EXBERLINER Issue 164, October 2017

WHAT’S ON — Barry Burns
MY PL AYLIST
by Barry Burns
1-In Aeternam Vale
“Dust Under Brightness”
Oldie, this one. Has everything I like
about music in it.
2-Trisomie 21 “The Last Song”
Another French one, but I’m in that
mood while I’m missing Berlin, for
some reason.
3-Aus Decline “Five Years Life”
Love me a badly recorded band.
4-Vena “Insane”
This has all the chords and notes
that wake me up at 11pm.
5-Kangding Ray “A Protest Song”
He’s my bandmate in my other band
SUMS, a Frenchman based in Berlin
and the nicest man in music bar
none. This song is Berlin for me.
for citizenship as we’ve lived here over
eight years. Our daughter was born in Berlin;
it is our home. Obviously, my bar Das
Gift imports a lot of stuff over from the
UK, mostly Scotland, but we won’t feel the
brunt of that until it goes through. More
people in Berlin have money now, though,
so perhaps they will still be able to afford
it. I hope to see Scotland break away from
the UK and rejoin the EU, but I fear the
orange-coloured human toilet brush in the
White House will press the red button first.
So you feel Berlin’s gotten richer since
you moved here? It’s changed loads since
we first moved here. It basically means
that the food is better and the people are
a bit more polite to you in shops than
before, when no one really cared about
“service”. I think it’s just going to keep
growing, I don’t really see it stopping yet,
anyway. I can’t afford to buy a place here
anymore. We bought one when we first
moved, when it was cheap, but have since
sold it and just rent now. We bought a flat
in Glasgow instead, because the prices
here are just crazy.
How’s the future of Mogwai looking?
Well, we have a couple more big
soundtracks lined up in the near future:
a TV series and another Hollywood film.
I’m quite happy for us to go down that
route and chuck in a studio album every
three years or so. The only major stress
that comes from composing soundtracks is
that we are writing to please someone else
rather than ourselves, so there can be quite
a lot of pressure there, but it is rewarding
once it’s finished.
Your band is over 20 years old, and it
seems you’re more popular now than
ever – how do you feel about that? Is
there a “legacy” attached to Mogwai?
I almost wish we were around during the
1960s because we’d probably be driving
Rolls Royces about now. Perhaps if we do
more Hollywood soundtracks we might
get there! I’ve noticed we’ve been getting
younger audiences in with every tour who
seem to appreciate that we’re trying to do
something different with each record. We
also have an older crowd who moan that
we don’t sound like we used to, but they
still come anyway. I couldn’t imagine just
churning out the same thing over and over
again. Either way, after 20 years it’s still
something we enjoy doing and can regularly
surprise us still. n
OCTOBER 2017