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Baker's Dozen

Happy Songs? Stuart Braithwaite Of Mogwai's Favourite Albums
Luke Turner , August 28th, 2012 04:28

Mogwai's Stuart Braithwaite takes us through his favourite albums, and explains why it's Margaret Thatcher's fault that everyone in Scotland is a goth and how John Peel funded the Scottish music scene

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The Cure – Pornography
It was hard to pick a Cure album because they're one of my favourite bands, and one of the bands that has made brilliant albums in very different styles, perfect pop albums. Pornography is a pretty unique record that is just insanely bleak, so hopeless but also really again self-contained and perfect. It's not got a shit song on it, even some of my favourite albums have a song that you can imagine they could have done without, but Pornography is absolutely brilliant in that respect. It's just a really suffocating, druggy, bleak amazing record. I hear there was a lot of drinking… I've never really been party to any studio meltdowns, so these stories are… I mean, maybe I'll have a couple of slices of cake too many. They're always quite fascinating. I was definitely a bit of a goth, and still am at heart, I just have no hair to dye black any more. The Cure were the first band that I got properly into. The Disintegration tour was the first gig I ever saw, when I was 14 or 15 or something. We toured with the Cure, they were great to tour with. There was a party every night, they treated all the bands really well.