Behind the Music: Antony Crook’s New Documentary about Scottish Icons Mogwai

Many years ago, I remember going to the movies to see an art film about a French soccer player named Zinedine Zidane. At the time, Zidane was at the peak of his career, a sublime talent who could do seemingly impossible things with a football, and I was obsessed with him. I must have been, given the premise of the film, which would only have appealed to the most diehard Zidane fan. Titled Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, the film involved trailing cameras on the soccer icon for the duration of a 90-minute Spanish league game to a backdrop of avant-garde music.

Even so, I remember finding the experience strangely hypnotizing. This was in large part down to the music, which was composed and performed by the cult post-rock band Mogwai. Hailing from Glasgow, Mogwai has made a career out of creating guitar-laden, emotionally rich instrumental tracks that Douglas Gordon, the artist behind the Zidane film, refers to as “sweet soul music from Scotland.”

Gordon offers this description in a new documentary about the band Mogwai: If the Stars Had a Sound, which is showing this month (Monday, December 16) at a special screening at Upstate Films in Saugerties. The documentary, which debuted at SXSW earlier this year and will receive a theatrical release in the US next Spring, was made by Accord-based photographer and filmmaker Antony Crook, who has worked with the band since 2011, creating many of Mogwai’s album covers and music videos.

Crook’s collaboration with the band began after he reached out to them one night about 15 years ago following an epiphany of sorts in relation to their music. “I had just come back from a work trip somewhere, and I was up in the middle of the night with jet lag retouching photos, chain-smoking, and listening to music,” says Crook.

At some point, he put on the Mogwai track “I Know You Are But What Am I?” He was so taken by the fusion of Mogwai’s sound with the images he was editing that he continued to loop the track for the next two hours, he says. “I was working on these big, foggy shots, and I was thinking, ‘These images and this sound just really harmonize.'”

On a whim, he went to the band’s website and found an email address. He sent them attachments of the photographs he had been working on, explaining the connection he had felt to the music. Although “they were quite a big band, and it felt a bit random” to contact them out of the blue, the move paid off, and when he woke the next afternoon, a response was awaiting him in his inbox.

“All the band were on it,” he says. “They said, ‘We saw your pictures. We really like your work, and we’ve got a new record coming out.'”

A few weeks later, he met with band member Stuart Braithwaite in Glasgow, an encounter which led to him photographing the cover for Mogwai’s seventh studio album Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will. The meeting also had the effect of launching Crook’s film-making career after the band sent him demos of the album ahead of its release, and he decided, unprompted, to make a music video to accompany the track “How to be a Werewolf.” The video, shot on location at the northern fringes of Scandinavia, features a cyclist (a friend of Crook’s) riding his bike against a backdrop of Arctic landscapes, and the making of it “changed my life completely,” he says. On the strength of it, he got an agent and began making films professionally. In the meantime, he continued making music videos for Mogwai, two of which have been shot here in the Hudson Valley.

The first of these, for the song “Simon Ferocious,” was shot in 2014 at Skydive the Ranch in Gardiner. A second video to accompany the 2017 track “Crossing the Road Material” was filmed at the Accord Speedway.

If there is a visual motif that links all of Crook’s music videos for Mogwai (and which, in turn, links them to Douglas Gordon’s 2006 Zidane feature), it is the beauty of things in motion. Whether it is silhouetted freefallers tumbling and turning against a melancholy sky, race cars sliding gracefully in slo-mo around a speedway track, or a footballing legend competing on the hallowed turf of the Bernabeu, there is something about Mogwai’s sound that seems attuned to the visual language of life captured at pace.

For his part, Crook attributes the success of the collaboration to a shared sensibility. “I think perhaps we see the world in a similar way,” he says. “The pictures I make when left to my own devices have a similar kind of feeling as the music they make.” (Spotify Playlist HERE)

Shooting videos locally has also helped introduce Mogwai’s not-inconsiderable fanbase to the culture of the Hudson Valley, sometimes to the surprise of those involved. Following the release of the “Simon Ferocious” video, Accord Speedway owner Gary Palmer found himself conducting interviews with Rolling Stone and Japanese music magazines.

“He had never heard of the band. I told him they were from Glasgow and a lot of people like them, but I didn’t want to make any bigger deal of it than that… Then his Facebook page got something like 70,000 new likes in a weekend. He just couldn’t believe it.” Palmer’s bewilderment is not that surprising. Despite a long career (they have been on the go since the mid-90s), critical acclaim, and an ardent fanbase, Mogwai has skirted the edges of full-blown mainstream success. In fact, the story arc of Crook’s documentary is the release of the band’s tenth record and the possibility that it may result in their first-ever No.1 on the UK albums chart. To some extent, it seems to have been a conscious choice by the band to avoid the mainstream. Or at least to eschew the conventional pathways that are meant to conjure it up. They largely avoid interviews (our request for an interview was turned down), and in a music industry obsessed with image, they seem refreshingly uninterested in presenting a sugar-coated veneer for public consumption.

On stage, they dress like they’ve just wandered in from the pub, and they insist that the song titles they choose are meaningless. Even their name (a reference to the Gremlins movie) was only meant to be temporary, but they just never got around to changing it, says Crook. “They reject any association through words,” he says. “They’re just sounds, and that’s it.” I asked him if it was hard to tell the story of a band who seemed so cagey about any attempt to interpret their music. Crook says that at the outset, he had a more conventional narrative approach in mind but that as he came to edit the film, he found himself pulled in a different direction.

“I recorded sit-down interviews with the band, but when I edited the film, I got all the way through it without putting them in. It was never really my plan to do that. It’s just that for me, it’s always about how something makes you feel, and whenever I added the talking heads, it didn’t feel as soulful.”

In the end, the band is heard from only rarely in the film and often in loose, unstructured ways – appearing in social media posts or in video chats with the director. The effect is to preserve the enigma of a band who stubbornly refuses to explain themselves while at the same time sparing them the hubris of self-canonization, a trap many music documentaries fall into.

The film avoids the usual trope of wheeling out celebrity fans to wax lyrical about the band’s merits even though, says Crook, there was no shortage of famous musicians keen to be interviewed. In the end, it is left to a handful of talking heads, many of them long-time collaborators, to provide context.

The most illuminating of these interviews is with the Scottish author Ian Rankin, who sees in Mogwai’s music a juxtaposition of opposites, which he regards as a feature of Scottish culture going all the way back to Jekyll and Hyde.

“The light and the dark are always there, clashing, bouncing off each other in Mogwai’s music,” notes Rankin.

At another point, Rankin talks about the cultural capital of Scotland, which he says “has always punched above its weight creatively.” If you widen the net slightly to include northern England, where Crook comes from, this statement still holds true, I think. So what is it, I wonder, about northern Britain that has spawned so many trail-blazing bands, from The Beatles to The Smiths and from Cocteau Twins to Joy Division? According to Crook, the common thread is a culture in which feelings are often withheld.

“I think when you’re from the North (of Britain) and working class, you’re not really expected to talk about your emotions, and certainly not the bands of that generation. So often, people would get together and make art as a way to get those feelings out there. I think that’s probably why all these great guitar bands come out of there.”

Mogwai: If the Stars Had a Sound will be screened at Upstate Films in Saugerties, followed by a Q&A with director Antony Crook on Monday, December 16.

Photos courtesy of Mogwai and Antony Crook

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