Ah, the soundtrack. Chances are your favourite band (or their increasingly disengaged guitarist) has indulged in a 40-minute laptop sojourn around a documentary about Indonesian sloth wrestling, before skulking back to the day job of arguing about drum fills. 10 years pass, and everyone quietly accepts that it happened without having to ever talk about it again. Not so for Mogwai, whose 2006 accompaniment to Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait was considered such a triumph – and rightly so – that they wheeled it out for a string of dedicated live dates seven years later. 2013 also saw the band soundtrack French drama Les Revenants and find time for an 8th studio album, Rave Tapes. Now they’re back to score Atomic: Living In Dread And Promise, documentarian Mark Cousins’ sobering insight into the horrors and anxiety of the nuclear age.
Matthew Neale 