people
who make quite serious music. If you're already a fan of Mogwai,
you probably know that they come from just outside of Glasgow,
make primarily instrumental music, and have recently released
a slew of cds, eps, and the like, including the latest, Come On
Die Young. I recently spoke with some of the members of Mogwai
regarding such diverse topics as Sting, shagging, Glasgow, and
of course, their music. This interview, while a bit long, was
so sillly and interesting that I thought it would be best to leave
it as is, as a transcript of our conversation. Here's a guide to who's who:
Janine Papp - Queen Bee of Temple of Sting
Anastasia Signoretta - friend of Janine, also has an insane knowledge of all things Britpop
Stuart Braithwaite - guitars / keyboards / percussion
Dominic Aitchison - bass / guitar
Barry Burns - flute / guitar / keyboards
Janine: This is my zine, Temple of Sting.
Dominic: It's great, because they wrote down descriptions of all the people that were doing interviews, and for you he wrote that you like bees but you don't like Sting.
Janine: That's me.
Dominic: Oh, I can't stand him.
Janine: Oh, great. One of the questions that I always ask people is if they've had any run-ins with Sting, or have any good stories about Sting.
Dominic: No, I don't. The only big rock star I met was Bono when I was on a ski holiday when I was nine and he was skiing in the same place. He was skiing about in leather pants. Bono was crap at skiing, he kept falling on his arse and he fell on his arse right in front of me. I helped him up, but I was nine at the time and I was asked "Are you Bono, aren't you?" and he was going "No, no, I'm not Bono." I can't believe he was saying this to me but he had leather pants.
Janine: So you play bass and guitar in the band, is that correct?
Dominic: And I sing. Mostly I play bass because I'm not very good at the guitar.
Janine: And you come from Glasgow?
Dominic: Outside. I live actually outside Glasgow, in the country. We all live around Glasgow.
Janine: It seems that lately there's a lot of attention given to bands from that area. A lot of these bands don't really sound that much alike, but they all seem to be coming from the same area - like Belle and Sebastian, Arab Strap, Delgados.
Dominic: You don't think we sound like Arab Strap? I sort of thought we sounded like Arab Strap, because no one ever points out that we sound like Arab Strap, but we sound like them in so many cases and no one's ever mentioned it.
Anastasia: I think that of all the Glasgow bands, I would put Mogwai and Arab Strap the closest together, but at the same time you definitely do different things. I wouldn't neccesarily put Mogwai and Belle and Sebastian on a double bill.
Janine: Do you think there's something about that area is conducive to the amount of bands in the area, or are there not more bands there than anywhere else, but the media is just potryating it that way?
Dominic: Half of it is just pure coincidence. There's a lot of good bands coming from Glasgow, always has been. Because Glasgow is a really small place and it's really far removed from the music industry scene in London - most people in bands in London are in bands because they want to be stars, and everybody in a band in Glasgow just wants to make the best music they possibly can. There's no way you could get away with the star thing because of Glasgow being such a small place. If anyone was in a big band, like Belle and Sebastian, could quite easily justifiably walk about acting like rock stars, because they're huge, they've sold so many records, and they could be such a bunch of asses about it, but they're not. If anyone tried to do that in Glasgow you'd get horse whipped, you just wouldn't get away with it.
Anastasia: Do you think Glasgow is becoming the new London of Britain, as far as music is concerned?
Dominic: Not really, no. There's all these good bands, but it's always been like that.
Janine: Do you find that there's a particularly supportive environment there, though?
Dominic: All the bands do get on with each other, we're all friends. Because it's such a small place, there's only a certain amount of places to play, there's only a couple of pubs that people go in. I suppose everyone knows each other, everyone's pals with each other, but it's not quite the media portray it, it's not quite as calculated or cliquey.
Anastasia: Are there people coming from England to Glasgow trying to be in the scene?
Dominic: I never met anyone from England, I met someone from Halifax, Canada. The band was called the Rentals.
Janine: How did you first start playing music, how did you learn? Did you learn from other people or bands in Glasgow?
Dominic: No, it's like my brother bought a keyboard and bass guitar for about 40 pounds and he just never used it. I've got three big brothers. Two of them play guitar. So my oldest brother was a total punk fan, so he bought the bass, he thought, right, it's only got 4 strings, it must be really easy to play. He's one of these people if he can't pick it up right away, he can't be bothered. So I just taught myself. See, I was playing for about three or four years before I started the band with Stuart. I was in loads of really, really shit bands with people I knew from school.
Anastasia: What kinds of bands?
Dominic: I mean, bands that did Rolling Stones covers. I was absolutely mortified, I would never enjoy what we were doing, but there was nobody else I knew that liked the same sort of things I did to start a band with, so we'd sit there arguing "let's do a cover of Brown Sugar," and I'm like, "No, let's NOT do a cover of Brown Sugar."
Janine: So how did you meet the other people in the band?
Dominic: I met Stuart when I was sixteen at a Ned's Atomic Dustbin gig. They were my favorite band when I was fourteen. I thought that Ned's was the best band I'd ever heard.
Anastasia: They're a great band, highly underrated.
Janine: And they have two bass players.
Dominic: That's it. I met Stuart because he was a friend of my best friend's big brother. Stuart was actually a bit of a legend to me when I was a wee guy, because my best pal was always going "My brother knows this guy Stuart, and apparently he can play guitar chords." I just bumped into him because he was in odd bands and our bands played with each other a couple of times. One day e called me up and asked me if I wanted to start a band. He knew Martin because he went to see this band when he
was fourteen called Birdland. John used to go to school with me.
Janine: So, why does the band choose to work in a format that's mainly without lyrics, vocals, or singing?
Dominic: Well, when we first started, all the songs had singing on them, but there were a couple of tunes that were instrumental and we realized that we were a lot better at it.
Anastasia: When you first started playing with Stuart, was it the same type of thing you're doing now?
Dominic: No, actually it wasn't. It was pretty awful. It was pretty funky, there was a couple of tunes that I would even describe as being slightly grunge. We just got to the point where we realized that if the song didn't need vocals, if the tunes were good tunes, there was no point in putting them on and none of us are really good singers. Stuart's the best out of all of us.
Anastasia: The first time I saw you guys play was '97 at Brownies with Snow Patrol, that was great, and then you played at Other Music, and while I was at the show I was watching everyone in the crowd. And it was all men, all boys. And these were definitely people who when they were younger were metalheads. What influence does metal have on Mogwai? Were you guys into metal at any point?
Dominic: No, but the weird thing is, it's just that most people go through a heavy metal phase at about thirteen, but that stuff never appealed to me. But as soon as we started the band, about a year into it, we all started getting into Black Sabbath. And I'm disgusted to admit I absolutely love it. But it has absolutely no bearing on the music whatsoever. I don't know, we all like Black Sabbath, and that's about it. Maybe George used to be really into Poison and stuff like that. We all liked Guns n' Roses before we started. I don't know if they're really heavy metal, but we all liked Guns n' Roses.
Janine: I have to admit that when I was about twelve I was really into Poison and Guns n' Roses.
Anastasia: Everybody was, that was what you were exposed to. Remember the bad bands, like Anthrax and Skid Row?
Dominic: Whenever we come to New York, I always see Scott Ian. I saw him last night in a restaurant, who was sitting in the window but Scott Ian? What was I jabbering on about?
Janine: Well, since a lot of your songs don't have lyrics, where do the song titles come from? What's the relation to the song?
Dominic: It's all rubbish.
Anastasia: What was the Puff Daddy one?
Dominic: Puff Daddy Antichrist.
Anastasia: I want to know about that one.
Dominic: Sometimes we get really drunk before we go on and we write things on our arms just because we're bored stupid. One day I wrote "Puff Daddy Antichrist" it was just in between that Police sample one, I always hated that song.
Janine: Good for you, it's the worst!
Dominic: Stuart, every time he really wants to piss us off, he starts playing it. It was in between that and that massacre of Kashmir that they brought out, and I just can't stand him, and I just wrote "Puff Daddy Antichrist."
Janine: He takes the worst samples of the most overplayed songs.
Anastasia: I just saw him on MTV and he said "Well, if this is what I'm famous for - taking other people's songs - at least I'm famous for something." Such a bad attitude.
Dominic: I reckon he's a really sharp guy, because those really bad songs he samples... As soon as I start watching MTV, I can't stop watching, I wait for a good video that never comes on.
Anastasia: How do you see Mogwai in relation to the rest of the music that's coming out of Britain now? Or, where would you place yourselves, like the stuff you read in NME, like the bands that NME is touting as being really great right now?
Dominic: I don't know, I mean the thing is with NME, they have to cover the bands that sell in the papers, so it's very rare that you ever read about good bands in NME. But we did a tour with the Manic Street Preachers. I can't think of a more strange coupling of bands.
Anastasia: Well, how do you feel about the Manic Street Preachers?
Dominic: I think they are lovely guys, but musically they suck.
Anastasia: Were you into them when they had Richie?
Dominic: No, I've never liked them, never have.
Janine: I have to say I'm really not familiar with their music at all.
Dominic: They were huge in Britain. The singer went missing a couple of years ago.
Anastasia: Richie was a depressive drunk, he used to slash himself, then he just disappeared. When he was in the band, they were kind of not really punk, but rock.
Dominic: They used to wear ski masks. They came back as a sort of soft rock kind of band, then they had their terrorist sort of look, and then this guy went missing and they came back as stadium punks.
Anastasia: Are they fans of yours?
Dominic: They asked us because they liked us, they'd come see us quite often. It was like a warm up tour for them, much bigger places than we'd ever play. We'd get pure abuse every night. The first night we played I was really shaking, because we're so used to playing to people that want to see us. A couple of nights you got a handful of people to see us, but most of the time the people looking at you didn't understand it. They kept going "Where's the singing?" They hated us, the front three rows would be rows of teenagers. Every night it became our mission to go on stage and inflict as much noise as we could, just ruin 45 minutes of the night, it was great. You get so angry at these people.
Anastasia: I think the British press is freaking out because they had Britpop to ride all their press on, and now it's completely gone, and they're still putting Blur and Suede and Oasis on covers because they don't know what else to do.
Dominic: If we got completely slayed in the press, nobody would like us. Not nobody, but we would lose a lot of fans.
Janine: When you play live, do you do any improvising?
Dominic: Not really, most of our songs are so loosely structured anyway, we can go off a tangent. We don't really do it that much any more, we used to do it all the time when we first started. 30% of the time it was brilliant when we got it right, but 70% of the time, when you got it wrong, which is quite often, it really sucked.
Janine: Now when you're writing or recording the songs, do you all do it together, or separately? How does that work?
Dominic: When we first started the band it was usually Stuart. For the last album, Young Team, it was half me and half Stuart. Now, it's usually in rehearsal, somebody plays an idea and then we play our own parts to it.
Janine: So it's turning into more of a collaborative effort?
Dominic: Definitely. Most of the songs on this album are Stuart's, but two of them are mine, but they're more the whole band's this time, not mine or Stuart's.
Janine: When there's not one person singing, it seems easier to focus on playing really well together, I think they rhythm section tends to improve that way.
Dominic: They're so many bands that we like where the singing ruins the tunes. They've got amazing tunes, but really bad singing. It's a mistake, it's a convention that you've got to have singing, but you don't have to stick to normal songwriting structures when you don't have singing.
Anastasia: Do you feel like because you don't have singing on most of you songs, that it makes you inaccessable?
Dominic: I would like to be as huge as we possibly can, make some money to get a house, that would be great. Before we did the Manics tour we thought it was possible. They're just good basic tunes, there's no reason why people can't get into it. But most people will never like it, no matter how great the tunes are, because there's no singing, they can't understand it. We had a lot of people come up to us at those gigs, like "You're alright, we like the music, but there's no singing, you need to have singing."
Janine: Well, when you think about it, it's only for the past fifty years or so that singing has become an integral part of popular music. If you go back before rock n' roll, to big band, jazz, even classical, there's no singing. People responded to the emotions that the music brings out.
Dominic: A lot of people like dance music, which is really big in Britain. And there's no singing on it, it's all instrumental. I don't know if I even answered the question.
Janine: Well, there really was no question, it was just an observance.
Anastasia: It's easier to listen to a top 40 song. Music without words can be almost more rewarding, in a way.
Dominic: A lot of people don't see music like that. It's background music or something to dance to when you're going out to the pub. That's why you get stuff like Boyz to Men, Backstreet Boys...
Janine: Oh, I have to admit a weakness for the Backstreet Boys...
Dominic: "Backstreet's Back" is a fuckin' great tune.
Janine: Oh my god - that's the song I'm obsessed with! I'm not joking. I heard it on the radio and I literally almost fell down laughing. "Am I sexual? Oh yeah..." I have the album, someone gave it to me. I put it on at work for a laugh, but now everyone loves it.
Dominic: "Backstreet's Back" is such a good tune, there's no messing with it. The video's great. Stuart really loves it as well.
Janine: So, getting back to Mogwai - you recorded this album in upstate NY?
Dominic: Yeah, in a place called Cassadogas - just outside of Fredonia. It's absolutely beautiful. As soon as we arrived there, David said it was full on redneck country, he said because it was hunting season, so be careful if you're going for a walk. I thought, he's joking. But we went to a local store, and as soon as you walk in the store, you've got your armor section. You see the shotgun, the platic deer for the target practice, deer heads on the wall... all the arrows. We just wanted some beer and food and stuff. When we went back in the car and we were adjusting the mirror, someone was targeting us with a laser sight, like they were shining it on David's head. We thought, this is really bad. We were up there for about three weeks. We really wanted Dave to produce the album, but he doesn't really go anywhere else because he's got his family.
Anastasia: Did being in America, instead of Glasgow, have a different influence on the record?
Dominic: In Glasgow we were stunted because we'd go off to see girlfriends, or go off to the pub or something, we'd never concentrate on the album. So here, there was nothing else to do, you've just got the album to concentrate on. It took us absolutely ages to come up with the first album. There was rubbish because of it as well, cause we all had too many things going on at the time, too many distractions. It was great to concentrate on the album because there was absolutely nothing else to do.
Anastasia: So how do you see Mogwai fitting in with American music? Young Team was hugely successful at college radio.
Dominic: I think that basically most of the bands that are influences are American bands. Basically, Slint. When we first started the band, Stuart never heard them and I made a compilation tape up for Stuart, then I got a phone call from him going, "The tape's alright, but Slint is just the most incredible thing I've ever heard in my life" and that's the same thing I thought. Stuff like Slint, Rodan, Tortoise. I think most of what we do musically is not different at all from American bands, but we've got our own sort of British slant on it. I know some people are quite fond of the shoegazing scene that happened in Britain. That was a joke. A lot of people thought it was a lot of pretentious art school students, rich kids with guitars. I can't believe we saw in Other Music all these Slowdive records and Chapterhouse records and they were all for a ridiculous amount of money.
Anastasia: Speaking of shoegazing, you're working with Kevin Shields?
Dominic: He mixed on the album.
Anastasia: What was it like working with him?
Dominic: Well, we never actually met him. We just asked him if he'd do the remix and he did it. He came to see us a couple of times.