Mogwai So Serious?

"Joey Barton is amazing!” Stuart Braithwaite heartily chuckles, his thick Glaswegian accent reverberating down the phone line. Admittedly not the kind of opinion you expect someone to cheerily volunteer, but Mogwai have made a career out of going against the grain.

“Have you read his Twitter?” he continues, referring to the troubled Newcastle United football star’s recent public war of words with his current (at time of writing at least) employers that has seen Barton tweet George Orwell and Friedrich Nietzsche quotes in a bid to rebrand himself as an oppressed intellectual.

“I had no idea! I just thought he was your typical normal idiot but he’s really quite something, isn’t he?”

The subject of sport is close to the guitarist’s heart (he’s a keen Glasgow Celtic fan), and saw Mogwai contribute the soundtrack to 2006’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, an arthouse project which focused entirely on the French playmaker over the course of one Real Madrid match. With no dialogue or real plot to speak of, it was as uncompromising as Mogwai’s music. Plans to recreate the experience live this summer fell through, but Braithwaite remains optimistic.
“I think it will happen,” he says. “When I first saw the finished film, it was amazing. We watched it in a football stadium in Switzerland and they draped a cinema screen across the goalposts. It was kind of magical and I think it could work well as a show. It might not appeal to people who want to see Transformers 3 or something like that though!

Back on the subject of Twitter, does Braithwaite feel like he has to watch what he says online?

“Nah, I don’t really give a shit,” he laughs. “I think I’d have to say something pretty wild for it to become news.”

Wild like Steve Albini’s recent admission that he wanted to “strangle” hip hop upstarts Odd Future? The Shellac supremo took to his forum to bash the group, following a recent shared bus ride in which their alleged boorish behaviour left Albini unimpressed. His post was picked up by music websites almost immediately. Braithwaite was moved to tweet on what he believes is a non-story.

“It’s really indicative of the sort of tittle-tattle non-news that’s around now,” he proffers. “There’s a real vapidness in music journalism with people reporting stuff that isn’t news. It’s just a comment on a messageboard. Steve was talking about a band that he has no interest in whatsoever, and all he’s saying is that they were acting like idiots on a bus. I mean, if a bunch of 19 year-old rappers aren’t annoying Steve Albini on a bus, then there’s something wrong with the world. Everything annoys Steve Albini! I’m sure they were acting like total dickheads, but we were acting like total dickheads when we were 19. We were acting like total dickheads when we were 25 to be honest!”

Mogwai have clearly come a long way since then, but they still find themselves stuck with that ‘post-rock’ label first applied to the band back in the mid-’90s. It is a term that they’ve never been entirely comfortable with.
“It maybe annoys me even more now than it did then,” admits Braithwaite. “It’s quite a pretentious term. At the start it kind of implied some kind of superiority but I think it’s actually gotten worse now. It now means a band of a certain musical style, which is basically us and Godspeed! You Black Emperor. It’s almost like being called a ‘90s band. Although, I think I’d probably rather be called a post-rock band than a ‘90s band!”