Mogwai live at Bristol Beacon: Gig Review

A live photo of Mogwai headlining BBC Radio 6 Music Festival

Mogwai headlining BBC Radio 6 Music Festival 2025 (Gary Mather)

4 stars hq

For many years Mogwai have had a live reputation built on volume and scale, but what stands out more is control.

Given the noise maelstrom that’s about to occur, there is something quietly disarming about the way Mogwai take to the stage.

No grand entrance, no attempt to rouse the crowd, just a few waves before the brooding, spectral keyboard of God Gets You Back pulses into life and the audience falls into a near-instant hush.

Hi Chaos, also taken from recent album The Bad Fire, follows with a slow, deliberate climb, the pressure building throughout.

Stoic as ever, Stuart Braithwaite, Barry Burns, Dominic Aitchison and Martin Bulloch are almost imperceptible as their dynamics swell, locked together in a steady volcanic ascent that eventually tips into distortion.

The set is a healthy balance of new and old material to keep everyone happy. Drive The Nail, from As the Love Continues (2021), is epically windswept and serrated, its guitar lines scraping against a dense rhythmic undertow.

In contrast, the piano-led Friend Of The Night, from 2006’s Mr Beast, offers a reminder of the band’s melodic instincts but siphoned through their unique blend of shoegaze and prog.

On I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead, Bulloch’s drums land heavily while the guitars grind forward in waves.

Gruelling but purposeful, its sense of emotional weight carries into Pale Vegan Hip Pain (the former track’s main competition for best song title), which has a melancholic core handled with restraint rather than sentimentality.

A notable shift comes on Ritchie Sacramento, one of the evening’s few vocal-led pieces.

Sung cleanly by Braithwaite, it references lost contemporaries including David Berman of Silver Jews and Scott Hutchison of Frightened Rabbit.

Characteristically, the delivery is understated, which only sharpens its emotional impact.

One mind-altering piece of music replaces another, but Mogwai simply glide through their set.

Elsewhere, Fanzines Made Of Flesh has one of the more uplifting surges of the night, its comparatively breezy forward momentum cutting cleanly through the set’s darker textures.

In contrast, We’re No Here leans into aching repetition, building a sense of desperation through incremental layering.

Lion Rumpus closes the main set in emphatic fashion, the most righteous outro music to the best film you’ve never seen.

The encore begins in near silence with a stark May Nothing But Happiness Come Through Your Door from Come On Die Young.

The opening is so quiet that the room seems to lean forward collectively, indeed the audience response is reverential rather than raucous throughout. A logical move: how can one hope to compete with the volume of Mogwai?

It provides the perfect prelude to Mogwai Fear Satan, still one of the band’s defining statements.

The familiar three-chord guitar motif emerges gradually, joined by bassand a restless drum pattern.

The riff cycles, gathering density and distortion, and when the guitars crest at around five minutes the impact is physical but not chaotic, like the release of Beelzebub itself.

Given the band members’ lack of theatricality, the production complements rather than overwhelms.

Rather than having a backdrop, the lighting design is often focused on the floor, which glows and pulses beneath the band while discreet tubes of light encircle the bases of the instrument stands and elsewhere.

For many years Mogwai have had a live reputation built on volume and scale, but what stands out more is control.

The audience does not simply hear the set as on record, but are hypnotically immersed in the music, truly experiencing it.

Justifiably the best at what they do.