The thing that surprises you most, reading Mogwai guitarist Stuart Braithwaite’s memoir, is that anyone involved can remember anything at all. Such was the full-body commitment with which the participants of the 90s Glasgow music scene he documents threw themselves into during the last days of real music industry money, that the whole era should, by rights, be one big blackout.
The subtitle of his book Spaceships Over Glasgow is Mogwai, Mayhem and Misspent Youth, and from early days experimenting with sniffing Tipp-Ex solvent while listening to the 13th Floor Elevators, the madness rarely lets up. On Mogwai’s first foreign tour, to Norway in 1997, they partake of the ferry bar so enthusiastically – snorting the booze for extra intoxication – that for a few hours they are genuinely not sure whether one of them has fallen overboard. Musical milestones whiz by in a drunken blur, relationships suffer and minds fray at the edges. At one particularly dark moment, Braithwaite responds to his breakup with his teenage sweetheart, Adele Bethel (later of Sons and Daughters), with a months-long psychedelic bender and manages to convince himself his right hand is demonically possessed.
