Mogwai: ‘It’s important that you have quite ruthless standards’

Rather than dwell on the past, the Glasgow four-piece are focusing on As The Love Continues, their 10th studio album of soaring post-rock instrumentals.

Guitarist Stuart Braithwaite sees a cautionary tale in other bands who have chosen to revisit old albums to satisfy the market for nostalgia. “There’s one band in particular that we’re good friends with, as soon as they did that with a record that people were really, really fond of they found it almost impossible to get anyone to listen to anything else. Just from the point of view of functioning normally it seemed to be a bad idea,” he says. “Also, I think it’s always better to look forward than to look back.”

To maintain consistency over the years, Braithwaite and band mates Dominic Aitchison, Martin Bulloch and Barry Burns have set themselves a high quality threshold. “I think it’s important that you have quite ruthless standards, especially when you’ve been making records for a long time,” says Braithwaite, 44. “People generally are quite rightly more excited about hearing something brand new, and hearing voices that they haven’t heard before. But also when you’ve been around for quite a long time, you need to make sure that people have a good reason to still be paying attention.”

Maintaining their independence has helped steer the band through the last two and a half decades, Braithwaite believes. “I’ve seen people make terrible mistakes because they’ve listened to the wrong people; we’ve never really listened to anyone,” he says. “That doesn’t mean to say that we’ve not made mistakes too but at least they’ve been our own. I think independence is really important. When I look at all the music that as been important to me over the years how independent they are has been a factor, whether that be philosophically or not being part of a huge corporate label.”

Due to the pandemic, Mogwai ended up making As The Love Continues in Evesham, rather than the US, as they had originally intended. “We ended up doing it months and months later which actually helped the record,” says Braithwaite. “We also had a pretty big tour which we were looking at, at the same time when people stopped buying concert tickets. It was nice to have the record, though, because all that stuff was pretty negative. Even though we had to change things, it was a positive thing to be working on.”

Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails features on the song Midnight Flit while Colin Stetson collaborated on Pat Stains. “Both of them are really talented people and they both brought musicality beyond our abilities,” says Braithwaite. “Atticus is an Oscar-winning composer (for the soundtrack to The Social Network), he’s amazing at what he does; Colin is a virtuoso saxophone player who plays these really fast arpeggio parts that are very far from what we would do. Both of them brought something different and unique to the songs that they played on.”

Mogwai themselves remain masters at building intense soundscapes from often relatively simple chord patterns – something Braithwaite learned from the music of John Cale-era Velvet Underground and bands such as Spacemen 3. “I’m obsessed with quite simple, repetitive noise music,” he says. “My two favourite albums of last year were Sonic Boom’s album and Juliana Barwick’s album, which I’m sure is a lot more complicated but it has that droney grandeur to it. That’s my jam, as the kids would say.”

Social media followers of Braithwaite will know he has strong political opinions. However he says it’s unlikely he will ever express such thoughts in songs. “I don’t know if I’ve got the lyrical powers to do it well, to be honest. I think it takes a Bob Dylan or a Chuck D to get it across. Maybe I’ll try at one point but I’d hate for it to seem tokenistic. I think it’s going to take more than a bad song to take the Tories down.”

He has nontheless helped out where he can for charitable causes such as Help Musicians and the NHS.

“I think it’s important to be outspoken, it’s important to call (the Government) out, like with school meals,” he says. “I wasn’t a Brexit supporter, but even the aftermath of Brexit, the way that they’ve chosen ideology and frankly racism over actual industries like the music industry and the fishing industry has been appalling. I can’t remember a worse government, and I grew up under Thatcher’s government. It blows my mind that they’re ahead or neck and neck in the polls. It’s like a circus running a hospital, it’s crazy.”

Braithwaite says he thinks Scots have “a lot of respect” for First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s handling of the pandemic. “I think it’s also harder for the people that don’t like her, because they’re seeing her every single day,” he says. “Even for the non independence supporters, there’s a grudging respect for the way that she has confronted it.”

He also thinks a majority is “possibly” more likely to vote for independence as a result of Brexit and the pandemic. “It’s been such a crazy few years that it would be hard to make any predictions, but I don’t remember the Westminster government being so ill thought of. I think people are really quite appalled, but saying that, there’s a bit of a bubble, you look at the opinion polls and think ‘what the hell?’”

As The Love Continues is out on Friday February 19. mogwai.scot