MogwaiMogwai play the Big Top Stage at Livid at the RNA Showgrounds on Saturday.
Much like their cinematic namesakes, Scottish act Mogwai are never too far away from transforming from a soft friendly creature into a darker and more malevolent being. While their albums hardly reverberate with over the top commercialism, there can be a joyous resonance to be found in what Mogwai do. But there are often bleak and creeping undertones at work within the very same tracks.
A rather weary John (guitars) takes some time from “rehearsing and sitting around” to muse on all things Mogwai.
“More and more there’s thing we put on records that we can’t really replicate live. It’s quite difficult. I suppose for our first album, the songs were written to play live, because we’d never been in and experienced recording and couldn’t fully appreciate all the things we were going to want to be able to do in the future. We’d always just written songs to play live. Playing live was what we’d always think of first.”
“It gets a lot harder when you use a lot of different instruments on the recording. Live now things don’t even sound the same; we just have a picture in our heads of where we want to go. If we can’t it’s disappointing. Things change now with the structures of some of the songs, and often we don’t even realise we’ve changed them.”
Mogwai had done three singles for different labels in their first year as a band, including their own Rock Action Records label.
“It seemed to be the right thing to be doing. ‘Do you want to put a single out?’ Yeah sure. ‘You’ve sold 1500 copies’. What? Bloody hell, that’s loads. There was no big plan until we’d done our first album. Things never really seem to be finished, we just keep going with things until someone says that’s it. It’s got to come out.”
Mogwai now infamous Blur Are Shite T-shirts caused quite a stir when they were released a couple of years back. Now that is appears the band have called it a day I ask who the next target will be…
“Apparently the split’s not true. Blur’s music has been generally rubbish. What are you doing here Damon, it’s just shocking. I don’t know if Blur are worse than the rest of them, but its very much so guilt by association. Their music is evil. How evil is their next record going to be. I won’t be buying that one.”
