Thirteen months after Mogwai, we played MONA

We played MONA on Sunday 23 March 2025.

Thirteen months before that, Mogwai played these same lawns as part of Mona Foma, and it turned out to be the last one. Walsh called time on the festival a couple of months later, after sixteen years, saying the spell had worn off. Mona Foma was the summer counterpart to Dark Mofo, his idea, curated by Brian Ritchie out of the Violent Femmes, and for a decade and a half it was most of the reason very good bands found a way down here in February.

So there is something faintly ridiculous about an instrumental post-rock band from Hobart setting up on the same grass. Mogwai have been doing this for thirty years and are a fair part of the reason post-rock is a word anyone uses. We had a handful of shows behind us.

It was a Sunday afternoon and the sun was out, which around here you cannot plan for. That was the best part of it. Anyone could sit down. Friends and family came, and so did people who were at the museum for the day and had never heard of us, and they stayed. Kids were going up and down Tom Otterness’s Girls Rule the whole set, seven metres of bronze that doubles as a playground, mostly ignoring us and occasionally not. Nobody had to buy a ticket or stand in the dark. For a band with no singer, that turns out to be a good way to be heard.

We had spent a while beforehand arguing about whether a merch desk was the right move for a place like this. It felt presumptuous. We set one up anyway.

When we finished, a bloke came over, European, Swiss we think, going off the accent. He had found us on the internet months earlier and on the other side of the world, a post-rock blog or something like it. He was travelling Australia, had come down to Tasmania, and had decided to spend that afternoon at MONA, and we happened to be on the lawn when he got there. He was delighted about it in a way that is hard to put down in writing. He bought a record and off he went.

Forty five minutes of music, and he caught all of it, and it lined up with one stranger’s whole trip by accident. That is the part we still talk about.

Somewhere above all this is the balcony at The Source, which is where you would sit if you owned the place and wanted to watch a band without standing in the sun. We have no idea whether David Walsh was up there. We have decided to believe he was, and that he liked it.

Old Haunts is out now, streaming everywhere, and on Bandcamp if you want to hold it.

Photos by Matt Sansom.