Reasons to be cheerful

For a man who spent the previous evening indulging in unrefined merrymaking to celebrate the occasion of his 27th birthday, Stuart Braithwaite cuts a remarkably chipper figure. Bounding down the stairs of the Hilton Hotel, the shorn-headed ‘Gwai spokesman enthusiastically greets your correspondent, before proceeding to order a heartily enjoyed late afternoon lunch. As you’ve undoubtedly surmised by this point, Braithwaite and his bandmates are only in the early stages of their latest tour, and have not yet succumbed to the tiredness and over-familiarity that inevitably surface amongst musicians after a prolonged period on the road.

One thing’s for sure, however - at this moment in time Stuart and co. have precious little to be unhappy about. The Glaswegian five-piece are currently playing in support of their staggering new long-player, Happy Songs For Happy People, a dazzling collection of space-age laments that only seems set to further seal their status as one of the finest groups on the planet.

Recently awarded a richly deserved nine-point-five/ten in these very pages, Happy Songs drifts along with all the grace and endless majesty of the spaceships in 2001, and boasts a sonic modernity drastically out of step with the prevailing garage-rock zeitgeist. In fact, as Braithwaite explains, the process of recording the album was dramatically different to what Mogwai had done before.

“For a start, we did the whole thing a lot more quickly, in less than five weeks,” he explains. “We really rehearsed the songs before we went in, whereas in the past we’ve probably been guilty of not having things finished and then really having to do a lot of work in the studio. This time round, because we were a lot more prepared than we usually are, we managed to get the record done without a great amount of flummoxing.

“Another difference was that we actually produced this album ourselves. That was quite a change from working with someone like Dave Fridmann, although it has to be said that Dave is probably far less authoritarian than a lot of producers around. He helped out and suggested a lot of ideas, but we’re not the kind of band that’s ever going to be easily moulded. Dave was never into the ‘puppet master’ school of production, he wasn’t really into imposing his vision on the band. But he did make a big contribution and he’d even write a couple of parts here and there, so we did miss him. Dave was more like a sixth member of the band in some respects.”

Mogwai, of course, were graduates of the mid-nineties Glasgow indie scene, that great flowering of Scottish musical talent which also spawned such underground luminaries as Arab Strap, Bis, and, er, “misunderstood visionaries” My Arse Imploded. Is it a time Stuart looks back on fondly or unfondly?

“I just look back on it,” he replies, with a degree of neutrality that would make even Brian Cowen blush. “I mean, even around then there were a lot of great bands who never even got their shit together to make a record. That’s the weird thing about scenes, it’s not always the bands who end up in the NME who are the best ones. For one reason or another, sometimes in local scenes great bands just absolutely blow it. Then there’s the random factors, like one of the guys has to move away to get a job, and then probably a lot of it comes down to what your motivation actually is for doing this in the first place.

“I mean, I remember back years ago, when we were just starting out in Glasgow, having an argument with this kid from another band who were around the time. He was complaining that we had marketing, that we’d put posters up and advertise our gigs. He was moaning away, like, ‘Shellac don’t have posters’, all this shit. So I said to him, ‘Look, bottom-line, what are you going to be doing when you’re 30?’ And his reply was, ‘I’m going to be an architect’. So I said to him, ‘That’s fine, you’ll be an architect. But I’m going to be in a band, so I’m gonna go put some fucking posters up!’”