Spaceships Over Glasgow: Mogwai, Mayhem and Misspent Youth

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Braithwaite told me, “I do enjoy writing but had no idea really if I would. It was totally new to me. It was a bit of a leap of faith deciding to do something I’d never done. I think music and literature are very different though there is definitely a bit of overlap in the people that are drawn to both. I don’t think it’ll be the last thing I write so it’s good to have found something new that I enjoy” Stuart Braithwaite: ‘I’m not the kind of person that talks about myself.’ Photograph: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan The book for me is an honest answer to the question that I just assume all music fans have: how does someone from a small place in Lanarkshire end up touring the world and being able to make the kind of music that they want to make and have it be their life? That Braithwaite wrote the book partly because that life was being eroded by the pandemic and the fact that much of the response to Covid was predicated by structures of global capitalism is just as interesting as Mogwai “getting mortal” once again before, during, and after a gig. Being a touring musician is an identity that perhaps has no other true equivalent in the arts, and the impact on those who have made it their life through hard work – as well as hard partying – is important. Braithwaite married musician Elisabeth Elektra in April 2019. [20] He was previously married to music promoter Grainne Braithwaite-Vedamanikam. [21] Braithwaite is a supporter of Celtic F.C.. [22] Getting To Know You: Mogwai's and Minor Victories' Stuart Braithwaite". Loud And Quiet . Retrieved 23 March 2021.

So, I liked the book and it's a no brainer for a Mogwai fan. I've got the slightly fancier signed hardcover with photo book which is nice. Now I'd like a continuation and perhaps a more detailed look at the band as a whole. Iggy Pop at the Reading festival in August 1991, the same year as the Barrowlands Stooges gig in Glasgow. Photograph: Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy I read Stuart Braithwaite’s Spaceships Over Glasgow with a certain amount of personal interest, in addition to the trepidation that came with being a long time respecter of Mogwai’s music. I grew up in Hamilton, the Lanarkshire town where much of the book is located in the chapters dealing with its author’s formative years, a place that subsequently hovers throughout the text in spirit. Braithwaite’s mum was our family GP and I distinctly remember her injecting my arm when I got my primary school jags. Scotland is a small place and yet what I think the book perhaps does best is show how the connections between people and place can lead to new, larger possibilities within and emanating from the country. That record wasn’t a lot of fun to make,” recalls Braithwaite, speaking to Big Issue North over the phone as he walks his two dogs, Prince and Lyra, around a Glasgow park. “We didn’t have enough songs in the studio, so we were writing them at the same time and there was a lot of self-doubt. That meant we were really gobby and we kept telling everyone how brilliant our band was and how rubbish everyone else was. You can’t come out with all that nonsense and then not bring out a decent record, so there was a lot of pressure onus to deliver.” I think, given Braithwaite’s previous history of how he spends time, something will be done with it.I read a proof so it may be that the finished work differs a lot but I would say that this approach shows. I don’t, however, necessarily see that as a bad thing because to me the book is in some ways a document of learning. As he has clearly demonstrated for the last few decades, Braithwaite knows how to practice and make pretty much perfect at times. Raised in a pro-independence family – a rarer thing in the 90s than now – Braithwaite lent his voice and his music to the yes campaign in the run-up to the 2014 Scottish referendum, and is unwavering now that a second vote is never far from the headlines. “I hope all Scots are looking at the Tory PM leadership contest closely,” he tweeted in July. “Do we really want these people to be running our country? … We have an out. Let’s make sure we take it.” In Niall McCann’s film about a journey to a festival of Scottish indie music in Brittany, Lost in France, a gig and journey that Braithwaite documents in the book, he says it’s impossible to explain music and what it does to you, and I think that’s true. But sometimes that inexplicable feeling can be reactivated by someone else’s memories, much as Braithwaite himself found when writing it, saying, “One of the most fun parts of the whole thing was talking to old pals about things that had happened. Loads of the best stuff in the book was things I’d completely forgotten about until it came up from other people.” Stuart’s book, then, for me is a no-brainer of a read. Born just a wee bit before me, his musical discovery escapades (as covered in the first quarter-ish of the book) mirror my own quite closely. While reading, I can’t count the amount of times I nodded and smiled knowing he had been up to (roughly) the same daft shite I had been. There were a few bands I hadn’t got into as he did (13th Floor Elevators being the best example of a band I discovered only thanks to Spaceships Over Glasgow), but largely, his love of guitars and decadence very closely mirrored my own (I grew up in northern Cumbria, a few miles shy of Carlisle, for geographical comparison. Not Scotland, but near enough to pop over for a pint whenever we fancied). A couple of years later, having witnessed Nirvana at Reading in 1991, he realised with joy that Kurt Cobain was a fan of Scottish bands such as the Vaselines and Teenage Fanclub. How did the support of Cobain, the figurehead of ambition in alternative music at the time, affect the Glasgow scene that followed? “It really was quite important,” he says. “Because there were two camps. There was the ‘move to London and try to sell millions of records’ camp, and then there was the Pastels, Teenage Fanclub camp, and it was the ‘stay in Glasgow and be like the Pastels’ worldview that won. I think representation really matters. When I did start making my own music, I wasn’t thinking: ‘Oh, I can never do this’, because I’d seen people like me already do it.”

Stuart Braithwaite’s new book, Spaceships Over Glasgow, recalls life before Mogwai, when the bands he listened to changed his world However, Stuart is not a writer, and it shows. This is not (NOT!) necessarily a bad thing - it’s not like I bought the book and went into this thinking I’d get the same literary shivers as with Tolstoy, FFS - it’s an (I hope) honest and straightforward account of his growing up, musical formation, and subsequent adventures. I started reading on the basis of wanting to know more about the (by his own admission) wee fella, the one who’d slammed his pedals into my lug holes and sang straight into my heart on Cody. There’s still something untouchably poignant about the verse: INTERVIEW: Stuart Braithwaite (Mogwai) – "It's quite important as an artist to put yourself in an uncomfortable position" | XS Noize | Online Music Magazine". xsnoize.com. 25 January 2021 . Retrieved 23 March 2021.Bei der Begeisterung führte der einzig mögliche Weg für Stuart selbst in Richtung Musik. Anfang der 1990er Jahre traf er Dominic Aitchison und gründete vier Jahre später gemeinsam mit einem Schulfreund Mogwai. Der Name stammt von einer Figur aus dem Film Gremlins, bedeutet aber auch "Böser Geist" oder "Teufel" und ist Programm für die Band. Zu der Zeit war es üblich, dass sich Bands untereinander öffentlich stritten, Mogwai wurde bekannt mit einem T-Shirt, auf der eine Beleidigung gegen Blur stand.

The group’s witty song and album titles have similarly punctured any notions of pomposity. Memorable entries in their canon include: I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead; Simon Ferocious; I Love You, I’m Going To Blow Up Your School; and Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will. And this writer’s personal favourite, You’re Lionel Ritchie.Mogwai was one of those bands which I read a lot about but did not have a chance to listen to their music. I was a teenager in the 90’s and it was difficult to come across their music at the time as record stores in Malta only focused on major label bands . Finally in ’99 , NME issued a best of the year compilation and Cody was on it and I was smitten. Braithwaite met Dominic Aitchison at a Ned's Atomic Dustbin show at the Queen Margaret Union in Glasgow on 10 April 1991, and four years later, along with school friend Martin Bulloch, they formed Mogwai.

If you've lived in Glasgow and had any interest at all in live music then this book is likely to please in a particular way, like me you will be familiar with many of the bands, venues, local areas and festivals mentioned. There's something quite thrilling about reading about familiar places in a real book. At heart, this book is a love letter to music, especially live music, and Stuart Braithwaite writes quite movingly about formative gigs and musical experiences. I'm about 6 years younger so it was interesting for me to see where our experiences intersected. Many of the bands Stuart loved as a teenager, or knew as fellow musicians, I didn't discover until much later. I didn't see the Cure play until 2011 and by the time I discovered Nirvana Kurt Cobain was already dead. The years aren't clearly stated, but when he said he saw David Bowie's last gig before he cancelled the rest of the tour I wondered if that was the same year he cancelled his appearance at T in the Park where I would have seen him. I didn't discover Mogwai themselves until about the Mr Beast album. Indeed as a teenager I was quite into Britpop bands which get a bit of a hammering in this book. Fortunately Stuart has a good time with Elastica, who played the second gig I ever went to. Around then I had a dream that I was in a band (something that was only a flight of fancy at this point) and was playing a gig with The Cure in a big field. It was a prophecy of sorts as 14 years later, now playing in my own band, Mogwai, we were invited by Robert Smith to play with them at Hyde Park in London. Pay attention to your dreams. They just might come true! Mogwai Young Team and Come On Die Young laid the foundations for Mogwai’s now three decades-long career. Subsequent albums grew more ambitious and diverse, adding strings, pianos, shimmering electronics and the occasional vocal to their dynamic sound, while regular touring and incendiary live shows attracted a loyal and sizeable following around the world. Mogwai's Stuart Braithwaite: "Creating art is a political act, because you're choosing to spend your time making the world a better place" ". Kerrang!. 15 February 2021 . Retrieved 23 March 2021. So, I was hyped for his memoir and it's competently told, with simple prose, full of interesting glimpses behind the scenes and a lot I wasn't aware of. The excesses and hedonism, the making of both Young Team and CODY were fascinating, the chaos. The middle section gets somewhat repetitive; there are only so many ways to describe being off your tits on anything going (and as someone who used to drink a lot and now doesn't at all, it got a little exhausting). The final section also felt rushed. I wanted to know more about the recent years, what happened with John, insights into the band's collaborative processes, is the alcohol and drug taking still ongoing or have things changed, why etc etc?

The sense of family that is evident throughout – whether his own, the band itself, touring pals or recording with Mercury Rev’s Dave Fridmann – is what persists underneath any ‘mayhem’. I would also argue that a youth is not misspent when you have amassed the body of work that Mogwai has and this book, if anything, shows that what society tells kids is time wasted is often very much not. When offered the means to make use of time differently they can and often will do so positively. Stuart Braithwaite (19 April 2017). "Oddly shaped emptiness – 10 Years of 'Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters' ". GoldFlakePaint. After an initial outing in the unfortunately (and provocatively named), Pregnant Nun, Stuart – alongside teenage friends Dominic Aitchison and Martin Bulloch – upgrades the band name to MOGWAI. They release their first single ‘Tuner/Lower’ in 1996. Championed by the legendary John Peel, and making a name for themselves for tinnitus-inducing live shows, MOGWAI’S subsequent single ‘Summer’ is named Single of the Week in NME. Their first album, Mogwai Young Team, follows to significant critical acclaim. I've seen them over 20 times in 4 countries (once flying to the states from NZ to follow then down the west coast). I'd have seen them more if we hadn't moved to NZ many years ago (they don't come here much sadly). I've been to a few of the gigs mentioned in the book. I've met and chatted to Stuart a few times over the years at gigs and he was always very nice (and didn't act too weirded out when I explained how I'd flown half way round the world to follow them). Maybe that's because he was wasted at the time?!