Ever since Oasis announced their plans to reform – playing 17 shows across the UK between June and September – we’ve been told this must be a Britpop summer.
But what about another Nineties band, formed four years after Oasis in 1995, who have been unrelenting in the consistency of their musical output since then, and – also unlike the Gallagher brothers – haven’t felt the slightest need to turn themselves into tabloid fodder along the way?
In Mogwai’s first NME interview, founding member Stuart Braithwaite declared the Glaswegian band were on “a crusade against the kind of person who chooses to be in a band not because they think people deserve to hear their music but because they want their face to be on the cover of magazines”. It wasn’t just Oasis they were rallying against. At T in the Park festival in 1999, Mogwai sold a line of T-shirts simply stating “blur: are shite”.
Photo: Gemma Harris-rock group’s headline South Facing Festival show at the Crystal Palace Bowl in South London, then, is an antidote to the tiresomeness of Britpop nostalgia. Celebrating 30 years since the band’s formation, the group’s four members plus two additional live musicians showcase many of their most transporting tracks from a back catalogue of 11 ambitious albums.
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They open with “God Gets You Back” from their most recent record, this year’s The Bad Fire (a vernacular Scottish term for hell), and itself a capsule experience of listening to a Mogwai concert in full: questioning, space-like guitars and keys build up and up until a grooving yet steady wall of sound takes hold, before slowly trickling away again.
Live, the band still play with the physical rush of their brasher first albums. On “Mogwai Fear Satan”, the closing track from their 1997 debut record Mogwai Young Team, the musicians come right down in moments of real tenderness, before exploding out and away when you least expect it. Meanwhile tunes such as “Remurdered”, from 2014, sound downright menacing in the drums and bass. It’s a thrill to hear musicians play with such intensity.
Photo: Gemma HarrisAnd it’s even more of a thrill to hear them change tack entirely, as when, in among the sheer mass of sound emerging from the stage, comes the rare sound of Braithwaite’s voice, first singing the balladic “Cody”, from the 1999 record Come On Die Young – featuring the simple yet poignant lyric “Sad songs remind me of friends” – and then again on the more recent “Fanzine Made of Flesh”, a comparatively upbeat number for which he sings via a vocoder.
Mogwai are undeniably masters of noise. Even more impressive is how well they understand when to bring it back down. It’s in these moments that a startling clarity emerges from the fuzz.
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