Scottish post-rock pioneers Mogwai return to T in the Park, a decade after their infamous headline performance where they there taunted fellow headliners Blur - who are also playing this year. Blimey, what a strange coincidence!
In 1999, the prickly Glasgow instrumentalists baited those poor Essex lads at T in the Park by selling T-shirts with the slogan “Blur: Are S***e” adorned on the chest.
The band went on to claim that “78 percent of people agree that Blur are s***e”. Blur braved it out and refused to be drawn into a war of words (though that was possibly because they were too busy being rubbish to notice that they’d been rumbled).
But we move swiftly on from that contrived “controversy” - not least since it’ll be no doubt resurrected at this year’s festival in some way - as it’ll get away from the fact that Mogwai are one of the best bands that Scotland has been lucky enough to ever produce.
They broke on to the Glasgow scene in the late nineties alongside contemporaries The Delgados and Arab Strap, but while their contemporaries have slowly but surely faded away it could be said that Mogwai’s most recent album The Hawk Is Howling is perhaps their finest to date.
They’ve nailed the art of brooding, sweeping epics such as The Precipice and heart-breakingly fragile slow-builders such as Scotland’s Shame, and in Batcat they also an unrelenting rock behemoth which live signals a concerted attempt to try and deafen those few fans not already suffering from tinnitus as some sort of badge of honour.
If Mogwai hailed from abroad we’d receive them with rapture every time they set foot on these shores, but as they’re Scottish we’ll instead ignore them for the most part and then probably put them on an unassailable pedal once they’re gone.
