It's early in the evening at the 2000 NME Awards ceremony in London and the Mermaid Theatre is packed with rock stars, record producers, and songwriters. The crowd, rigid with anticipation, waits for the master of ceremonies, Radio One's Steve Lamacq, to announce the winner of this year's Best Single, Best New Artist, and Best Band. A serious aura wraps around every padded chair and every table in the theater. Well... every table, that is, except one.

Seated at the front of the room, right against the stage, are all four members of a young, scruffy, and relatively unknown Scottish rock band. Every last one of them is fidgeting and laughing and, unlike the rest of the folks in the room, they seem to be enjoying themselves - a lot. Clearly drunk, they take turns at heckling every rock star who crosses the stage in front of them. The more popular the musician, the uglier the abuse. (Not surprisingly, they haven't received so much as a silver trophy themselves. None of them seem to care.) The evening rolls on, and eventually the stars of the night - Damon Albarn and his hugely popular band Blur - are called up to claim the first in what will turn out to be a fairly impressive stack of statues. Not every eye, however, follows Damon and Co. as they weave their way toward the front of the room. The four drunken, disheveled Scots are getting their fair share of attention, too. While few people here know who Mogwai are, and even fewer have heard their music, everyone at least knows this: the Scots hate Blur much, much more than they hate everyone else.

As Damon Albarn and the rest of Blur climb onto the stage and turn to face the audience, the Mogwai table erupts in a vulgar cacophony of shouts and barely comprehensible slurs. The words "Blur" and "shite" and "pish" are the only ones the embarassed crowd can make out. It's a bit of a sad spectacle, but it's not without a sense of bluntly honest rock + roll humor. The Scots yell and shout as the band stomps back to their seats, angry, embarassed, and, as far as Mogwai are concerned, unable to deal with a tiny bit of harmless fun.

None of this should surprise anyone familiar with the historical culture of Scotland, or better yet, the historical culture of Glasgow, the gritty industrial city that Mogwai calls home. In the early 1970's the city of Glasgow was known as a center of widespread uneployment, economic depression, and urban violence. Many Scots claim it was this grim existence, along with the city's rugged, sooty landscape, that gave birth to the area's well-known black sense of humor. It was also around this time that Stuart Braithwaite, Dominic Aitchinson, John Cummings, and Martin Bulloch were growing up and developing the talents and personalities that would, some two decades later, evolve into one of the most emotionally affecting and sonically challenging rock bands of the late twentieth century.

"I met Stuart when I was 16, and he was friends with one of my friend's brothers," says bassist Dominic Aitchinson, a hulking figure with closely cropped hair and a thick, black beard, talking from his hotel room in Manhattan, where the band is preparing to launch another mammoth Stateside tour. "I used ot see him at shows. We were both in a lot of bands before Mogwai, and one night both of our bands played together. It was really weird because I never gave him my phone number. I don't know he got it, but he called me and asked me if I wanted to start a band."

Shortly after that phone call Mogwai (the name refers to the the innocent exotic pet from the film Gremlins who unintentionally spawns evil creatures) officially entered the scene with their debut single "Tuner" which, to this day, stands out in the band's discography because of its overwhelming vocal presence - a definite Mogwai rarity. The next single, "Angels vs. Aliens," quickly found itself in the top ten on the British indie charts, followed by Ten Rapid, an album-length collection of obscure, early material that became increasingly difficult to find. In 1997 the band released the 4 Satin EP, and only then did the modern incarnation of Mogwai truly come into its own. A dense record, 4 Satin's three songs bleed with both the existential angst of a John Coltrane record and the teenage punk-rock fury of the Sex Pistols and the Stooges. They followed soon after with Young Team, the band's full-length debut, a surprising album if only because it managed to make brick-shattering feedback noise melodic and, well, pretty. But not until 1999's Come On Die Young, an ingenious post-rock explosion bristling with fuzzy guitar noise and epic melodic soundscapes, did Mogwai receive global recognition.

For many, the songs on Come On Die Young were the first examples of Mogwai's music they'd ever heard, and few people realized ho risk-laden the record was. Like it or not, Come On Die Young was a stereotypical sophomore follow-up, the album that would most likely make or break Mogwai's entire career. Lead vocalist and guitarist Stuart Braithwaite, an impishly short character who seems to grom a foot taller once he climbs onstage, explains: "I think we all felt kind of disappointed with what we'd done on Mogwai Young Team, and I think we had a point to prove to ourselves - more than to anyone else - because no one else was really disappointed by that record apart from us. We really felt like we had to do something to be proud of."

As fasr as the marketing department at their American label, Matador Records, is concerned, they've done just that. While Mogwai may not be a household name in the U.K. just yet, they'd been receiving recognition from underground audiences in Europe long before Come On Die Young hit the shelves. The exact opposite was the case stateside, where the album had an undeniably anxious "sink or swim" expectation. After its release, music critics in both the States and abroad heaped praise on the band, and their street cred shot through the roof. With ex-Mercury Rev bassist Dave Fridmann producing the album, even the most discordantly challenging numbers convey a sense of intelligence. (A furious, fist-clenching intelligence, but an intelligence just the same.) And while the overall message is one of utter frustration with the world and life in general, one gets the feeling, after carefully listening to Come On Die Young from start to finish, that this band has made peace with its demons. It's interesting to note how much more subtle, delicate, and profoundly quiet this album is compared to its predecessors, while still managing to maintain a sense of fuzzy rock discord and static emotional electricity. For Mogwai, the ultimate artist's cliche hits them square on the forehead: if they weren't busy making this music, they would probably all have gone insane a long time ago.

Of course, as the incident at the NME Awards ceremony shows, Mogwai are anything but a stoic band. "I guess the only thing that we take seriously is the music," admits Aitchinson. "Other than that, we just don't take anything seriously."

The band, after all, gained considerable notoriety for hawking tour t-shirts with the declaration "Blur: Are Shite" emblazoned across the front. "The thing about the shirt is it's like a dictionary definition," said Braithwaite in an interview with British music magazine NME. "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."

Mogwai also managed to finagle a sponsorship deal out of a popular European sportswear manufacturer, to which the fifth track on Come On Die Young, "Kappa," is dedicated. (To this day, the band can still occassionally be seen sporting the Kappa logo in magazine spreads and promo photos.) But like every other good-natured Mogwai prank, it ruffled too many feathers and eventually had to be put to rest. "We've kind of abandoned the sponsorship thing," says Braithwaite, a slight tone of sarcasm evident in his voice. "It was kind of a semi-joke, and people got uptight about it. The magazines would ask us how we could support big, huge, multi-national companies, and we were just like, 'Yeah, whatever.' So we've stopped all that. We've matured in our old age."

For anyone who doubts the sincerity of that statement and needs more solid proof, a single spin of their new album, Rock Action, should do the trick. Because as lazy as it seems to label this album their most brilliant yet, it's true. Now joined by fifth member Barry Burns on drums and guitar, the band's first track on the album, "Sine Wave," rips into the record with the most harmoniously constructed sonic dissonance since Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation. Imagine an orchestrated symphony of broken television sets and fuzzy AM radio static, turned up full-blast and backed by shimmering keyboard chord progressions. Track two, the (very) aptly titled "Take Me Somewhere Nice," is even better: with what sounds like a full string orchestra behind the band, Rock Action is instantly transformed from the anthemic punk-rock masterpiece of the year to a luxuriously cozy bedtime record - all in the space of five minutes. In fact, the entire album clocks in at just over half an hour - not quite the "long player" fans have been waiting more than two years to get their hands on. With compositions this pretty and emotions this revealing, it may very well end up being Mogwai's cruelest - and most deeply resonating - prank to date.

Back at the NME Awards ceremony, something surprising has happened: Mogwai have been called on stage themselves; they've won an award. As the prize is announced, "Best Live Band," a slight groan works its way through the crowd. While Mogwai may deserve the prize, a few people seem to be whispering; their intrusion in tonight's ceremony is an obvious red herring. After all, in the entire history of the NME ceremonies, this award has never been given. "Best Live Band?" Gimme a break.

Later, Aitchinson admits that he and the rest of the band are friendly with the NME staff, who dreamed up the award as an excuse to get Mogwai into the building. "They put us right at that table, right at the front of the stage, whan all the famous people were in the back," he says, laughing between breaths. "They put us there deliberately, because they knew we were going to get really drunk and shout at all the people we didn't like."

So it went, and so it will definitely go again with these men so utterly enslaved by music, and so comically uninterested in anything else. Anything, except picking on the members of Blur - a story which actually has a happy ending. "People have told us that [guitarist] Graham Coxon actually likes us," says Aitchinson, after being asked about the rumor that Mogwai's battle with Blur isn't as serious as it seems. "But the whole thing, we really did it as a joke. We thought it would be funny, and it totally got blown out of proportion, but they never slagged us back. They never said anything so us. We were really, really disappointed."

It would be difficult and probably pointless to speculate on what's next for Mogwai. Artistically, their lineup has grown from a pounding guitar/bass/drum unit to an emotionally denser setup, complete with classical string instruments and high-end keyboard treatments. Their newfound success hasn't exactly gone to their heads. They're still five guys in their mid-20's, after all, and they still exert quite a bit of energy on simply having fun. Who knows what secrets their next album will tell, or if there will even be a next album. In the meantime, let's consider ourselves fortunate that Mogwai's music grows gracefully with each successive effort. It's a tall order to fill, but this band hasn't come up short yet.