We're Still Here: Mogwai celebrate two decades by looking to the future, Live in Glasgow

It’s been twenty years since the release of Young Team, 1997’s post-rock masterpiece and the blueprint for Mogwai’s (and plenty others too) quiet/loud dynamics. Twenty years of shows at venues ranging in quality from the toilet to the arthouse, leading to this, their biggest headline show in their history at Glasgow’s corporate spaceship, the SSE Hydro. And after all that time, rather than some greatest hits celebration to hide a dip in quality, Mogwai are celebrating the release of their ninth studio album (in regular terms) Every Country’s Sun - which also happens to be their best in at least half a decade.

I grew up around the same part of the world as Mogwai, a Lanarkshire kid who a few years earlier at high school found out that Teenage Fanclub were local boys made good, bringing some kind of realisation that there was escape and hope from a mining town decimated by years of Tory rule.

Mogwai were (and are) important to me not for their music but also in terms of my socio-political outlook. Yes, I wouldn’t have listened to Sonic Youth, Slint and many more without hearing Stuart Braithwaite and co talking about these in the band’s early days, but my interest in the independence movement was probably spurred on by the band’s take on something like Trident and Indyref...but perhaps more by their place in the music industry at the height of Britpop.

It’s probably not unfair to suggest that Britpop didn’t have quite the effect on Scotland as it did on certain parts of England. Yes, I had a love of Blur for sure (something the band emphatically did not share) but my country felt isolated from the Union Jacks adorning Noel Gallagher’s guitars, even from the cultural touchstones mentioned in Pulp’s “Common People”. Mogwai never really got played on BBC Radio 1’s Evening Session, never got on TV when literally every other band under the Britpop banner appeared at one point or another. It became clearer and clearer that Scotland was (and to an extent still is) ignored by the music industry, and by successive blue and red governments.

So they just got on with it; as they released Come On Die Young, Rock Action, Happy Songs for Happy People and I saw them in bigger venues and weirder scenarios. One ten quid ticket in 2001 came with a coach and ferry to see them play Rothesay Pavilion on the Isle of Bute, where 1000 Mogwai fans drank their carry-out, smoked, ate fish and chips, played crazy golf drunk and were filmed for a documentary. Never have I felt cooler than sitting on a bench with a friend, smoking and telling a film crew why I loved Mogwai. Less cooler later on when the bass in “My Father My King” led to me throwing up on the ferry back to the mainland.

Mogwai changed as the years went by, guitarist John Cummings left a few years ago and the band dropped the quiet/loud shock tactics, developed their electronic leanings and even delved into the world of soundtracks (Zidane, Les Revenants, Atomic). And somehow they remain relevant two decades later.

So tonight, in front of thousands of fans and introduced by Aidan Moffat dressed as the creepiest Santa in history, Mogwai played a set lifting heavily from Every Country’s Sun. A record which is among the most playful and fun of the band’s career, Braithwaite, Dominic Aitchison, Barry Burns, Alex Mackay and Cat Myers - the Honeyblood drummer standing in for the ill Martin Bulloch - are having great fun amping up the driving riffs of “Crossing The Road Material”, “Coolverine” and set closer “Old Poisons”. These are songs which keep that old instrumental blueprint of Mogwai but batter them into almost radio-friendly jams….if it wasn’t for the noise levels.

Any worries about the size of the venue and how that would affect the band’s notoriously loud assaults were quickly dispelled. Heavy already, “I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead” (from The Hawk Is Howling) grew bassy muscles and boomed against the roof of the Hydro, while “Mogwai Fear Satan”, the definitive Mogwai experience with its extra loud section that still scares to this day, sounded better than ever. I’ve heard “Satan” countless times but the searing heat and layered noise was incredible, given an extra dimension by Cat Myers’ almost speed-metal drumming.

Closing with a doomy one-two punch of “Auto Rock” and “We’re No Here”, the latter’s coda of ear-splitting feedback taking us (just beyond) the venue’s curfew, we were left in no doubt as to the continuing power of Mogwai. A lot has changed in twenty years, but Mogwai remain of the finest bands this island has ever produced.