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I am sitting
and can hear Whenever I listen to Mogwai they make everything else seem so unimportant, forgettable, and that there's no point in worrying. Nothing matters but the noise, it blocks out the stupid noises in your brain, the ones that stop you doing what you could. You just want to fill your head with the noise and you keep playing the songs and turning up the volume, trying to breathe the noise. When Stuart leans back with his head on the monitor, you know he understands what music means, what noise means. Mogwai bring back the days when I used to listen to 'Dreams Burn Down' on my walkman at top volume with the headphones pressed against my ears, watching the patterns the leaves of the trees make against the sky when you're on a coach at dusk. Watching the white lines at the side of the road, twisting round the corners, disappearing under the wheels, cracking and showing the texture of the road. Watching the telegraph wires separate and join, separate and join, split and split and disappear...
That coach trip
changed my life I suppose - it wasn't much of an event, just a chance
to get out of some classes, get out of town for the day. But on the
way back, it was getting on for winter and it was darkening fast -
I had Ride on my walkman and the seat to myself and I lay back with
my head juddering on the window and I noticed those three things for
the first time in my life. Now I love travelling, particularly on
the train where you can watch the telegraph wires for as long as you
like, and if you're lucky there'll be some metal bridges with huge
metal patterns criss-crossing in front of your eyes, so fast that
you can hardly focus on it. And now I listen to Mogwai. People use the images they love to describe Mogwai. They get the same feelings listening to Mogwai as they do when being entranced by whatever they personally find entrancing and beautiful. So while some people think of stormy skies and rolling hills, I always think of telegraph wires and metal bridges. I can totally understand people connecting Mogwai with nature but as much as I love nature, I'm more inspired by the mechanical than the natural. Mogwai do it all - weak knees, goosebumps, hair on end, pain, joy, heartache, shivered timbers, the lot. There's nothing like that feeling in 'Xmas Steps' just before the guitars are about to come crunching in, you get this sick feeling in your stomach like when the lift goes down too fast or you drive too fast over a bumpy bridge. It gets me every time. Too much of this could drive you mad.
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