Mogwai have drafted in a string quintet for their appearance at the ALL TOMORROW’S PARTIES festival, nme.com can reveal.
The festival takes place at Camber Sands Holiday Centre on the weekend of April 7-9.
The band have also lined-up a low key warm up gig at the 700-capacity Liquid Room in Edinburgh on April 4. The gig was originally scheduled to take place at the 400 capacity The Venue club in the city, but it has been moved to allow the band to fit the extra musicians onto a larger stage.
Mogwai bassist Dominic Aitchison said that the quintet had been recruited over the last two weeks “to play on a few songs that we’ve never really tackled live before”. He added: “I don’t want to spoil the surprise and say what we’ll be playing!
“All Tomorrow’s Parties is going to be a really big festival for us. We really wanted to play The Venue, but if we’re warming up for a really big gig and we’re going to get strings there’s no point doing a warm-up gig and not being able to use them!”
Aitchison claimed these two gigs would probably be the band’s last of the year, instead Mogwai would spend the next few months working on the follow up to 1999’s ‘Come On Die Young’ album.
Aitchison also revealed that the band were planning a mini-album of traditional Gaelic folk songs. He said: “Stuart‘s (Braithwaite) mum speaks Gaelic and she knows loads of people within that circle, so we’d be able to get a proper singer in!”
All Tomorrow’s Parties, which takes place April 7-9, has now sold out.
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