Written by When Mogwai formed in Glasgow in 1995, Britpop and the ‘Cool Britannia’ cultural brand was at its zenith, with indie rock stars on the front pages of England’s tabloid newspapers almost as regularly as they graced the covers of influential music magazines NME and Melody Maker.
Mogwai, it’s fair to say, felt zero affinity with the nation’s cultural zeitgeist.
“It was a disposable culture, where people were so fixated on the next thing that bands would be discarded,” recalls bandleader and guitarist Stuart Braithwaite in a new interview with The Times. “It was like music was a joke.”
“People say British,” adds multi-instrumentalist Barry Burns, “but what they mean is English. Scotland didn’t really feel part of Britpop, it always felt culturally closer to America. We were listening to more Television than the Kinks.”
While Stuart Braithwaite tells Times writer Jonathan Dean, that he’s “not going to castigate an entire era of music”, at the time, there was one Britpop band more than any other who grated on Mogwai: Blur.
“It’d be fair to say they were the antithesis of what we felt was good in the world of music,” Braithwaite recalled in his excellent 2022 memoir Spaceships Over Glasgow: Mogwai And Misspent Youth. “Their anti-American English nationalism also grated, as did their fake cockney accents.”
In 1999, when the two bands were given the same stage time at Scotland’s T In The Park festival – Blur on the main stage, Mogwai on the Radio 1 Evening Session Stage – the Glasgow band decided to commemorate the occasion with a new piece of merchandise: a T-shirt featuring the emphatic declaration ‘Blur: Are Shite’.
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“We decided to proclaim our dislike of one of the weakest bands on the planet by putting out these shirts,” Braithwaite told NME at the time. “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.”
“It was super childish but I honestly didn’t think anyone would really notice,” he wrote in his memoir. “They did notice. To those not familiar with my somewhat acerbic sense of humour it probably read like I was some kind of malevolent psychopath. Blur were (and are) far from my favourite band, but it really wasn’t worth all the hassle that ensued. For weeks the music press letters pages were full of furious Britpop fans aghast at the temerity of anyone casting aspersions on their heroes.”
“I recall my mum saying to me that we shouldn’t feel the need to be saying stuff about other bands because people really liked our music in its own right. She was of course right, but I was too young and daft to hear it.”
“It was a silly idea we thought would be funny but it had more attention than anticipated,” Braithwaite says now.
For the record, unlike in their ‘battle’ with Oasis, Blur opted to stay out of this entertainingly one-sided feud. In fact, Blur guitarist Graham Coxon was a Mogwai fan.
In 2015, when a fan on Twitter asked ‘Do you think Mogwai is shite”, the guitarist replied, “Not at all, quite the opposite.”
With the benefit of hindsight, Stuart Braithwaite mused “I’m not entirely sure it was worth it, as funny as it was at the time.”
“After all,” he said, “who really gives a fuck what Mogwai think about Blur?”
