Wednesday, July 02, 2003

16.00, Main Stage

God proves Himself to be a man of impeccable taste: whereas he had eloquently passed comment on The Fabrics with the downpour, by the time bona fide post-rock legends MOGWAI shuffle out in front of probably their biggest audience yet, the skies are blue and the sun is baking hot, so much so that I can literally feel my neck burning during the opening song, ‘You Don’t Know Jesus’. Mid-afternoon on the Main Stage was always going to be a challenge for Mogwai, but they cope with the adverse circumstances admirably – and then some. Several tracks from recently-released fourth LP proper Happy Music For Happy People get an airing - the likes of ‘Hunted By A Freak’ and ‘Kids Will Be Skeletons’ billow up from very little, spreading and spiralling majestically, while album centrepiece ‘Ratts Of The Capital’ ascends to a Sabbath riff that pounds down on the already sun-beaten heads of the assembled masses. There’s also room for old live favourite ‘Summer’, which soars and swoops like a jetplane. But then what was already great becomes instantly magical with the opening chords of ‘My Father My King’. Almost 23 minutes of the reworked and instrumental version of the Jewish hymn later, and having taken the song from the brink of silence to the outer edges of the sound barrier, the band’s diminutive and moustachioed genius Stuart Braithwaite is rubbing his guitar on the edge of the stage and then pushing it up and down the tracks fitted for the moveable cameras. Awesome. The title of the new album might be ironic, but they leave happy people everywhere.

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