support from aerial m and us maple

melody maker review

review from midnightpunk

this was a great gig. very packed venue, looking back it must have been sold out.

aeriel m where one of the best support cats i ever have seen. real lo-fi material but outstanding unassuming musicians. they looked the (usa) arty / nerd-rock-part and boy did they sound good. i did not know any of their material before seeing them but i’d recommend you dig some of their material from 1998 out if possible.

rate 9 out of 10.

mogwai were quietly becoming quite big in an underground kind of way. despite having a smattering of their 12 inches and lp’s i was not that familiar with their material. they, as quite a few bands do, picked up on the birmingham / black sabbath thing (i.e. playing in the city where sabbath are from). it always amazes me that the audience generally look non-plussed when bands do this. birmingham. industrial. sabbath. we should be proud. of note that mogwai put out a split 7 inch single with magoo at this time and did a wicked version of “black sabbath”.

anyway. i was really enjoying the show but left as the non-stop strobe and sheer amount of people in the venue made the mates i’d gone with want to leave. the strobe really was non sop and to an extent i could see their point – when we got out of the venue we all got that whoa! feeling you can only get by standing in a packed room blasted with feedback with constant strobe! we went to the nearby victoria for last orders. despite missing what must have been the last 15 minutes or so it was a great gig.

rate 9 out of 10.

review from matt claridge [2014]

The second Mogwai gig I saw had the impossible act of following up the (cliché alert) life changing Stoke-on-Trent Stage show from 1997. This time one of the friends at Stoke brought her sister (who due to living and working in Birmingham at the time rather than being a student with nothing better to do on a midweek night missed out first time around). I had also banged on about the Stoke show to old school mates, one of whom was studying in Brum, resulting in a small corner of my school Sixth Form Common Room reuniting in the part of Birmingham where the city appeared to give up any attempts to look like a modern cosmopolitan metropolis and instead descended into tatty roundabouts, flyovers, menacing looking pubs and boarded up shops. Of course this might all be bollocks, because my memory of the night is that we met up on hot summers evening, but the date of the gig is actually in February!

Anyway, the gig itself. I think we skipped the first support group, but we made sure that we were in there in time for Aerial M, the ex-girlfriend being something of a fan of Slint. They were good but no Arab Strap. My main memory of the gig (and again, this may well have been distorted by time and the slightly awkward feeling of meeting with up old and new friends simultaneously) was that the venue was one where unless you got there very early and staked out your spot from the outset, you weren't likely to see all too much.

Mogwai themselves were fine, but there was a slight feeling of anti-climax for me as we struggled to see (and unbelievably to hear; chattering broke out towards the back as members of the audience with the same visual predicament - the quieter sections were accompanied by a rumbling of talking, reducing the impact of the crashing loud sections). There was also that slight sniffiness of "where were all you people last year" due to the sardine-like nature of the crowd and the lack of Brendan O'Hare's all round zaniness. All in all I'm probably painting a picture that suggests the gig was less than stellar, but that isn't the case, it was just such a different experience from a few months previously. Maybe the best way to put it was that I liked the band more after the show than I did before. And at least three of my pals that saw them for the first time that night came back for more (the two weren't so blown away I was never that close to in the first place!).

review from the birmingham post

although many compliments have been paid to mogwai in the music press, they can hardly be described as media darlings. as for exposure on the air waves - the mogwai sound is not really devised with radio playlists in mind. it came as something of a shock, therefore, to find the foundry packed for the young glaswegian noise terrorists.

for the uninitiated, the first few minutes of the performance must have been bewildering. with most of the crowd chatting, stuart braithwaite and his co-conspirators gently strummed their guitars, repeating the same chord sequences as though still tuningup, before launching into a blistering white noise onslaught. the intensity was further heightened by brutal strobe lighting.

proceedings continued in this manner. beneath the racket, some semblance of melody could always be detected, while the quiet moments were hypnotic. even without vocals, the songs were engrossing.

my bloody valentine might have patented this ear and spirit-penetrating sound, but mogwai are worthy successors. of today's bands only spiritualized are as adept at exploring extremes in such a compelling fashion.

to say that no one left disappointed or underwhelmed would be a ludicrous understatement. by the time mogwai vacated the stage amid a sea of feedback and blinding visual pyrotechnics pyrotechnics, most fans appeared under the impression that their lives had been changed irreversibly.

oliver kirkland