Mogwai's Barry Burns on Camaraderie, Comedy, and Bombing Onstage

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Mogwai are and have been legends since Young Team; one of my favorite concert moments of the last 15 years was getting to watch them rip through "Mogwai Fear Satan" while sitting on scaffolding backstage at Primavera Sound in 2011. But they've been on a real creative tear in the last few years as well; 2021's brilliant As the Love Continues actually topped the charts in the UK, and their latest The Bad Fire continues their hot streak when it comes to thick, gothic slabs of melody. I got to talk to Stuart Braithwaite back in 2011 circa the release of Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will, and I was very pleased to have a go-round with the band's exceedingly good-natured and cheery multi-instrumentalist Barry Burns last week. Check it out:

You went through something pretty specific and intense while Mogwai were recording this new album. Talk to me about that.
My daughter, she was one year old at the time, and she had these weird bruises on her body. Her gums were bleeding one night, so we took her to the hospital and she turned out to have this pretty rare blood condition called aplastic anemia. I didn't know what it was, and we were in the hospital for months until they could work out exactly what it was. We thought it was leukemia. Eventually she had to get a bone marrow transplant—like a stem cell transplant—but she got back and everything's fine now. She actually just got her final vaccinations yesterday. She's back to being normal, which is great.

But I couldn't do any work. I was either in the hospital or looking after our other daughter, so I was out of the game, really. But the band were really cool about it. They just said, "Take your time," and they got on with it. Eventually, I got some time in my studio and really tried to do things quickly—but you know how music is. You just sometimes can't do that. So it took as long as it took, and here we are. Everything's sort of back to normal, and we're getting ready to go on tour, which is great.

Talk to me about the ways in which the other guys in the group supported you during this time. Being in a band is its own relationship, and that leads to band members treating each other in a familial way sometimes.
I didn't have to worry about any of the stuff [around the album because of them].
I'm quite a worrier anyway, and every time I mentioned anything negative about it, they'd be very supportive and just say, "Look, it doesn't matter." They had some shows to play in Australia and at SXSW, and they got someone else to come in and do my parts—I came down and helped out to show them what to do. But they were so just all over it. I didn't expect them to do anything different, because I know the guys are really cool, but it was really a weight lifted off. There was no pressure on me at all.

I thought it was funny to see you describe Mogwai as a "Calvinist band" in the bio for this record, in regards to repressing your feelings. Why do you think you guys are like that?
A lot of bands have these really intricate discussions about the details, the music, and what note comes next. I feel like we are, in a way, very repressed. We don't really talk about that kind of stuff. I was thinking, "That's almost Calvinist." But you could say that we don't really need to talk about it—we just get on with it and trust each other to do their part. I was kind of joking when I said it, but it's a nice relationship without words—without these huge discussions that I see other bands having.

You've been with the band for just about the entire run thus far. Can you recall any times there's been points of friction, or moments where you felt like it could be the end of the road?
We've never really been close to splitting up. We've had one tiny argument, and it was because we were on tour with The Cure. We were playing at four in the afternoon, and we were getting really drunk by five o'clock. Everybody was drunk every night. I think there was one concert we played where Stuart was like, "Can we play this song?" And I was like, "No I don't want to fucking play that, stop being an asshole!" [Laughs]

There's no reason to be that crotchety, you know? That was the only argument we've ever had, and it was just nothing. We still laugh about it, because we were just hungover. We don't have arguments, it's really nice—and that does come back to the Calvinist "don't have an argument just to avoid any confrontation" thing, which is kind of weird as well. I guess you should have arguments about stuff, but we don't, really.

This was Mogwai's first time with John Congleton in the studio. Tell me about that experience.
He got our sense of humor, and we got his straight away. That's really important for the chemistry, because if you're not going to have fun doing something, then there's not much point to doing it. The only thing we take seriously is the music. All the other stuff around that has to be good fun—and he was really a hilarious guy.

What does he bring to the table in terms of a work ethic?
He's speedy. There's no messing around. We did three songs in one of the days, which is quite unusual for us. Maybe we'll do one, maybe two. Sometimes, not even one. But he was like, "Let's get this done really quickly." I think he's from that whole Steve Albini school where you just get it done. It's almost like a photograph of where you are with music at the time. You don't mess around or get into the details, and that can work pretty well. Dave Fridmann, who we usually work with, is in no way slow—but John's super fast and gets it done with as little fuss as possible.

You mentioned having a sense of humor. Tell me about where that comes into play with Mogwai.
Glasgow is a very funny place. I noticed that more when I moved away to Berlin for 12 years. Any time I came back, I was just killing myself laughing. The people here are so fucking funny. You're in a little gang when you're in a band, and there's a lot of in-jokes and stuff like that. You tend to laugh at the same stuff after a while. If you're in a work experience and you're not clicking like that, it's like walking through mud. It's not fun.

Would you consider yourself somebody who watches a lot of comedy?
I'm addicted to standup. Sometimes I wish I'd got into comedy rather than music—but I think a lot of musicians say that, and a lot of comedians say they want to be in a band.

Who are some people who you find especially funny?
The old ones were Billy Connolly and Stewart Lee, who's one of my favorite comedians. I'll go for Bill Barr, Eugene Mirman, David Cross. I'm not really into shocking comedy so much anymore—I used to be, a little bit. Frankie Boyle from Glasgow is fucking hilarious—he used to be really offensive, but now he's toned it down. He's got this podcast that he does which is just really fucking funny, with a couple other comedians from Scotland. I listen to a lot of comedy podcasts—probably more than I listen to music, which is kind of shocking, but there you go.

I was just catching up with the Philomena Cunk series. Have you watched those?
Oh my god, yeah. One of my friends, his brother writes for that as well. It's great.

Tell me about the melodic evolution of Mogwai over the years. The melodies have felt quite pronounced across these last few records in particular.
I used to think that in the early days that we didn't focus on melody, but I don't think that's actually true. When you listen back to those records, they've always got a glockenspiel or guitar part that has a good melody. At the time, it seemed like we were making a lot of noise and drones. But it's always been there, and I think now it's come a bit more forward-facing. It's nice to have a melody in a song—I can't deny that. Otherwise, you could be listening to Merzbow or something like that—which has its benefits.

Mogwai have an estimable live reputation at this point too. Talk to me about that.
We've never managed to perfectly capture what we do live on record. We've always thought of the live experience as much more important. It's much more immediate and powerful than an album is, to me—and I can't say that about every band. It's different for everyone. But with the live experience, you've got the volume on your side, and you've got people around you. It's more of like a social thing, and it's just very enjoyable to play a concert. Listening to an album is great fun too, when you're on your own—but it's not really a public thing. I know what I prefer, so I'm all for the experience.

Any gigs over the years that stand out to you as disastrous?
There was one in Norway in which everything just went wrong with the equipment. It wasn't that we didn't rehearse properly—everything just started to break. It was a time when all I was using was a Fender Rhodes piano. and I remember hiding behind it with my fingers on the keys and my head beneath the keyboard. The gig was so bad that the promoter actually said to us, "I think you have to come back next year and play for free," which obviously we couldn't afford to do—but it wasn't that bad. [Laughs] It's really unfortunate because it was a technical problem—it wasn't that everybody was drunk, it was just one of those things.

Talk to me about your experience when it comes to the financial aspects of being a musician.
It's getting harder. It's still possible to do it, but the only thing I always think about is that young bands—or new bands—don't have much of a chance, especially now in Europe with Brexit. We have to pay all this extra money to go to Europe, across the channel, to different countries. If you're a young band, you don't have the finances there. So we've been very lucky, and we've ridden the wave of all this financial stuff and just kept our head above the water. It's still possible for us to do, and obviously there's bigger bands that it doesn't affect as much at all, but there's this real disparity between a medium-sized band and a small band now that just didn't really exist before. It's difficult even to sell records. People just want to stream stuff—which, you know, the horse has bolted through the barn door with that one.

It was a nice surprise when the last record topped the UK charts, though. How did that feel?
I've got a trophy in my toilet—that's where it goes. [Laughs] It doesn't mean anything! I've never liked awards for things—it's just back-patting because you sold some records. I don't give a fuck I know that Stuart was quite happy about it, but it really doesn't appeal to me at all. I appreciate what it did, you know—but it doesn't really do anything, does it? It doesn't mean anything in a hundred years.

Do you feel like the band attracted a younger fan base as a result, though?
Maybe. I started noticing that a few years back. When we started, it was a bunch of guys that came to see us, and now there's old people, young people, men, women. It's much more diverse than it used to be, and that's a good thing.