28/100 - White Rabbits and Frightened Rabbits

and Mogwai.

Three days back home touring Ava Anna Ada culminate in a festival, curated by my publisher, White Rabbit Books, and Stuart Braithwaite from Mogwai. After an afternoon of conversations, Mogwai are on stage. Mogwai are one of the loudest bands on earth, which is saying something since earlier, Michael Rother’s set nearly made conversation in the literature tent impossible. But Mogwai have taken the baton from NEU! and are running with it, as loud as they can.

It hits mostly in the chest, which is just where I like my drums to be, but it hits so hard breathing in again feels impossible. Lights match the rhythm of the drums until both become fireworks and sound comes alive, creating a process of sonic conversion. With Mogwai, I arrived a sceptic a decade and a half ago; I like my songs with lyrics and a clear verse chorus verse structure. I wasn’t sure I was going to like them. A summer’s afternoon and I put The Hawk is Howling on and quickly realised I couldn’t do anything else while I was listening. It demanded attention - and tonight, they command the same.

Some music, it exists until it doesn’t; the band leave the stage, the speakers cease their hum and it’s gone then. But Mogwai seem to make something tangible, there’s a real sense of something solid being made present during the set, something that is almost too much for one body to both see and hear, a thing that outlasting the final chords. The first time my youngest daughter encountered Rothko she fell to the floor; too much she said. Mogwai are too much, and instantly addictive, you want to see them again, again, more more. And tonight, as the light filters into the tent - a Scottish summer, the sun will barely set - they get louder, louder, more and more confident, and at the end of every song Stuart with his thank you, thank you very much, and it’s all he ever says and here is a band at the top of their game; here are a group of artists, bringing something flinty into being.

Encore and as the last song plays its way out we all spontaneously burst out laughing. We can’t stop. There’s something transcendent about the communality of it, the beauty and frailty of this human endeavour. How fleeting it is. How necessary it is.

It’s nearly two years since I last saw Bright Eyes, that night at sometime around five I prowled the house in search of an uncanny sound I heard until I realised it was in my ears; some fragment had followed me home. The same will happen tonight, after the lights go out and the roadies move out and we spill out into the low sun, and there are no cabs, no Ubers, no way to get back across the river, there’s nothing to be done other than walk to a pub; the first too crowded, the second, The Bell Jar, and a black cat crossing our path as we pile into it.

A friend grabs me, overcome by the fact we’re doing it too, we’re all making our things, our silly sustained pre-occupations. What a life it is.

One final drink for the road and it hits me smack in my chest then that all I want is to do the same to Frightened Rabbit. Give me one last night. One last time dancing in a tent, the floor grass. One last act of holy communion. If the poem stops time, the song suggests that it might exist instead as a series of undulations, rarely moving forward or backwards but instead each moment reflecting, recalling, repeating previous ones, perhaps this is one more night, one last night.