THOUGH they cut a rather austere and stoic presence on stage, Mogwai are in fact a funny band.

It’s just hard to communicate that when you’re an instrumental act, so it’s often expressed in their song titles: ‘George Square Thatcher Death Party’, ‘Stop Coming To My House’, ‘Boring Machines Disturbs Sleep’, ‘Glasgow Mega-Snake’, and ‘You’re Lionel Richie’, whose hilarious real-life backstory is retold by multi-instrumentalist Barry Burns below.

Barry himself is the epitome of Mogwai’s wry Scottish humour. (Bandmate Stuart Braithwaite wasn’t joking when he said he brought him into the band because he was a “good laugh”.) He’s lived in Berlin for the past eight years, and when I ask a seemingly benign question about the rest of the band’s whereabouts he immediately gets stuck into Stuart’s current address.

“Stuart is keeping it real in Glasgow. But you’re not keeping it real if you’re in the fancy west end,” he says, laughing loudly down the phone.

“We just wanted to have a laugh and we still continue to do that. But when we play music it feels like we’re taking it seriously.”

Even Mogwai’s pummeling live show – which they’re bringing to Australia in March – is a long-running in-joke that’s both enthralled and terrified audiences for two decades. “We’re just brats,” Barry says proudly when I tell him that their 2002 show at the Prince of Wales in Melbourne was still the loudest I’ve ever seen a band play.

So have they toned things down as they enter their early-40s? “It’s worse,” he jokes.

Barry joined the band a few years after they formed in Glasgow in 1995, contributing a bunch of back-masked shit-talk (his words) on their debut album Young Team and becoming a fully-fledged member around the time they recorded its follow-up, Come On Die Young.

Those two records are the starting point of a brief history of the band, told through four of their nine albums and one EP of unholy white noise.