Twenty-two years later, I remember one thing from the first and only time I’ve seen the Scottish post-rock band Mogwai live, in Orlando, in September 2003: the feedback. After the band played its one presumably epic encore track and departed the stage, they left behind an intentional assault of sound — an elliptic pas de deux of guitar and amplifier reverberating into eternity. I was in my early 20s, when the body was at its most resilient; bringing earplugs to a concert was unthinkable. But decades later, I can feel that coda in my bones.
I conjured that moment while watching a scene in Mogwai: If the Stars Had a Sound, director Antony Crook’s novel documentary about the band (Kino Lorber, $15.96 DVD). As we discover, Mogwai had agreed to sponsor a soccer team at a financially struggling school for the deaf in their native Glasgow. Thanks to the agreement, the youngsters’ sleek new apparel is now emblazoned with the word Mogwai, the irony of a band advertising itself on the jerseys of a hearing-impaired team fitting snugly into the underground band’s obscurist ethos. In response to a request from a player, the coach who spearheaded the sponsorship lets him listen to a Mogwai song, which means tuning into the vibrations of the music. This boy, like me in 2003, is stunned by the loudness.
But as Mogwai fans can attest, crushing volume is only one aspect of the band’s appeal. They thrive in the binary between fragility and immensity, between the twinkle and the tempest. The Scottish writer Ian Rankin, interviewed in the documentary, describes the Jekyll-and-Hyde polarity of the band’s sound as reflective of the bifurcations of Scotland itself. “The light and the dark are always there clashing,” he says.
Insights like these abound in If the Stars Had a Sound, which takes its title from a fan’s apt response to Mogwai’s elusive aesthetic: “If the stars had a sound, they would sound like this.” In fact, such observations from admirers and fellow creatives outside the quartet’s immediate bubble — carry the entire narrative. Not once are members of Mogwai themselves interviewed about their music. (A few minutes of such one-on-ones are included as DVD extras, suggesting Crook considered this direction only to abandon it.)
Instead, we hear from producers like Paul Savage, who worked on the band’s earliest records, and offers the movie’s most quintessentially Scottish sentence: “They were a wee gang of guys, but they were not daft.” Other noted producers, including Paul Doogan and Dave Fridmann, share their thoughts, along with artist Douglas Gordon — “I don’t know if I’ve ever smiled while listening to Mogwai” — who commissioned the band to score his 2006 documentary about French soccer star Zinedine Zidane.
Even the documentary’s framing device is centered essentially on the fan’s perspective. Crook bookends the film around the release of the group’s pandemic-era 2021 LP As the Love Continues — the first time Fridmann ever produced an album remotely, owing to the lockdown — which was, for the first time in Mogwai’s career, vying for the No. 1 slot on the U.K. charts. In the streaming era, it feels almost quaint to still follow such charts, whose impact is much diminished from their once-determinative stranglehold on what we hear and how we hear it.
But for Mogwai’s Scottish fans, especially, this precipice of heretofore unheard-of mainstream success provides a rare reason for hope in a world still convulsing from the daily horrors of COVID-19. Crook successfully builds considerable suspense around a chart to which even most American music lovers pay little attention, to the point that it seems unfair for me to spoil the payoff.
In the epilogue of Crook’s open-hearted film, the band is preparing its first post-pandemic hometown concert, at Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall in November 2021. As is Crook’s wont, we don’t follow Mogwai backstage; we hear from the fans eager to once again thrill to their favorite band in a live setting. Mogwai, we learn, has helped them survive deaths and divorces, and has been the soundtrack to their children’s first steps. For an instrumental rock band, one that has never relied on the universal communicator of lyrics to forge communion with its followers, this level of intimacy is unusual.
The film suggests there is beauty, then, in the withholding of specificity. If the Stars Had a Sound is a testament to the value of remaining cryptic in one’s art. “Anybody can take anything away from it,” as one fan says. Their music “doesn’t belong to the band.” Neither, appropriately enough, does Crook’s documentary.