‘The whole election felt like a slow motion car crash ... it was weird when Trump won’
Joe Neressessian
Few bands reach their third decade intact. Even fewer manage to release nine albums across 22 years, losing just one member in the process. But Scottish post-rockers Mogwai certainly have. And all while managing to remain a force who can turn their hands to an array of projects, such as scoring both a football documentary and a nuclear history film.
They returned in a more traditional format this year with their ninth studio album, Every Country’s Sun (minus guitarist and keyboardist John Cummings, who left for a solo career in 2015).
The band’s guitarist, Stuart Braithwaite, is supposed to be talking about the record and a few upcoming shows, but he seems far more interested in bemoaning the current state of the world.
The Tories are a “despicable bunch”, Brexit is like “approaching an iceberg” and US President Donald Trump is an “incomplete human being”, he says, in-beplay tween snippets of conversation about the Scottish outfit’s recent effort.
The record landed in September but was completed in January — and Mogwai arrived in the US to start recording it just before Mr Trump was elected.
Thus their whole time in the studio was set against a backdrop of drama as the world watched power transfer from Barack Obama to Mr Trump.
❝ He just seems to be a genuinely awful person. He’s doing such a bad job on making people like him
“The whole election felt like a slow motion car crash,” Braithwaite says. “And then to be there when Trump won, it was really weird. Then we finished mixing just after he got inaugurated so we were there for all of the horror.”
It is a reflective album, in that it collects the band’s contrasting sounds of the past 20 years into an 11-track record. Their first since Cummings’s exit, they decided to sign up psyche-rock veteran Dave Fridmann (Mercury Rev, The Flaming Lips, Tame Impala, MGMT) on production and headed to his isolated studios in New York state, where they shielded themselves from the political events around them.
It charted at number six, their highest ever position and only their second ever top 10 studio record after 2014’s Rave Tapes. So something resonated and although Mr Trump’s rise is not explicitly dealt with, Braithwaite believes there is plenty of subconscious shielding from the turbulent time the world has endured.
Forgetting the music again, he goes back after his number one target.
“He doesn’t seem to have any empathy, any intelligence, he just seems to be a genuinely awful person on every level. He doesn’t have the intellect to grasp anything other than what people think about him. And even on that level, he’s doing such a bad job on making people like him.”
Although his commentary is intriguing, Braithwaite has far more substance when addressing the politics of the music industry.
He brushes off concerns over the band’s position in a world where touring is increasingly important, but adds: “What really worries me, is there being the resources to introduce new bands.
“I think that a lot when I look at festivals, most of the headliners are old bands.
“And that’s not because mu-