Photo by Shannon McClean
Later this month Mogwai will celebrate their 20th anniversary with shows at Glasgow’s Barrowland Ballroom and London’s Roundhouse. That the Scottish quintet has held on for this long is laudable: Post-rock, and instrumental music in general, hasn’t been particularly cool for over a decade now; the indie mainstream’s embrace of pop has left the dour guitar heroics of bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Explosions in the Sky seeming a bit stuffy and overwrought. In 2015, post-rock sounds decidedly pre-Internet—its primary aesthetic focus (build tension, release tension, repeat) out of step with the genre-blind, nostalgia-obsessed, and altogether sunnier musical cultures that have thrived on the Web.
Of course, in post-rock’s late-'90s heyday the Glasgow band were a huge deal, particularly in the UK. And the fact that they survived the vast hype that emerged in the wake of Young Team, their 1997 debut, is the other reason that their two decades together is such a feat. A record like Young Team—one that simultaneously defined a genre while running up against its limits—would have felled a lesser band, particularly one as young and naïve as Mogwai were. After all, where do you go from there?
But not only have the boys survived, they’ve gotten even more prolific in their middle age. While many of the band’s most well known peers have faded from view (Mono, Tortoise) or taken significant breaks (Godspeed), Mogwai have continued to release records, along with film and TV soundtracks, at a consistent clip to a dependably attentive audience—and all this despite post-rock’s marginalization. In many ways, Mogwai are the genre’s most visible representatives (regardless of the fact that they hate the term "post-rock").
And they’ve done it by not taking themselves too seriously. Mogwai make music of epic scale, but their collective image is remarkably human-sized. This conspicuous lack of pretension (all Blur-hating diatribes aside) speaks to a camaraderie and resilience—and to a palpable confidence both in themselves and their music—that, along with shit tons of hard work and plain luck, form the foundation of their longevity. This gap between Mogwai’s fussy music and unfussy vibe is also key to their appeal, and the reason I’ve continued to listen to them long after I’ve stopped paying attention to the genre they helped create.
Mogwai’s inane song titles are probably the most famous example of the band’s light touch: "I Love You, I’m Going to Blow Up Your School", "Oh! How the Dogs Stack Up", "Fridge Music", "Thank You Space Expert"—all of them afterthoughts and in-jokes ("You’re Lionel Richie" is apparently what a hungover Stuart Braithwaite said to the R&B singer when the guitarist bumped into him in an airport). There’s also the album titles: the nakedly ironic Happy Songs for Happy People and Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will (reportedly a phrase that a friend of Braithwaite’s overheard an annoyed Scottish teenager say to a shopkeeper who wouldn’t sell him wine).
But dig deeper and nearly everything about Mogwai emerges as playful and mischievous—almost childish: The names of the band’s first two LPs, Young Team and Come on Die Young, are references to Glasgow gang culture; in the early days, every member had a nickname (Cpt. Meat, Plasmatron, Bionic); and Mogwai love comics—bassist Dominic Atchison claims that Braithwaite buys 10 new Batman comics every month and the band once printed a bunch of t-shirts with "Mogwai" squeezed into the Batman logo.
When a Sunday Herald journalist traveling with Mogwai in Iceland in 2001 asked the band to tell him—"as a gang"—some of their favorite things, their list included cats, robots, the Godfather films, Evil Dead II, "slagging folk off", and Irn-Bru, a revolting, neon-orange fizzy drink the Scots sometime use as a hangover cure—which likely came in handy that day: Stuart had been out boozing the previous night, locked himself out of his hotel room, and woke up the Herald journalist at 5:30 in the morning to help him out.
There was one other thing the band mentioned to the Herald: Celtic. That would be Glasgow’s famous Celtic Football Club. Mogwai are massive fans. They’ve thanked the team in their liner notes (Come on Die Young), and dedicated songs to its former managers ("We’re No Here" for Martin O’Neill, or so it’s widely believed) and others to Celtic’s bitter rivalry with the crosstown Rangers ("Scotland’s Shame"). Mogwai’s own page on thecelticwiki.com, on which you can see Braithwaite and guitarist John Cummings mugging in Celtic jerseys with a bunch of soused fans, claims that the band’s music is "regularly" played at Glasgow’s Celtic Park before matches and during half-times. And I have a distinct memory of checking Mogwai’s official website over 10 years ago and seeing a note from the band begging someone—anyone—to record an important Celtic match while the band played a show.
It’s hardly unusual for musicians to love sports, but I can think of few indie bands, let alone members of the ever-so-solemn post-rock clan, who would make that love such an indelible part of their identity, and even fewer (Explosions in the Sky and their Friday Nights Lights score notwithstanding) who would get behind recording a whole film soundtrack dedicated to a single athlete. Mogwai are artists with, it seems, little interest in presenting themselves as such outside the strict confines of their music. Whatever one might expect of a band that would record a crushing 20-minute instrumental based on a traditional Jewish hymn, it probably isn’t obsessive sports fandom.
If the band is at all aware of this gap between their down-to-earth character and their soaring music, it’s in part because confused listeners have pointed it out: "There are people that come up to us that are generally quite appalled that we're having a laugh and seem to be enjoying ourselves...," Atchison told me in an interview back in 2006. "It's something we've become aware of—certain people who just go, ‘My God! You guys are idiots!’ It was never a conscious decision; it's just the way we are, really."
Obviously, Mogwai aren’t all a bunch of loutish bores, nor is their music all sturm und drang, all the time. There are certainly moments of levity ("Waltz for Aidan", "Acid Food") hidden amid all the heavy-lidded gloom. But the disconnect at the band’s core is unmistakable: On one side, the music—brutal ("Like Herod", "Glasgow Mega Snake"), menacing ("You Don’t Know Jesus", "Kappa"), and achingly beautiful ("Cody", "Local Authority"); on the other, the band themselves—grounded, self-effacing, a bit silly. Regular.
We tend to believe that art is—or at least should be—an all-encompassing thing: If you’re doing it right, you aren’t doing anything else, and your identity can’t help but be consumed in the process. But Mogwai's longevity suggests that good art isn’t synonymous with self-destruction or self-delusion; nor is it endangered by normalcy or decency—in fact, it can be built on those things.