. The drumkit alone is 95 DB. It’s such an unfair thing, because if you go to hear an orchestra, they’re f***ing deafening, much louder than most rock concerts. “It’s a kind of cultural snobbery, when governments are handing out millions in subsidies so that people who already have loads of money can get cheaper tickets to go and listen to music that was written by someone who died 300 years ago.” As he puts it so passionately, I am tempted to tell him that Mogwai are my favourite living composers. They are roughly the same age as me, and their career so far coincides with my decade and a half as a resident of Scotland. Their music has scored my time in that place to the point that it somehow sounds like Glasgow, as if the city were transmitted through a graphic equaliser. Braithwaite hears it slightly differently.
“To me we sound more like Lanarkshire,” he says, having lived there all his life. “It’s got a lot of problems, but there’s something romantic about it.” Before they go on stage tonight, I ask the band at random what other images or memories their own songs invoke in them, but they’re inclined to confine their answers to quite literal-minded reflections on the titles. Stop Coming To My House, for example, reminds Barry Burns of “someone I didn’t want coming to my house any more”. Mogwai Fear Satan? “When I was young I had a lot of scary dreams about the devil,” says Dominic Aitchison. New Paths To Helicon, Part One? “That’s really old,” says Braithwaite. “I took it from the title of a book of Greek poetry in my parents’ house.”
Aye, I tell him. But how do you feel about the song itself? “Well, I think that one in particular is the first we did that sounded really good, and felt quite moving to play. It had a nostalgic feel, even back then. And now we’ve been playing it for so long that the nostalgia is bona fide, if you like.” They play it again tonight, in front of thousands of Japanese fans, who remain so quiet in the first, soft part of Helicon One that I can hear the cicadas in the trees. I am watching from the side of the stage when the loud part switches on like a supercollider, and I see the first five rows of jet black hair blown back by the shockwave.
Stuart Braithwaite, standing just in front of me, appears to be oscillating. “It feels like something we’re involved in, rather than controlling,” he told me earlier. Mogwai and their Far Eastern audience seem to be in agreement: this music means something. It’s not a question of what, but of how much. I keep my eyes closed for a lot of the show, to concentrate on whatever private happiness or sadness occurs in the midst of a shared experience. If Mount Fuji erupted, I might have missed it. But I open them during I Know You Are, But What Am I?, an intricate electronic piece with a juvenile title and no need of a bass player. Aitchison is standing in the wings, exchanging funny faces and hand gestures with his bandmates as they keep playing. And this is what happens when you catch five Scotsmen in the act of making something beautiful. They treat it as a joke.
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