By fair means or howl

Your starter for ten: how do Mogwai, five unassuming blokes from Glasgow, produce such an epic, expansive, end-times sound roughly halfway between Sonic Youth and Sergio Leone?

“I don’t know!” laughs multi-instrumentalist founder member Stuart Braithwaite, on the phone from Orleans in France. “It’s quite strange, I don’t think the music reflects us particularly as people, because it’s quite sombre, and we’re not at all like that. It’s something subconscious. I think some of our music sounds Scottish, it has a real pentatonic sadness about it.
“But I think the city of Glasgow has affected us more culturally, being in a place where there’s a lot of talented people around, always things happening. Glasgow’s got a bit of an edge as well, so it’s not as if it’s full of posers or anything. I was talking to the crime writer Ian Rankin about this, how he spends his days writing about these really horrific, violent, grisly incidents, and he’s the most affable person you’ve ever met. I think maybe people look toward what isn’t in their everyday make-up to inspire them.”
Mogwai’s latest album The Hawk Is Howling might just be their best, a stunning, slow-motion extinction level event of a record. The title might suggest Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’, but as Stuart explains, its origins were a little more rock ‘n’ roll.
“We were listening to the radio,” he recalls, “Simo Mayo was interviewing Ray Manzarek from The Doors on Radio 5, and he was describing Chicago, and I think he got his words confused, he said, “In Chicago the hawk is howling,” and I think he meant that the wind was howling, so that struck our tiny Scottish minds as being a very amusing phrase.”
It also leads rather logically into the album’s majestic opener ‘I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead’.
“No, that was something totally different, I think Dominic (Aitchison) said that, and we just thought that was funny. That was more nonsense art than found art!”
So in the absence of lyrics, how important are titles in terms of setting the tone for a piece of music?
“I don’t think they’re that important at all – I’d say the only position they really have is in our strive against pretentiousness, because they are quite ridiculous and trashy, they’re certainly not in the same tone as the actual songs, so I think we probably use them to make sure everybody knows we’re not stuck up our own arses. I think our music’s quite basic and uncontrived. We’re not virtuosos or anything. Not to say we’re purposely not virtuosos – we just don’t have the talent!”
I would dispute that. An integral component of virtuosity is taste, something Mogwai have in abundance. It’s hard to figure if the quintet’s music is tragic or exultant or both, but one imagines it’s cathartic as hell to play live.
“It is. If I’ve had an unsatisfying or bad day, I really look forward to playing, because when it goes well you get lost in the noise and stuff.”
So, songs like ‘Batcat’ are simulatneously violent and poetic – one could easily imagine Mogwai scoring an alternative Raging Bull. In fact, the band are no strangers to film soundtracks, having provided the music for Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait, Douglas Gordon and Pilippe Parreno’s 17-camera real-time documentary about French footballer Zinedine Zidane’s performance in the 2005 Spanish Liga Real Madrid versus Villareal CF game.
“With Zidane we used two songs that were already written that hadn’t settled on old records,” Stuart explains, “and the rest were really written on the spot, we did pretty much what Neil Young did (on Dead Man) I imagine, we’d just play until something sounded good, and then just play along watching the film. We recorded and mixed the whole thing in two weeks, which was pretty fast for us. It’s amazing the inspiring power of a deadline! I’m sure it’s the same with the writing as well.”
No kidding – raw fear as creative laxative.
“Yeah, it’s scary, you need to get it done, you don’t want to turn up without your homework, so you just put that bit of extra effort in. Normally if you’re thinking and playing and writing on the run, you do something pretty good. As long as you care.”

Mogwai play the Dublin Academy on March 20, 21 and 22. The Hawk Is Howling is out now on PIAS.