Mogwai
Live @ Qube, Roma, 19.04.2006

To Pogo, You Need Two

April 20, Qube.

I arrived during the second track, bolstered by four cans of Baffomoretti gulped down on the trip from the center to Qube. My press badge is arrogantly bounced back, the place is a packed hole, terrifyingly hot. But who cares, they're on stage. The typical listener of Moguei doesn't expect that a slippery ferret from South Tyrol might pop up in front of them from who knows where, so within two tracks I'm at the front of the stage, albeit off to the side.
Who cares again, the chubby guy at the center of the stage - I can't call him the singer, as he does that one in five pieces, nor the leader, because it's obvious that role is intentionally vacant in Moguei - chubchub, as we were saying, drinks from a plastic cup at the end of each track. "As Scots, shouldn't they be followers of alcohol?" I wonder. "Of course, you idiot, it's wine," I answer myself almost immediately after, when chub produces a bottle of red from behind the speaker to refill his cup. Plastic, I reiterate, to testify that in Scotland, they know a lot about pints and little about goblets.

The girls are all beautiful, with unusual and striking features. The guys are kind, maybe a bit too slick, but overall friendly, certainly. As I sway back and forth pummeled by the Moguei, for example, someone taps my shoulder and makes a gesture indicating "it's hot...", comical but effective. At the Marlene concert, three weeks ago, a similar scene almost led to a brawl. The fault of an idiot, it should be noted, not Marlene. But the idiot wasn't at the Moguei concert, there you go.

And then, the music. So calm/relentless/mighty that it steals the scene from the wine, from the non-rockstar poses of chub, from the beautiful girls, from the friendly guys. The music, mysterious and dazzling like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The music, which enters straight into your head and doesn't leave, that makes you close your eyes for a good three minutes after weaving through the whole hall to be in the front row, with the blasting bass that makes the floor shake or with whalelike cooing in the slower tracks. They play for an hour and three quarters but the concert seems to have just begun, giving the impression they could go on for days, if not forever.

During the last encore, I felt the urge for five minutes of good pogo, I jabbed here and there, and got some odd looks. Never mind, to pogo you need two, but for Moguei, in the end, no.