thanks to iain.

headline show on second stage

related links

the official festival website

reviews/comments

from iain:

f***in brilliant mogwai show.

had luke sutherland on bass for sine wave and violin for 'my father...' plus female cellist who also did some keyboardy/barry stuff when he was on guitar at a couple of points. stuart wore headphones for his vocal tracks- best i've heard him sing by a mile. john got carried away at the end as usual... only drawback was the prolonged noise at end of 'my father..'. he pushed over his amp head off the speakers at the end!

from nme.com:

mogwai make a brilliant noise. when stuart braithwaite and his mates kick back and allow 'tracy' to pump over and over with simple little melodic chords, there is nothing better. perhaps because their team celtic had a convincing win today the band are enlivened and full of vigour. or perhaps they just want to remind all that while manic street preachers can have people standing bewitched, thinking of past glories, they can sail in and in their own intense, layered way make deadly music that can hypnotise. of course they sound like slint and draws memories of spacemen 3 (this will become a theme), but theirs is a glorious individual noise. and a mighty way to close.

from david gill:

reading was the best mogwai gig i have seen. they played with an intensity and anger that i have never felt before. i have never seen john batter his equipment before either. it was loud but i still refuse to wear earplugs. amazing experience...

from gary:

i'd just like to say that was the best mogwai gig i have ever seen, definitely the highlight of the entire weekend. perhaps it was just the mood i was in, but it was amazing, and it was the first time i'd ever heard mogwai fear satan live, maybe that had something to do with it. the pa in front of me sort of "died" during 2 rights, so i missed out on the guitar solos a bit. i did wear earplugs, however, so i managed to stick around until the end.

from nick dyer:

mogwai were utterly magnificent (again!), i wonder how long a band can be this good for? they even have great lights now - not that that matters at all as things went loud, louder. very louder and then louder still. glorious and the jewish hymn thing went on on for a delicious amount of time. my legs ached and i needed sleep but i had to see it out. superb.

from bob a scott:

this was the 3rd time i'd seen them this year (shepherds bush & san francisco) and i think it was the 3rd best show i had seen (sf was no 1, followed by the shepherds bush gig). this time they really went for it with the light show - they had red and blue strobes pulsing away and along with the intense screaming "wall of sound" it was total sensory deprivation.

only two criticisms: the cellist was way too loud - she drowned out the opening guitar riff in 2 rights. second, the volume suddenly decreased at one point, and i have read on another site that they blew some speakers! is this true? they seemed to recover the volume for jewish hymn so maybe someone fixed the problem.

jewish hymn was mind blowing and it also hurt my head - stuart was doing something with his guitar on the stage and there were intermittent blasts of this excruciatingly loud grating noise, over the top of all the other sonic shenanigans. i considered leaving at this point (to save my ears) but stuck it out.

another amazing show - now what about this uk tour?

from tim whitehouse:

re: the pa 'dyin' during 2 rights - i got the impression that it was meant to happen and did not in fact die. some present muso's came up with some odd explanation of what they did. they were probably talking out their arse and it did in fact die. but the death sounded good.

anywho the show was absolutely incredible. easily as good as the atp set (which i've always considered the best gig i have ever seen). everyone i spoke to about it was absolutely amazed by them and felt it was like meeting god or something.

one thing that i noticed was they didn't seem to be so much a 'band' anymore. there were a couple of people on stage i hadn't seen before but stuart was always at the center and in front of everone else and appeared to be leading. people who didn't know the band thought that stuart was a chap called mogwai.