What happens when five Scottish reprobates play a concert in Reykjavik?
Join Mogwai on the road in Iceland for lager, lava and a lot of laughs.

ROCK. It's a noun, a verb, an adjective. It's the whole dang syntactical shooting match. It's also a pretty accurate description of the motion currently being made by the van carrying Mogwai across the Icelandic wilderness.

This isn't the most conventional place to do an interview but then, Mogwai, a five-piece from Scotland who ceaselessly erode the frontiers of rock, are not the most conventional band. Tradition is their enemy, the status quo their foe. Here is what Stuart Braithwaite, Mogwai's guitar player and mouthpiece, once said about his band: "I think the bare fact alone that we shun the conformist way of writing songs is as radical as Bob Dylan alerting the southern states of America to their racist ways in the Sixties."

They're not modest, Mogwai.

Don't get the idea, though, that Mogwai are a difficult listen. Put simply, they make music of rare beauty and power with guitars. The difference is that their songs tend to be very long and don't have any choruses. Or indeed words. Atmospheric instrumentals, sometimes soft and gorgeous, sometimes frighteningly loud and distorted, sometimes both. Their last album, 1999's 'Come On Die Young', has sold about 70,000 copies, so they're hardly a specialist taste. Suck 'em and see.

Mogwai have not played live for more than a year and are kicking off their world tour in Reykjavik, largely because they've heard it's nice. What's more, they've brought along a documentary crew, fronted by Radio 1's Gill Mills, to film them against the backdrop of Iceland's breathtaking landscape.

Trouble is, Iceland's breathtaking landscape keeps threatening to take away our breath for good. As the van, driven by a local who looks like Giant Haystacks and steers like Mr Magoo, speeds toward another photo-opportunity it becomes increasingly clear that the suspension is not coping with the terrain's volcanic eccentricities. Death seems imminent. We keep bouncing up in the air or tilting nauseatingly from side to side.

The band are all looking green around the gills but Braithwaite could give Kermit The Frog a run for his money. Until this particular moment, I have never seen a man look verdant, so I offer to put the interview on hold. "No, no, no, no, no," he gabbles, weakly. "Fear is my ally." He looks out the window at the blurred lava-fields, pauses, swallows and summons as much bravado as he can. "This is just like the BMX track in Hamilton."

Some history. Mogwai formed in Glasgow in 1995, emerging at the height of Britpop, a movement they despised. Defining themselves in opposition to acts like Blur (of whom more later), they sought to make music that was the equal of their idols My Bloody Valentine, Joy Division, the Stooges and the Velvet Underground.

"We never thought that anyone was going to want to hear us," recalls Braithwaite. "It was totally selfish. We were just amusing ourselves. And at that point there was a snowball's chance in hell of us ever playing to more than 20 people. It's a miracle that we've ever sold any records."

They released four singles before signing with the Scottish label Chemikal Underground. Their debut album 'Mogwai Young Team' (a title which hinted at their fascination with Glasgow gang culture) was acclaimed in the press but hated by the band, who felt they'd rushed things in the studio.

In 1998, Mogwai, who are only now in their mid-twenties, released the 'No Education = No Future (F**k The Curfew)' EP, an attack on an initiative by Lanarkshire Council and Strathclyde Police to ban teenagers from the streets of Hamilton after 8.30pm. It caught the ear of the Manic Street Preachers, who invited the band to open up for them on tour. It was an odd pairing and Mogwai were not well received by the Manics crowd. They did, however, get on well with the band, especially gobby bass player Nicky Wire.

But Mogwai are never ones to let friendship get in the way of a good grudge. They have nothing but scorn for the Manics' recent jaunt to Cuba, which the Welsh band envisaged as an anti-American gesture. "As free holidays go, I think they pulled off a cracker," sneers Braithwaite. "Cuba is still a dictatorship, even if it's a slightly anti-corporate one. Anyway, Nicky Wire should really check himself for talking about corporations when he's on Sony Records."

Joined by a new member, multi-instrumentalist and singular mentalist Barry Burns, Mogwai relocated to the wilds of upstate New York to record their second album. Deep in redneck country, where drummer Martin Bulloch was laser-targeted by a hunter straight out of Deliverance, they created 'Come On Die Young', a moody epic, which again took its name from Glasgow gang culture.

Live shows for 'Come On Die Young', including an incredible set at Barrowland and headline slots at both T In The Park and Glastonbury, saw Mogwai proclaimed the best band in Britain by the music press. They agree that they were overhyped and, anyway, have something of a love/hate relationship with the media. "Most of the editors of these magazines wouldn't know music if it shot their mum in the face," spits Braithwaite.

Biting the bullet, I'd say Mogwai's forthcoming album, 'Rock Action', their first for new label Southpaw, is their best yet. It's their shortest, most focused LP and is bolstered by much non-rock instrumentation - violin, trombone and banjo. It even features lead vocals on four tracks, including Gruff from the Super Furry Animals on 'Dial: Revenge'. It's glacial, it's heart-melting, it's the reason we're in Iceland.

Stuart Leslie Braithwaite HND has had, at most, four hours sleep. I know this because at 5.30am he came knocking at my hotel room door, dressed only in pants and a T-shirt. After hours of bevvying at the after-show party in a hip Icelandic boozer - including an unsavoury incident when he was sick at the bar - he had somehow managed to shut himself out of his room and lose his kecks. I got a porter to come and unlock the door for him. He gave me a hug and headed off across the corridor toward oblivion.

Ten in the morning and Braithwaite is bouncing around in a manner ill-befitting one who has recently consumed so much Viking lager. With his shaved head, dodgy beard and Batman T-shirt, he doesn't cut a dash so much as a limp. The overall impression is not enhanced by the fact that he's standing in Reykjavik's main shopping street, waving around a slice of chopped meat and slurping from a mug containing his own recipe - a cocktail of coffee and hot chocolate. This man, apparently, is the saviour of rock. "The lumpen proletariat know little of high art," he mock-pontificates. "None of them can read and they seldom wash."

I've seen Barry Burns' backside and all I got was to write this lousy article. We're luxuriating in the Blue Lagoon, Iceland's premier tourist attraction, an incredible outdoor pool heated by geothermals from the adjoining power station. It's a great hangover cure and is packed with loads of minerally-enriched mud, which the band, grabbing handfuls, are dismayed to discover contains actual strands of human hair.

Apart from that, things are going well. David, the Sunday Herald snapper, is photographing the band, while the documentary crew film him doing so. Clusters of perfectly toned Icelanders look on with bemusement at the fat Scottish people, with hair in all the wrong places, who are scruffing up their pool. This is the lagoon show, with five Spike Milligans and no Harry Secombe.

Suddenly, Burns leaps out of the water and whips down his shorts for the cameras. It's horrible. If Mogwai truly are a Pink Floyd for the new millennium then this is the dark side of the moon.

Of course, Mogwai are really nothing like Pink Floyd. That's just lazy journalism. A better comparison, and they'll hate this too, is the Manic Street Preachers. Not musically, but certainly in their ear for an invective-soaked soundbite, in the way they seem driven by negativity and, most of all, in the way they act around each other.

Mogwai are basically a gang. They even have nicknames. But, unlike the ned gangs that fire their imagination and humour, Mogwai are an extremely touchy-feely bunch of lads. It's no surprise to see Braithwaite, like some freakish ventriloquist's dummy, perched on the knee of bass player Dominic Aitchison. Or to see John Cummings wander over and gently kiss the guitar player on his shiny pate. The only other band I've ever known to do this kind of thing are the Manics.

I ask Mogwai, as a gang, to tell me some of the things they are in favour of.

"Irn-Bru, Celtic."

"Slagging folk off."

"Aye, we're in favour of criticism."

"The Godfather films. Robots."

"Cats."

"Evil Dead II."

And, of course, being a gang they spend their time dreaming up madcap wheezes. The most recent is their forthcoming gig at Rothesay Pavilion on the Isle of Bute. In a Buckfast-fuelled version of the Sex Pistols' Silver Jubilee Concert on the Thames, fans will sail from Wemyss Bay in a specially chartered ferry.

I say that this is just the latest example of Mogwai's unwillingness to toe the party line and do what's expected of a contemporary rock band. They say that they just like to spite themselves. "Our self-loathing takes us to Rothesay," quips Braithwaite, rubbing his hands together. His gloves, which he bought on tour in Japan, have writing on them. They say Rock Stars Baby Is Born A Happy.

Another Mogwai wheeze was to print up a T-shirt proclaiming "Blur: Are Shite" when they found themselves co-headlining with the Britpoppers at T In The Park on different stages at the same time.

That caused quite a tempest in the small pond of the weekly music press and it's arguable that Mogwai cheapened themselves by getting into that sort of mud-slinging. They don't regret it for a minute, though. Apparently an inebriated Braithwaite later saw Blur's Graham Coxon in a kebab shop in Norway, ran up to him and sang the Skye Boat Song in his face.

This is the sort of tenacious tilting at windmills which saw Mogwai slapped on the cover of the NME as figureheads of the paper's No Sell Out special issue. The band were mortified, regarding the whole exercise as tacky in the extreme. Talking about this brings them on to the Daily Record, a paper which has them extremely riled.

They are particularly aggrieved by the tabloid's current anti-drugs campaign, which is using as its logo an image first produced by Barnardo's. "They've got a picture of a nine-month-old baby and got computer graphics to make it look like it's shooting up," says Braithwaite, growing louder by the second. "I bet there's wifies in f**king Shotts going 'That's terrible, that wean's on drugs.' F**king idiots, man. Scotland's a f**king pile of shite. F**king Daily Record, a baby shooting up. F**k off!"

He continues. "I'm not being pro-drugs. I just think it's the naffest thing of all time. There is a drugs problem in Scotland but showing a baby shooting up is not helping anyone."

On the Daily Record's anti-drugs march, which hadn't happened at the time of the interview but took place in Glasgow last Sunday, Braithwaite is equally incensed. "Marches! What good is that going to do apart from getting f**king Craig Brown some column inches?"

"I tell you what it's going to do," Burns cuts in, "It's going to get loads of people that are against drugs all in the one place so I can go and get my f**king deals, know what I mean?"

Later, on stage at Reykjavik's Idno venue, Mogwai are playing like they talk - considered, articulate passages building to sustained bursts of noise and aggression.

The stage is dark apart from a few coloured lights. Aitchison faces the drum kit; we can see the tattoo on the back of his neck. Cummings has discarded the military jacket with Scottish Guitar Army scrawled on it with felt tip and is wearing a Celtic top. Braithwaite gleefully announces the football results - Celtic win, Rangers lose - and dedicates a song to Martin O'Neill in front of a crowd that don't know what he's talking about.

The Icelandic fans are a polite lot, keeping shtum during the quiet bits, a few going dutifully mental when the music becomes as abrasive as the grinding of tectonic plates. One guy in front of me actually starts screaming when the drums come in on 'Christmas Steps'.

Earlier, back in that rocking, rolling van, Braithwaite had uttered the key to understanding Mogwai, the art of Gremlin-watching: "We take our music pretty seriously but we've never taken anything around it particularly seriously."

It's true that they're a bunch of Glaswegian numpties, radges against the machine with a tendency to drink too much and a willingness to talk gibberish at the drop of a pair of trousers. But there's more to them than that. They're clever and funny and loyal to each other and are making some of the best music of anyone right now.

The great rock critic Lester Bangs once wrote this about The Doors: "Perhaps what we finally conclude is that it's not really necessary to separate the clown from the poet, that they were in fact inextricably linked."

He could easily have been talking about Mogwai, poetic clowns to a man. Why don't you climb aboard their collapsing car?