Did My Bloody Valentine album ‘Loveless’ bankrupt Creation Records?
My Bloody Valentine’s second studio album Loveless has become synonymous with the shoegaze genre. Frontman Kevin Shields developed new production techniques, including the use of the whammy bar, reverb, and copious pedals to create a collage of noisy distortion and bending guitars. The album is now considered the genre’s seminal release, heavily influencing the alternative music that followed, from Radiohead to Bdrmm. But in 1991, the recording and production of the shoegaze masterpiece were causing Alan McGee’s independent label Creation Records huge financial problems.
Loveless began the lengthy process of recording in London in 1989. Creation Records, who were also home to The Jesus and Mary Chain and Primal Scream, were optimistic that the album would be done within weeks. Instead, it took the band two years to finish all 11 tracks. Many of the delays were caused by Shields‘ perfectionism and experimentation – My Bloody Valentine worked with around 45 different engineers across 19 studios throughout the recording process, meticulously recording as many takes as it took to achieve their desired sound.
Each element of the record came together slowly, with huge gaps between recordings, as Shields recalls the lengthy timeline in an interview with Select in 1992: “We recorded the drums in September ’89. The guitar was done in December. The bass was done in April. 1990 we’re in, now. Then nothing happens for a year, really.”
The tambourine featured on the album’s biggest anthem, ‘To Here Knows When’, alone took a week to record. He recalls, “Months and months of not touching songs”, which made Shields forget his tunings.
The record’s lengthy production process is rumoured to have racked up a cost of £250,000, though Shields reports that it was only around £140,000 in a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone. He states: “Plenty of other bands on the label spent a lot, and all bands on major labels spent double the amount. To me, all the financial details seemed to overshadow the record’s artistic qualities. Why is that an issue? Do you know how much the Beatles’ and Pink Floyd’s records cost? You’d be shocked.”
Though the costly album was received well by critics, it didn’t do well commercially, and Creation dropped the band from the label, contributing to the financial woes that the company was suffering from at the time. The LP became a cult album, with original copies of Loveless going for hundreds online until renewed interest in the album and genre led to Domino repressing it in 2021.
