(Credits: Far Out / Steve Gullick)
Sat 20 September 2025 10:00, UK
Though their name was famously a reference to the cute and furry “Gizmo” creature from the film Gremlins, the Scottish post-rock outfit Mogwai built their fanbase by metaphorically “feeding after midnight,” as the movie lore goes—routinely shedding their sweeter melodic sensibilities for effects-laden, blow-torch hot guitar riffage more befitting of the slimy Gremlin monsters themselves.
Rarely bothering to include any vocals on their early albums in the late 1990s, Mogwai’s mystery was another appealing part of the package, enabling them to entice curious listeners from the worlds of indie rock, metal, shoegaze, and avant-garde jazz and electronic music.
They were hailed as forerunners of a new genre—post-rock—and while they didn’t love the label, they were certainly happy to take aim at the status quo of British guitar music if the invite was out there. Specifically, Mogwai made no bones about their gleeful disdain for Britpop, the ‘90s phenomenon that was just limping to the finish line of its glory days.
Mogwai guitarist and sometimes vocalist Stuart Braithwaite, who didn’t hesitate to praise everyone from The Cure to Mudhoney to Slayer, had no such love for Britpop’s endless droves of “fucking cunts in tight Adidas shirts,” as he once infamously summed it up. In fairness, Braithwaite seemed to have it out for just about anybody decked out in Adidas, as he was equally pleased to slag off then-newcomers Korn and Limp Bizkit as “pseudo-heavy” and “quite weak.”
Nobody suffered the wrath of Braithwaite’s amateur insult comedy worse, however, than one Britpop act in particular. Blur, for whatever reason, represented everything Mogwai disliked about popular music in late ‘90s Britain. Maybe it was the clothes, the poshness, the pretend un-poshness, the harpsichords. Either way, the Essex quartet weren’t just deemed “one of the weakest bands on the planet” by Braithwaite, he also took the step of merchandising that opinion—selling t-shirts at Mogwai gigs that made no mention of Mogwai at all, and simply read “Blur Are Shite.” They sold out in a hurry during the Leeds and Reading festivals in 1999.
“[The slogan on the shirt] is written like a dictionary definition because it’s fact,” Braithwaite told Seattle’s Rocket newspaper that year, chuckling through his response. “I’ve already said that if there are legal problems with it then I’m willing to go to court as someone who has studied music and can prove they are shite.”
Damon Albarn and Co. were wise enough not to take the lawsuit route, nor did they offer much of any response at all to these noisy upstarts. It wasn’t their first rodeo.
Meanwhile, more than 20 years later, an older, wiser Stuart Braithwaite stopped short of suggesting any regret about the “Blur Are Shite” stunt, but in a 2021 interview with The Independent, he did admit to being a tad baffled by the whole thing.
“The idea that we’d dislike a band so much that we’d make a t-shirt out of it now seems deeply hilarious,” Braithwaite said, “not just because it’s genuinely quite funny but because we’re men in our mid-forties, most of whom have children and who are generally tactful and reasonable human beings.
“But if you can’t do daft stuff when you’re young, what’s the point of being young?”
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