Stuart Braithwaite does not look like anybody’s idea of a tortured artist. Slumped backstage in Dublin, clutching a tin of noxious, foamy brew, he could pass for a motorcycle mechanic enjoying some down-time.
Prodded about his band, Mogwai, the stocky Glaswegian seems truly baffled that anyone would wish to ascribe deep motivations to their oblique, quasi-orchestral music.
Braithwaite is defiantly blue-collar and, should your questions flutter too highly into the realm of the abstract, maybe even a little surly.
“There’s no blueprint,” he says, when asked what audiences can expect of Mogwai’s new record, a slavering, shuddering (bad) mood piece called Mr Beast. “As a band, we don’t go into the studio with any definite idea of what kind of record we want to make.”
“Is there a Mogwai sound? To be honest, I’m not sure,” he concedes. “People may find a resemblance. But for us, every record we make is different. We don’t set out to repeat ourselves. Then again, we don’t set out not to repeat ourselves. Whatever happens, happens.”
You can almost forgive Braithwaite his truculence. Mogwai have, for nearly a decade now, inhabited a brave frontier between heavy metal, soundtrack composition and what happens when someone connects a jack-hammer to an amplifier.
To claim their music is on speaking terms with genius may be an exaggeration. But only a slight one surely. Do we reach too far to imagine a Mozart raised on Einstürzende Neubauten and Morricone could have sounded a little like Mogwai?
For a few years, Mogwai, and the swell of copycat groups that came in their wake, even threatened to crash the mainstream. Music magazines splashed them on the cover; their monochrome anthems graced movies (you might still stumble upon Mogwai on CSI: Las Vegas) and – no really – video games.
Some went so far as to coin a noun for this strain of music,‘post-rock’, although the term quickly became a catchall for anything that lacked a chorus or didn’t reach the pop charts.
Lately, though, the post-rock bubble would appear to have popped. With the pendulum swinging towards brattish, unabashedly populist guitar bands such as Arctic Monkeys and Maximo Park, the scene has suffered the equivalent of a dotcom crash.
Dozens – yes, there were that many – of post-rockers have gone to the wall. What are you doing now, God Speed You Black Emperor, Billy Mahonie, Fridge?
Braitwaithe, looking around for another tin of special brew, claims indifference to post-rock’s sudden demise. Mogwai, he says, never felt part of the scene to begin with.
“Was post-rock ever a phenomenon? I think it was something journalists liked to write about,” he says.
“Fair enough, there were a good many instrumental bands around for a while. It wasn’t like we all hung out together though. I liked some of those other groups. But I never felt there was a connection with what we were doing.”
What does he think of Britrock’s brave new era? Can it ever have a place for so diffident, dissonant a talent as Mogwai? Braitwaithe shrugs: “Some of those bands are all right. To the extent that we are aware of them. The Arctic Monkeys? They’re okay. Mogwai don’t belong to that world, though. So it’s hard for us to be really that excited.”
Ironically, in view of Mogwai’s otherworldly music, politics is one of the few topics that draws Braithwaithe out of himself.
Mogwai’s left wing credentials are impeccable (although many in the Labour movement might blanche at the ‘Galloway all the way’ slogan on their website). On an early single, the band castigated their local council’s plans for an underage curfew; their own label, Rock Action, is run as a group collective. Marx would have approved, assuming he hadn’t been terrified to death by the band’s music.
The Glaswegians are also proudly internationalist in outlook. Their fan-base straddles the globe (they are huge in Europe, Russia and Japan); in part, believes Braithwaite, because their songs, devoid of lyrics, transcend cultural barriers.
“We’ve actually played Tokyo more than we’ve played Glasgow over the last five years. A lot of it is probably because we don’t have any singing. There are no cultural references that you have to get. Our music is pretty open to whoever wants to enjoy it or not.”
On Mr Beast Mogwai return, emphatically, to the abrasive territory of their mid ‘90s records. Although the wintry ennui of their previous LP, Happy Songs For Happy People, brought the band their biggest hit yet (it sold particularly well in the United States) Mogwai were anxious, says Braithwaite, to revert to their roots in sonic extremism.
In this, they were encouraged by long-time producer, Tony Doogan, who wished to capture the raw energy of the group’s live shows. Time was not a constraint; Mogwai recorded Mr Beast in their own studio, unveiled recently in Glasgow (Belle And Sebastian and Snow Patrol are among those to have already made use of the facility).
“Tony used to give us a hard time for not playing hard enough in the studio,” says Braithwaite. “He thinks we play better at shows than in the studio. This time, we really wanted us to cut loose during the recording process. That’s what we set out to achieve.”