After 25 years Mogwai have a number one album – and it only took a pandemic to get there

Twelve months into Covid, the world has transformed in many radical ways. Face-masks are de rigueur. Disney is releasing blockbusters straight to the small screen. “Take-away” pints are a thing. And now comes ultimate proof of how topsy turvy life has become: veteran Glasgow indie rockers Mogwai have just scored a number one album.

They’ve done so with a beautiful, graceful and emotion-packed collection of largely instrumental compositions called As The Love Continues. Mogwai snatched top spot from grime MC Ghetts, who pulled out the stops to promote his record, Conflict of Interest, going go far as to drive a tank through London.

The response from the public to the stunt was “thanks but no tanks”. Because the charts are weighted in favour of physical formats, it is believed strong vinyl sales gave Mogwai the edge over Ghetts, whose audience will have listened to his music largely via streaming. As a bonus, Mogwai received the support of Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood, which will have played well with the hobbit demographic.

However, the true explanation for Mogwai’s victory may be that their 10th studio LP feels powerfully of the moment. It captures the rollercoaster nature of getting through Covid-19 and could plausibly join Taylor Swift’s Folklore and Charli XCX’s How I’m Feeling Now in the pantheon of great lockdown long-players that speak to the bittersweet stillness of life today.

Mogwai are, in other words, ideal pandemic listening. Which is presumably one reason why As The Love Continues vaulted over Dua Lipa, The Weeknd and Ariana Grande to give the quartet their first chart topper in their 25-year existence. It’s also the perfect introduction to Mogwai in that it reprises their classic formula whereby a quiet, menacing guitar bit will give way a louder, even more menacing guitar bit. Sometimes keyboards will sweep in. Drums may explode. There is rarely any singing. It will sound as if the universe is ending, but in oddly comforting fashion.

As is often the case with great albums, the sad magic that swirls through As The Love Continues was a product of happenstance. The plan had been for Mogwai, which features Stuart Braithwaite (guitar and vocals), Barry Burns (guitar, piano, synths), Dominic Aitchison (bass) and Martin Bulloch (drums), to fly to New York state to work with Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann.

Fridmann, known for his spacey, psychedelic sound, indeed produced the record. But at one remove, with Mogwai writing in isolation and then hooking up with their American collaborator remotely from a studio in Worcestershire.

What resulted from this transatlantic collaboration echoes Taylor Swift’s achievements on Folklore. On the face of it, the comparison may feel absurd. But look more closely and the parallels are clear. Swift’s finest album to date came together as the pandemic gave her an opportunity to pause for breath. To step back and think about her music and how it related to her life. The same is true of Mogwai, as Braithwaite hinted in a recent interview.

“The memories of the pandemic will always be coupled with the memories of making this record,” he told the NME in January. “Making the album was the happiest I’ve been during the pandemic… We were extremely grateful for the experience and I hope we made the most of it. I think it’s quite a warm record, and that might have come from writing the music while we were stuck inside during a plague. It has a lot of positivity to it, which some of our records in the past haven’t so much.”

Mogwai topping the charts will be regarded as a shot in the arm for the UK indie scene, which has been reeling as Covid devastated live music.

Yet for those who have been with the group since their 1997 debut Young Team (which peaked at 75) the notion of a number one album by the Scottish “noiseniks” – as one was legally obliged to refer to them through the Nineties – is slightly unmooring. Exciting yes. But hard to get your head around, too.

Mogwai materialised just as Britpop was about to come toppling down. And from the outset they stood definitely apart from the self-satisfaction that defined the period. As Blur, Oasis, Pulp etc incorporated the bouncy spirit of fish and chips, Carry On films and Michael Caine’s Get Carter (with varying degrees of irony), Mogwai were the brooding outsiders. They refused to join a party they knew was going to end with tears, smashed crockery and someone throwing up in the rose bushes.

Their music was no less brooding. Young Team culminates in a 16-minute instrumental called Mogwai Fear Satan. It is essentially the anti-Parklife, a riposte to the chipper cheekiness demanded of pop stars of that era.

This wasn’t merely something bystanders read into their music, either. Mogwai were explicitly against the mainstream. For instance, they boycotted TFI Friday, Chris Evans’s lads-mag-on-the-telly backslapping fest which set the boorish tone for much of Britpop.

“We never would’ve done it. I’ve never met the guy, but popular culture around then got ridiculous,” the band’s unofficial leader Stuart Braithwaite told the Irish Times’s Éamon Sweeney in 2015. “You had TFI Friday and Damien Hirst. I can feel myself bitching when I start thinking about it. It was a really cosy, west-London, jokey, cocaine-fuelled social circle. To be honest, I just found it really gross.”

One Nineties tradition to which they weren’t immune was the ding-dong rock feud. In 1999, they took on Blur in hilariously uncompromising fashion by selling t-shirts with the message Blur: Are Shite.

“We decided to proclaim our dislike of one of the weakest bands on the planet by putting out these shirts,” Braithwaite said at the time. “We sold out in one day and Super Furry Animals and Pavement have put in an order for more. The thing about the shirt is it’s like a dictionary definition. Blur: Are Shite. It’s factual and if there’s any legal problems about it I’ll go to court as someone who has studied music so I can prove they are shite.”

If you’ve encountered Mogwai recently it may well be via their soundtrack work. They’ve scored art-house movies (Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait) and prestige television (French zombie romp Les Revenants). This year, they could be heard on Sky’s continent-hopping Narco thriller ZeroZeroZero. However, the conventional long-play record has always been their natural medium and many fans are in agreement that As The Love Continues is their finest since early in their career.

But even if it wasn’t, Mogwai at number one is surely a cause for optimism. For outsiders, underdogs or anyone who has ever felt they didn’t fit in, the idea of a middle-aged “post rock” instrumental band sitting at the top of the charts, gazing down at Harry Styles, Lewis Capaldi etc, feels like a win. And a reason to face into the rest of 2021 with a smile and a spring in your gait.