After so many years of fantastic tales told and hero worship bestowed, the business of rock n’ roll – of being an artist in any sort of pop music form for that matter – has become a very unusual endeavour. Tales of bands embarking upon marathon tours (Robert Plant’s solo tour behind his Now And Zen album in 1988 was known as the Non–Stop Go Tour for a reason; Guns N’ Roses toured Use Your Illusion for two years straight; the list goes on) or transcendent, inspiring single performance moments are the sorts of trivia that die–hard fans keep in little jewel boxes to show off occasionally and become the fodder for urban legends but, realistically, does every band regard their own performances that way? Is the exhaustion and drama that a band feels or is subjected to really that bad? In talking to Mogwai guitarist Stuart Braithwaite, a case could be made for the possibility that those incredible stories are nothing more than tall tales; not because he has proof that some of them didn’t happen or are grossly exaggerated, but because Mogwai goes out on lengthy tours too and, even 14 years after forming, still find joy in performing and touring most of the time and, in those rare moments when it does get hard, each bandmember simply drops his head and gets the job done. “As of about right now, we’ve been on tour for about a year,” laughs Braithwaite before Mogwai’s set at the Trocadero in Philadelphia, PA, “We’ve already been to Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, Europe and now North America this year. We’re going to be here for a month so we’re going to be covering a bunch of the key markets in the U.S. and Canada, and then, after we go home for a few weeks, we start in on doing European festivals.
“Honestly? We’re just happy to play anywhere,” continues the guitarist, frankly. “I know there’s this perception that we’re a different sort of band for one reason or another, and that we might not work so well on the festival circuit but, at a lot of the festivals we play – it’s funny because we’re considered the mainstream band and the other groups are the left field bands! Because of that, when we go to play [we] don’t worry about how we’re going to fit in or anything like that. If people ask us to play, we just turn up and play; it’s not a chore and it’s not like we don’t enjoy it. I mean, sure it’s a long time, but it’s also a good time. We’re going to some pretty nice places, we’ve got lots of friends all over; it’s pretty far from a chore. I think we’re pretty lucky to play our music all over the world and, so far on this trip, we’ve been playing quite a few new songs as well as a few songs from each record – a couple extra from the new one – and it’s been going well. We’ve got no complaints.”
