Gig review: Mogwai

Published on Thursday 25 June 2009 20:51

***** PICTURE HOUSE, EDINBURGH

"I KNOW we're not The Boredoms or The Fall," noted Mogwai's Stuart Braithwaite on his band's unveiling as the special live guests at this UK premier of the film All Tomorrow's Parties, "but I hope we'll do". Of course they would. For those who know and love All Tomorrow's Parties – aka ATP, a thrice-annual alternative music festival held in off-season holiday camps in England – Mogwai are idols, perhaps matched only by fellow ATP regulars Sonic Youth and Shellac.

Whether the correct tone of the festival (intelligent, modest, doesn't like to shout about itself) had been met for its first foray north of the Border was debatable, as this presentation of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, event producers Future Cinema and filmmakers Warp X kicked off with donkeys, bluecoats and boisterous "holidaymakers" parading up and down Lothian Road, all in the name of recreating a bit of 50s holiday camp tack. Also performing promenade-style through the street and venue were local outfits the Second Hand Marching Band and Jesus H Foxx.

Yet Mogwai (performing after the film, an excellent cinema verite document) are a most ATPish band. Epic, affecting and resolutely ungimmicky – although some accompanying live video footage mixed with monochrome local authority architecture added a new visual element – their current set spans early triumphs Summer and Helicon 1, the mid-period Hunted by a Freak, and the more recent Scotland's Shame and I'm Jim Morrison I'm Dead, rumbling to a thunderous conclusion with the 20-minute My Father My King. It would be lovely to see them curate their own Scottish leg of the festival one day.