The Scottish post-rock kingpins of Mogwai have had a busy summer touring the European festival circuit, playing their first music-themed cruise and launching a U.S. tour highlighted by a Psycho Las Vegas appearance. The Weekly caught up with guitarist Stuart Braithwaite to chat about the upcoming gig here and more.
Psycho Las Vegas 2019
What are you most looking forward to at Psycho Las Vegas? I’m really excited about seeing the Misfits. And just playing a different event. Especially in Europe, we play quite a lot of the same events every couple of years, so just to go somewhere totally new is something really fun.
Is Mogwai working on new music? We’re working on a soundtrack for a show. I think it’s going to be on early next year. It’s quite heavy, a lot of it. The thing we were working on today was more plaintive and kind of beautiful, but I think most of it’s pretty harsh. I think people are going to enjoy it. [Then] we’re going to start to think about making another record as well.
Mogwai will mark 25 years as a band next year. Is that on your radar at all? I don’t know if we’re going to do anything particularly, but we’re definitely keeping it in mind. We did celebrate 20 years with some shows and a compilation, [so] it seems almost too soon to do that again—to pat ourselves on the back again five years later. I don’t really think of these things myself, but I’ll quite often see on Instagram or Twitter somebody saying that our record’s 20 years old, or 10 years old or something. It doesn’t feel that long. The passage of time changes in your mind as you get older.
As a band still creating new music, it is weird to look back? The culture of nostalgia, I think, is good in a lot of ways. Things don’t go out of vogue in the way they did before. But there can be a tendency to live in the past. Apart from one time, where we played our first album because we got an offer we couldn’t refuse, we veer away from that, because I’d rather people were excited about what we’re doing now.
Mogwai has played Vegas several times. Do you have any memorable experiences here? We played one time at the Hard Rock Cafe, and the soundcheck was so loud one of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s guitars fell off the wall. That was quite awkward.
MOGWAI Sunday, 3:50 p.m., Events Center.