Mogwai formed in Glasgow in 1995. Five people from various parts of the city who were interested in making music that was very quiet and then very loud, that built dynamics across long tracks without relying on conventional song structures, that used the physical experience of volume as a compositional tool. Their early singles – Tuner/Lower in 1996, Summer in 1997 – announced something that sounded like no Scottish band that had existed before them.
By the time Young Team came out in 1997 – their debut album on Chemikal Underground, the Glasgow independent label – it was clear that something specific was happening in the city. Mogwai were not alone.
The Infrastructure
Glasgow’s post-rock moment was enabled by the simultaneous existence of two independent labels that were paying attention to different versions of the same aesthetic impulse. Chemikal Underground had been founded in 1994 by members of the Delgados, initially to release their own material, and rapidly became the label that defined a specific Glasgow sound. Arab Strap signed to it; so did Mogwai, initially. The Delgados themselves – whose orchestral rock became increasingly ambitious through the late 1990s and early 2000s – released their defining work through it.
Rock Action was founded by Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite in 2000, initially as a vehicle for the band’s own releases before evolving into a label that signed acts including Errors, RM Hubbert and later Blanck Mass. Both labels operated from Glasgow on independent means: no major label funding, modest advances, the expectation that the music would be allowed to develop on its own terms.
Why Glasgow Made This Music
The question of why Glasgow specifically produced a concentration of post-rock and instrumentally-led music in this period has been discussed at length and without definitive conclusion. The practical factors are identifiable: rehearsal space was cheap, the venue ecosystem from King Tut’s upwards gave bands a natural progression, the city’s existing music culture was not dominated by a single genre that excluded everything else.
The weather argument is always made and should not be entirely dismissed. Post-rock is indoor music. It is music for dark evenings and long winters, for the kind of sustained interior attention that grey October afternoons encourage. Glasgow’s climate is sympathetic to this kind of making.
There is also the specific quality of the city’s noise. Glasgow has a physical loudness – the rumble of the underground, the density of the tenement stone, the way traffic sounds in canyon streets – that informs the music made there. Mogwai’s volume is not arbitrary. It is commensurate with something the city generates.
The Legacy
Mogwai are still operating, releasing their tenth album As the Love Continues in 2021 to a UK number one – the first post-rock album to achieve that. Chemikal Underground merged with Rock Action in 2019. The Delgados dissolved in 2005 after two of their finest albums. Arab Strap returned from hiatus in 2016 and have been making some of their best work since.
The Glasgow post-rock scene of the late 1990s was not, in retrospect, a scene in the sense of a social network with shared aesthetics and venues. It was a coincidence of several serious bands operating in the same city at the same time, enabled by infrastructure that Glasgow had built for other reasons. The music it produced has lasted considerably better than most of what else was being made in British music at the time.
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