Mogwai have been a unique and powerful musical force since forming in Glasgow, Scotland in 1995 and have forged a worldwide following from the sheer intensity of their live shows and the endless intrigue found in their almost exclusively instrumental albums.
We caught up with founding member and guitarist Stuart Braithwaite on the eve of the band's third visit to Australia.
yourGigs (YG): You are about to embark on your third trip to Australia - is it somewhere you enjoy touring?
Stuart Braithwaite (SB): Yeah, very much so, it's always a good time down there.
YG : Is it logistically hard to combine playing the club shows and the festival shows within the one tour?
SB: Not really, there's not really any other place that it happens except Australia, but its good, you get to play to people that don't know the music and to people who have no idea about the music and its pretty good. It's not that different, it's just a matter of getting a decent sound check at the festivals.
YG: Why do you think your music is received so well down here, considering the differences between Australia and Scotland?
SB: I think its most places we go people are just very receptive to the music, I think it's because our music has got hardly any lyrics in it - not that that's a problem in Australia - but generally it's okay wherever we go.
YG: Last time you played here there were people throwing up and passing out due to the intensity of the music - is that a common reaction to Mogwai?
SB: I think it has been. I don't know if we were in a really loud stage at that point of time, but yeah sometimes. I don't know if we are extremely loud at the moment, but we could be - time will tell. Take a Serapax along just in case.
YG: What have been some of the strangest audience reactions to your music?
SB: Well we played in Greece at the weekend and there was this one guy who was up the front just doing the craziest dancing. Usually when there's some insane dancing going on it's a cause for an enquiry.
YG: What is the process for taking new Mogwai songs into the live environment?
SB: For the last two records especially we really tried to record them as live as we could and make them as true to us just playing them in a room. So there really wasn't too much hassle, a few songs have sequenced parts so you have to have to do a bit of computer stuff, and you have to do a bit of preparation for that, but for the most part it's pretty straight ahead.
YG: Have you found recording as live as possible the best way to capture your sound?
SB: Generally as a rule it is, and for bands who play a lot of concerts you should play to your strength.
YG: You have had a wide range of different studio experiences, from upstate New York with Dave Fridmann to your own studio and label, Rock Action Records, now - is it hard to come across a perfect situation to record Mogwai songs?
SB: Well, no I just think anywhere that's got microphones and electricity we go okay! It was good doing it upstate because we were in the middle of nowhere, but its good doing the last record because we can get home in ten minutes. It all depends, anywhere can be amazing and anywhere can be terrible, depending on one's mood.
YG: How have your own experiences with the music industry shaped the way you operate your own label?
SB: We've definitely learnt from our mistakes; one of the best things about the label is that we can have a look at is coming from being on the other side of the fence. Save bands from making the mistakes we've made and also do things in the way we would have liked them to have been done for us...
We don't really have any obsession with finding the next Coldplay or anything, we just want to put out good records and want to make enough money to put out more good records. When we started the band there were a lot of little labels like Love Train ... and then we ended up on Chemikal Underground, which was great, and I think that experience was really, really good.
I think there's something really romantic about little indie labels, they're terrible financially, but their definitely important.
YG: Last year your debut album, Mogwai Young Team, was reissued - how did that come about and what has time done to your thoughts on the album?
SB: For starters, because Paul Savage - who recorded the album - has always thought it was mastered really badly, he wanted to re-master it and we thought if it was going to be reissued so we looked around for some extra stuff for it and we started finding live versions of stuff that weren't too bad, so people wouldn't be buying the same stuff twice, and we were really quite happy how it turned out. Plus the album had been unavailable for a really long time too.
We spent a lot of time listening to it for the re-mastering and we were surprised at how good it was, we have been quite dismissive of it over time, and I'd say time had definitely changed my opinion of it having to listen again.
There are a few songs on it that if we have had a few months in the studio we probably would have written better ones, but I'm a big advocate of records being a document of time and not being a kind of masterpiece of perception ... I'm happy with it, but I think if we had the chance to record it again there would be quite a difference.
YG: You also played the album in its entirety live for the Summercase festival - how did you go about reconnecting with the songs when you revisited them live?
SB: Some of the songs we've never played live and some of them we never recorded them, so it felt like we were playing another band's songs. Again there three or four of the songs that we still play a lot, and we knew those ones off by heart, so it felt like we played a bunch of songs we always play then a handful of cover versions and we enjoyed it. It was fun.
YG: How do you generally go about making a set list for your shows?
SB: We usually have a song from each record and then we have a bunch of new ones from the latest record is the general rule we've been using on the latest tour.
Like 'Herrod' from Mogwai Young Team goes really well with 'Batcat' from the latest records so we've been pretty much playing that every night. It also comes down to what we enjoy playing live, some songs like 'Mogwai Fear Satan' are simple and kind of organic and we play that one a lot too.
YG: You have managed to work or play with a lot of your musical idols over your career - Kevin Shields, Pixies, The Cure - what were they like to deal with? Was it daunting?
SB: It was weird with me and Kevin at first, but I'm really good friends with him now, I speak to him every once in a while and have done now for 10 or 12 years, so its fine. There's a few that you get a wee bit daunted by but not really. Ninety-five percent of people are pretty decent so, it's nice to meet those people.
It's just flattering to just watch other musicians and do things with them and see other people's motivations for what they are doing. Even if you are actually working with them, it's interesting to see why they are doing what they do, so I think it's really inspiring.
YG: Do you still think there is room to develop for you all as musicians - are there areas where you haven't taken the band yet that you would like to?
SB: I'm sure there is, we can definitely get a lot better - there's a lot of room for improvement. I know getting to grips with technology makes recording a lot cheaper, you can record something cheaply on a laptop that would have been really expensive in the past. It's certainly something worth applying yourself to.
YG: Is there anyone you haven't worked with yet that you would like to?
SB: There's loads of them. I'd love to hear David Bowie do a Mogwai song, even though he's probably never heard of us or probably thinks we're terrible or something, but that would be unreal.
Andy Ryan
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