Gorillaz, Macca, Starsailor: feel the wrath of the Mogwai tongue. Even in the heartland of hippydom, NME finds the Scots noise terrorists in fighting form.

‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ - Johnny Rotten, from the stage of the Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, aeons ago.

On the streets of San Francisco, you don’t hear crap pop music. Not a note. Not in the bars, delis, record, book or clothes stores, venues, grocers, newsagents, blaring from cars, windows, people’s mouths, in their dreams, nowhere. In the city which possibly invented the word ‘vibes’ you hear Missy Elliott, Pavement, Nirvana, James Brown, ‘70s disco, blues by buskers, ancient rock’n’roll and, naturally, ‘Hotel California’. Birthplace of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Rolling Stone magazine, the drag queens here are ‘gender illusionists’ - but there the glam-count stops. With its laid-back seaside ambience and historical tolerance to outsiders, the lost and the completely insane, it’s a safe zone for the homeless, literally hundreds of whom are in the city centre simply keeled over in the streets, asleep, while others live inside their wheelchairs.

There’s rows of trees encased at the trunk in wire-mesh baskets and used, as the flies can tell you, as public open-air bogs. At I0.30am the queue outside one public clinic is 120 people long, snaking into infinity for the blockbuster known as ‘Heroin Replacement Therapy IV (This Time It’s Personal)’. House prices here are astronomical; it’s the fourth mast expensive city to live in the world, so residents literally ‘drop out’, and at least the pavements are toasty warm. A city built on a geographical joke - tourists screaming on the ‘rollercoaster’ vertical tram-lines - San Francisco is a uniquely bonkers hybrid of a colossal, multi-racial Brighton, Beirut, New Orleans and the Glastonbury festival, and as far away from the shiny pop world of Britain as you can get without flying directly to Saturn.

On the subway there’s culture-jam stickers covering ads for the US newspapers blaring ‘Do Not Trust The Corporate Media’. In one free arts’n’music city guide, a writer comments on the most potent force sculpting our thoughts today, the world-wide mainstream media, and its creation of a whitewash of fleeting, surface, ‘entertainment’ idiocy while people, the planet and everything else, literally, burns. ‘We need to save the present,’ it reads, ‘from a future without memory.’ Another page announces the Critic’s Choice gig of the week. It’s a sell-out show of several thousand for Britain’s premiere spook-rock pilgrims. San Francisco says ‘Mogwai: Are Good’.

"It’s like a fucked-up Blackpool," says the spectacularly cheery Barry Burns, Mogwai’s keyboard and flute player, staring into the crumbling skyline, his back to yonder Alcatraz, ‘it’ll be a nice place when it’s finished.’ Barry Burns, it must be noted, owns rock ‘n’ roll’s girliest nose - ‘aye, it’s quite nice!’ - is an ex-primary school music teacher and used to be in a band called Hinley’s Shovel. Four days into a sold-out American tour, the five profoundly affable young Scotsmen are climbing, like ‘bairns’, all over an authentic World War II warship called Enterprise, finally seeing some sights after highlights thus far of ‘literally hundreds of McDonalds’ and ‘being trapped in a lift with Ike Turner in Texas’. Like Scooby Doo adventurers in the fairground of insanity, Mogwai love America, they’ve been ‘famous’ here since they were 19 years old, six years ago, their natural affinity with US alt-rock seeing them release records here before Britain. Back then, Stephen Malkmus, ex-Pavement, declared them as ‘the band of the 2Ist century’. They wear original Batman T-shirts and a selection of US-bought antique badges: Guns n Roses, Black Sabbath, The Cure, Ghostbusters.

"It’s got to the stage," grins Stuart Braithwaite, guitarist, founding member and, these days, occasional singer, "where the badges have become more important than the music. Badges are the new notes."

Now perched on a selection of random seats in a canteen-esque upstairs room at a glam-plush nighterie called Bimbos, a sometime high-class strip joint, Mogwai have taken off NME’s shoes (it gives the time-zone crossing traveller, apparently, ‘two hours back’) and stuck the kettle on, in between the odd beer. They avoid playing these days while ‘absolutely pished’, ever since they were given a tape of ‘selected highlights’ of such incidents two tours ago.

"And it was utter shite," says Dominic Aitchison, hearty, open-faced bass player, "the worst thing I’ve ever heard. And we remembered that tour as being absolutely blindin’. Such a mortifying experience."

Stuart: "The fear of embarrassment. Oh my God, that’s a fear."

That’s why the phrase exists: dying of embarrassment.

Stuart: "I think you could. Shame is a weighty thing. I’ve been mortified for years. Shame is relentless. Punishing. (Shouts to bloke wandering through) How d’you feel about shame, Adgie?!"

Adgie: "I’m ashamed to say."

Stuart: "That’s a shame. I think I just have a fear of fear. I have a fear of the fear of fear."

Barry: "There’s a word for that. You’re a phobophobe."

Mogwai are a band who take self-deprecation to Beta Band levels of calamitous honesty. They’re ‘embarrassed’ by some of their old music, consider themselves ‘a much better live band than they are on record, that they merely ‘strive’ to the heights of The Greats. Nonetheless, they remain Britain’s most potent purveyors of beguiling ‘orchestrated rock’ and as spiritually punk rock as it’s possible, and deeply unfashionable, to be. Their third LP, ‘Rock Action’, produced by Dave Fridmann ( man ‘behind’ Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev), is half the length of their two previous soundscape instrumentals - ‘Mogwai Young Team’, ‘Come On Die Young’ - and contains, for the first time, some singing from Stuart, Barry and their fellow art-rock titan Gruff Rhys from the Super Furry Animals. ‘One of the nicest, nicest people I have ever met in my entire life,’ says Stuart, sagely, ‘a quiet man who embraces surrealism and poetry.’ Beautiful, melodic, euphoric and spectral, it even features a chirpsome banjo.

What did it feel like, Stuart, singing?

"Embarrassing," says Stuart, embarrassed. "Embarrassing but necessary. Singing a song is like stopping the car on a motorway, jumping out, doing a pee behind a tree and seeing that a family’s having a picnic and they can see you. It’s awful. And I think if you can project yourself into the head of somebody who would think it’s good, it makes it even worse. It’s bad perv. It’s Fred West. Let’s stop talking about singing! Talking’s like singing with no notes and I’m feelin’ bad about even just talking now!"

Why those lovely lyrics about ‘spaceships over Glasgow’ (from the peerlessly-titled ‘Secret Pint’)?

Stuart: "(Turning bright red) Don’t... uh... noooooo!"

Har har. You’ve got what the Celts deem ‘a beamer’.

Stuart: "I’m dyin’ here! Dyin’! I have got a red neck. Even when I was singing it I was going, ‘If any c*** asks me about this I’ll die!"

Barry: "(Grinning head off) We just use it as another instrument."

Stuart: "(Even bigger grin) And if anyone else likes it, it’s a bonus."

Two years ago, last time NME spoke to Mogwai, they insisted, culturally speaking, they ‘hated everything’. Today, Coldplay are ‘just another band off the radio’, David Gray is ‘Grey David’ and the re-evaluation of U2 as culturally relevant an abomination.

"U2 are as evil a corporation as Sony," says Stuart, "at least Sony make MiniDiscs; you can record good music on MiniDiscs. U2 and good music do not equate." The dance culture of ‘tunes’ meanwhile, is "as retro as Ocean Colour Scene; there’s nothing new there, it’s people buying into a lifestyle they’ll grow out of." As the sometime inventors of a Mogwai T-shirt which read ‘Blur: Are Shite’, mooted plans for a new one, ‘Gorillaz: Even Worse’ have been shelved in the name of sheer disinterest.

"‘I was thinking about doing ‘Limp Bizkit: Are Shite’ for America," muses Stuart, "but now I don’t think we should even bother with Gorillaz. It’s irrelevant. And I’d hate the idea of someone only knowing us because of our dislike of some band, or one person. But he’s a c***, man. See if Damon and Paul McCartney did a record, it would implode with pure evil."

Mogwai do not believe in the continuing reverence afforded Thumbs Aloft McCartney either. Two years ago at the NME Brat Awards, Mogwai watched, ‘pished’, as he received The Beatles’ award for Best Band Ever Award and a standing ovation.

"We were sitting going, ‘Booo!’" grins Dominic, "and the singer from Shack flew over and started screaming blue murder at us to stand up, ‘Yer buncha fuckin’ wanks, on yer feet!’"

Stuart: "Paul McCartney has never made a good record while I’ve been alive and thus deserves none of my respect. John Lennon was a figurehead, he utilised his position. Paul McCartney just encouraged people to slap his back. Paul McCartney is everything that is despicable about the British Music Industry. Bands we were influenced by were kicking against fuckin’ Wings. He’s beyond irrelevance, he’s post-irrelevance."

Mogwai: "(Singing) Muuuull of Kintyyyyre.."

John Cummings, guitar: "I was born to that fucking piper pish blaring out the radio in the hospital."

Martin Bulloch, drumsmith: "He should be shot wi’ a ball o’ his own shite."

Neither do they believe in the ‘phenomenon’ of Starsailor.

Stuart: "That Starsailor guy has the evil look in his eyes of Brian Molko. That’s the look. I think he’d fuckin’ rape his granny for any kind of music award. I think the music they make is culturally worthless. What is the fucking point? ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ but not as good? But if it’s been decided they’re gonna be huge, then they will be huge. And in three years’ time we’ll be laughing about them in the same way we laugh about Jesus Jones."

Here, a discussion ensues as to the difference between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.

"Cheers to the right!" shout Mogwai, cans aloft.

Stuart: "(Appalled, fearing the fear) Well... cheers to the un-wrong! Cheers to the right is not a good quote; you could really stitch us up noo. Get the warship picture with a big Union Jack behind it, ‘Back to the Falklands’ say Mogwai, ’Cheers to the right!’"

In recent times, a band like Mogwai, now moved on from Glasgow’s maverick Chemikal Underground label to a new independent, Southpaw, run by a Glaswegian man in a T-shirt which reads ‘Ponce’, have watched Britain’s musical climate evolve into something they barely recognise. The Music Business has successfully suffocated truly alternative anything in the name of wholly obvious commerce and the presence of its traditional ‘enemy’, the music-based media, culled to its absolute core. The transient novelty of Hear’Say doesn’t particularly bother Mogwai, but in 200I, from the tabloids’ position as ‘The Pop Bosoms Bugle’ upwards, our national conscience is now comprehensively bombarded by bollocks; sensation, celebrity and entertainment values the only ones that count; sex ‘n’ drugs without the rock ‘n’ roll. Without the soul. Or, as Eminem once rapped, ‘like an over-worked plumber, ah’m sicka the shit’.

"You pick up the NME and there’s a pair of exposed breasts with ‘Miami’ written in cocaine," says Stuart, "that really sums up modern culture in Britain. I like breasts, but it’s nothing to do with music. Let’s not be stupid here. I think that some really, really, really vulgar idealism crept in a few years ago; some really fucking nasty sexist ideas and anti-thought devices, and they got largely ignored by anyone with any intelligence or integrity but since then they’ve been so omnipresent that a lot of young people and people who actually have a bit of say, don’t think anything of them. A pair of breasts on the cover of NME would’ve been seen as abhorrent eight years ago. Even one year ago, but eight years ago unthinkable. But breasts are now the selling point of almost every magazine in every shop."

Barry: "A friend of mine was on the NME.COM mailing list and got this thing sent saying ‘if you wanna see hot pictures of Britney...’ She sent a letter back saying, ’What the fuck are you sending me this pish for?’"

Beers are sipped.

‘We have no relevance,’ says Stuart, plainly. ‘We have no relevance to that one-dimensional view of culture. That is the antithesis of us. Music as a cultural force is a way of life. And to move the goalposts to the point that music isn’t a cultural force any more, but actually a commodity, is the sad, sad fact of what’s happening at the moment.’

And, here, he laughs his head off: ‘I just... pity the young. I pity the young. It’s not even Indie versus anything, it’s integrity versus... pish.’

The young might tell you this is what they wanted all along.

Stuart: ‘What the people want and what the people need are often very different. The lumpen proletariat know little of high art. (Guffaws, ruefully) But from getting into music, you can get so many different things. That’s why the music press should be a catalyst for people to improve their lives. For a lot of people it doesn’t come from anywhere else.’

Stuart Braithwaite is the loudest member of Britain’s loudest band, widely believed to be ‘mad’ but is, naturally, anything but. Small, bald and all in black, he’s an unfeasible amalgam of a bestilled, other-worldly guru and a maniacal rock ‘n’ roll goblin. He’s a very funny, very smart, paranoid, poetic, burningly passionate 25-year-old man with colossally penetrating brown eyes. He dropped out of higher education to form Mogwai, inspired as much by Julian Cope’s classic ‘Head On’ autobiography as Nirvana. A man with an abnormally keen in-built physical ‘danger’ antennae, outside the live experience he can’t listen to really loud music, ever since he knocked down a pensioner in the car: "I saw her fucking come up and hit the windscreen. It left me with a slight nervous disorder where I don’t like the idea of not being able to hear what else is going on."

Sometimes, Stuart realises he gives people too much credit. He likes Eminem, imagines the world sees Eminem’s tirades as he sees them, as ‘really funny, infantile, playground slaggings’. Recently he read about Eminem’s teenage fans in a monthly style mag, "and they were saying, ‘Yeah, we think gays are disgusting, too’. I was really disheartened, imagining some wee gay kid at school with these psychotic homophobes everywhere. The world is thick. The world is thick."

Sometimes, the magical music of Mogwai can turn you bonkers and you believe it to be possessed with the spirit of William Blake, all angels-in-the-trees. Stuart doesn’t believe in pansy angels but he’d like to.

"I actually yearn for religious belief," he says, "but I can’t kid maself on." He can remember, aged eight, "the actual moment of realisation I was gonna be an adult. I realised that being a kid is about fun, and that one day the fun was gonna stop."

He sees the fun-filled entertainment whitewash as a delusive lie.

"I think kids are aware of how serious the world is," he says, "through actualities like having to resuscitate their drunk parents. I thought about all that. Which is better than having to deal with it. I know I’ve had a really good life."

Stuart’s dad is the only telescope maker in Scotland. He had highly paid jobs in his late 20s and gave them up, felt he was working for ideologically ‘wrong’ people, so now he works alone: "he doesn’t care about money, he’s me dad."

That’s the most romantic job in history... and you grew up with the best toy ever invented!

"Aye," grins Stuart, "it was quite groovy! But it seems really normal to me. Getting to see the moon and the stars."

So he’s got big huge gigantic ones and everything?

Stuart: "He’s got massive ones! He’s made ones for observatories! I’ve seen the rings of Saturn, really cool stuff, the moon just so close it looks like somebody’s hoose."

Noooo!

Barry: "Hang on a minute. Let’s put things into perspective here. Ma dad designed the ventilation shaft in the Tunnocks factory! And we got free Tunnocks stuff all the time! Still do!"

Stuart: "What, boxes o’ teacakes?"

Barry: "Aye!"

Rings of Saturn, eternal free teacakes... you two grew up in heaven!

Both: "I know!"

Stuart Braithwaite, then, has always seen more than the average Big Picture. "Aye," he says, calmly, "the Bigger Picture."

The young men of Mogwai are some of the most inspirational people you could wish to meet. They don’t feel doomed and are reasonably optimistic.

"I don’t feel doomed at all," says Stuart, emphatically. "We certainly moan about the bad too much but I think that’s necessary."

They believe in the kind of sonic intensity that makes your ‘trousers flap’, from the Aphex Twin to ‘noise torture’ extremists Pan Sonic. They believe in the natural cycle of regeneration.

"For all those millions o’ wee kids in Britain right now that are imitating Offspring videos," says Stuart, "who’s to say in a couple of years’ time we’re not gonna get brilliant bands because of who influenced those bands?"

Dominic: "Me and Stuart first met at a Ned’s Atomic Dustbin gig. My first gig was The Wonderstuff and I fucking loved it! Look back and it’s no’ very good."

Stuart: "But you learn. If music becomes a passion to you, you filter out the pish and it becomes a way of life. There’s kids that come and see us who are really, really young and I think it’s pretty encouraging. When they really should be jumpin’ about to Feeder. People recognise that we’re about something other than mainstream mediocrity. Maybe we’re underground mediocrity, I don’t know, but I think that that’s appreciated. I don’t think we’re a rallying call band. Our music is not triumphant, our music is bedroom music. I think the rallying call bands will be bands who liked us."

Down the front in San Francisco, NME’s trousers are flapping. Like bendy sheets of horizontal, colouriffic glass the music lifts in layers, hoisted into infinity by the angels of William Blake, a sonic impression of life and death and all the cruel and ecstatic madness in between. It’s beautiful, it’s loud and it’s ours, a band in the present creating a future with the most vivid memories imaginable. More than anything else, Mogwai sound like a band who are right. "Cheers to the right, fuck the wrong!" shouted Stuart, conclusively, earlier. "We are right. I don’t think our band are that good but we’re fuckin’ right. You might not like our music, I wouldn’t expect folk to like it, and who fucking cares, enough folk like us for us to sustain ourselves anyway, but we’re fucking right. And that’s all that matters."