Mogwai’s ‘upbeat’ return after difficult years
One word keeps cropping up during our interview with Glasgow four-piece Mogwai – and that word is “weird”.
It was “psychedelically weird” when their last album, As The Love Continues, unexpectedly went to number one in 2021.
The achievement was made “even weirder” by the fact it happened during the pandemic, “so we couldn’t even go to the pub to talk about how weird it was”, says frontman Stuart Braithwaite.
The success took them all the way to the Mercury Prize gala (“such a weird ceremony”), but they didn’t let it influence their new album, The Bad Fire.
In fact, they completely forgot to mention the chart achievement to their new producer, John Congleton (St Vincent, The Killers, Blondie, Modest Mouse).
He only found out when a French journalist brought it up in an interview.
“He was like, ‘Wait, your last album went to number one?’ And we were like, ‘Yeah’.
“And he was like, ‘Wow, that’s weird‘.”
To be fair, he was right.
Mogwai are not a band who ever seemed destined for global domination.
Formed by longtime friends who wanted to create “serious guitar music”, the quartet specialise in long, mesmerising instrumentals, riddled with creeping anxiety and devastating pay-offs.
Their journey to number one took 25 years, aided by chart rules that place higher value on physical record sales over streams when calculating rankings.
Mogwai – a cult band with a fanbase that prizes vinyl – found the scales tipped in their favour. For one glorious week, they outsold Dua Lipa and Harry Styles.
“It was a huge surprise,” Braithwaite reiterates.
“We want our music to do as well as it can, but we’re not uber-ambitious. We’re not like Queen, plotting world domination.”
But even if the band had been inclined to capitalise on their success, fate was conspiring against them.
As they prepared to record the follow-up to As The Love Continues, keyboardist Barry Burns received the news every parent dreads: His daughter might die.
Doctors had diagnosed her with aplastic anaemia, also known as bone marrow failure, where the body stops producing enough blood cells.
“She had blood coming out of her gums and bruises all over,” he recalls. “It was extremely stressful.”
The condition is exceptionally rare, with only 30 to 40 children diagnosed in the UK per year, but Burns had first-hand experience of how serious it could be.
“The weird thing was that my neighbour when I was a kid had it and, sadly, she died,” he says.
“So obviously, I really panicked because I thought I knew the outcome – but thankfully the treatment is completely different now.”
After a bone marrow transplant and chemotherapy, his daughter recovered.
“She’s going to be fine, but I’ve had an awful two years.”
Opaque and impressionistic
It wasn’t the only trauma the band experienced while making the record.
Live agent Mick Griffiths, who had worked with them since the start of their career, died of cancer, while bassist Dominic Aitchison lost his father.
Even Braithwaite’s pet dog, Prince, had problems that caused turmoil. “He got cancer and had to have his leg amputated two weeks before we started recording,” he recalls.
Appropriately enough, the album’s title, The Bad Fire, is a Glaswegian term for hell. But anyone expecting an outpouring of grief or a reckoning with mortality is in for disappointment.
“If anything weighty happens in my life, the last thing I want to do is write a song about it,” Braithwaite told The Herald newspaper in 2003, an ethos that holds true today.
Largely instrumental, their songs are deliberately left open to interpretation. The band christen their compositions with nonsense titles and in-jokes (You’re Lionel Richie, Secret Pint, Simon Ferocious) to avoid the imposition of meaning.
The new album continues that tradition, with deliciously-titled tracks like Pale Vegan Hip Pain and Fanzine Made Of Flesh (although Lion Rumpus may be the most self-descriptive entry in the band’s discography).
When lyrics appear, they’re opaque and impressionistic. The only hint of the turbulence Mogwai experienced comes on the groggy, distortion-washed 18 Volcanoes, where Braithwaite quietly sings: “Hope has come another day/Hold me close in every way.“
“Some journalists in France said the album was really cathartic, and I can kind of see that,” he says. “But I don’t think its maudlin at all.
“It’s vaguely upbeat, by our standards.”
Released last Friday, The Bad Fire is heading for the top five of the UK albums chart amid stiff competition from Central Cee and Teddy Swims.
Again, physical sales will give The Bad Fire an advantage over streaming hits, a situation Braithwaite is pretty happy about.
“The streaming world is very murky and hard to understand,” he says.
“It does make a lot of money, but it makes a lot of money for old music and artists with popular back catalogues, and I think that’s really discouraged a lot of big labels from investing in new music.”
He adds that Spotify is filled with “fake bands making generic music” for its curated playlists, especially in genres like chill-out, lo-fi and relaxation.
It’s an accusation that’s been repeatedly levelled against the streaming service, and which it has called “categorically untrue”. But Braithwaite is sceptical.
“You absolutely know that if anyone’s going to be making generic AI music, it’s going to be the streaming services, just so they don’t have to pay humans.”
Streaming isn’t entirely bad for Mogwai, however. Over on YouTube, their crepuscular 2005 album track Take Me Somewhere Nice has been streamed 85 million times.
The video isn’t even official. Uploaded by a fan, it’s illustrated by a drawing of a girl with her head in an upturned goldfish bowl.
Originally drawn by video game designer Ken Wong, the picture’s aura of disconnection and alienation has become so synonymous with Mogwai’s song that some fans have turned it into tattoos.
“I almost want to go, ‘Mate, you know, that’s not the cover of the record’,” laughs Braithwaite. “But it’s cool.
“And the comments under the video are a sort of endless message board of young kids who are going through a hard time supporting each other. There’s an agony aunt vibe about it.
“That’s one thing I do like about the digital world, that music has these other lives.”
For Braithwaite, who read a lot of William Blake’s poetry during the recording of The Bad Fire, there’s something alluring about the prospect of art outliving its creator.
“I’m kind of obsessed with the concept of eternity within culture,” he says.
“William Blake was kind of laughed out of society for his ideas but hundreds of years later, his paintings were projected onto the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, and Jerusalem is the unofficial English national anthem. It’s incredible.
“I like the idea of, when we’re long gone, having made some kind of mark.”
The concept has extra resonance this year, as Mogwai celebrate their 30th anniversary. They’ve come a long way, from gobby young upstarts who sold T-shirts slagging off their rivals to respected stalwarts of the British rock scene.
So how does it feel to have reached this stage? Was it something they ever anticipated at their first practice, the first Tuesday after Glastonbury, in the front room of his parents’ house?
“Well, I thought we’d have flying cars by this point,” laughs Braithwaite. “So any joy at the fact I was still eking out a living as a musician would probably be tempered by the lack of jet packs.”
To put it another way, it simply feels weird.
