Mogwai perform Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait @ Albert Hall, 19 July

It's impossible to question Manchester's heritage when it comes to either football or music, so it always seemed a sensible choice for Manchester International Festival to host the live debut of one of the great pieces of art to successfully combine the two in recent years – the Mogwai-soundtracked Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait. The film – which follows French icon Zinedine Zidane for the full 90 minutes of a Real Madrid home game back in 2005 – is projected on to a huge screen in the ornate new Trof venue, Albert Hall, which will open fully early next year.

With the band seated unobtrusively, and no stage lighting at all, it's obvious that the film is intended to be the uninterrupted visual focus of the event. The soundtrack to accompany it, though, is vintage Mogwai; it manages to tap into Zidane's emotions in wonderfully nuanced fashion. Twinkling guitars signal serenity in the game's early stages, but quickly give way to furious drums and screeching reverb as Real Madrid concede. 

A half-time run-through of the match day's current affairs, which includes footage of the Iraq War, involves Mogwai's signature dizzyingly noisy walls of feedback – but the band's subtler, more reflective moments, accompanied by subtitled quotes from the man himself, pack just as hefty an emotional punch.

The evening ends in ignominy, for Zidane at least; he's sent off for his part in a brawl ten minutes before the final whistle. As he leaves the field to a nightmarish cacophony of screaming guitars, the subtitles tell us: "Magic is sometimes very close to nothing at all.” Like Eric Cantona, Zidane clearly fancied himself as an amateur philosopher. Tonight, though -– and for by no means the first time – it's Mogwai who are magical. [Joe Goggins]