Watch a ferociously loud early set from My Bloody Valentine in 1989
To try and recreate the oozing, velvet-lined noise of My Bloody Valentine would be to miss the point entirely. The Dublin shoegaze outfit’s 1991 album Loveless was perhaps the only truly psychedelic album to arrive since Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, quietly revolutionising ideas about what guitar brands could and should sound like.
The road to immortality was a long one, with the group spending nearly a decade honing their hallmark brand of euphoric noise. We’ve trawled the archives to bring you this rare footage of Kevin Shields, Bilinda Butcher, Colm Ó Cíosóig and Debbie Googe performing at the London University student union in 1989, just a year after they signed to Creation Records.
By 1988, My Bloody Valentine were ready to call it quits. It had been a full five years since Kevin Shields and the band had come together, and they had very little to show for it. After performing in and around Dublin as a post-punk band, they relocated to Berlin and began mimicking goth groups like The Cramps and The Birthday Party. After that, they made their way to London, where Shields set about transforming the group into a conceptual rock band, releasing deliberately provocative songs in scruffy DIY record sleeves.
Sadly, the public’s response was less than enthusiastic, with Shields later telling The Guardian that My Bloody Valentine were written off as little more than a “shit Jesus and Mary Chain copyist band”. Things only got worse when lead singer Dave Conway decided to quit, leaving the remaining members to adopt a Byrds-esque jangle-core style. But Shields still wasn’t satisfied. He’d long had the idea for a sound blending “beautiful songs with the most extremeness of physicality and sound”.
Though Loveless is frequently held up as an example of studio experimentation, My Bloody Valentine’s oblique, fuzz-drenched sound has its roots in two formative live concerts. The first of these was The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl, which Shields heard on record as a child in the 1970s. He was struck by how The Beatles’ music was barely perceptible amid the noise of the crowd. The second was a Einstürzende Neubauten gig Shields attended during MBV’s time in Berlin. The guitarist got close to realising this imagined form of oblique rock on 1987’s Ecstacy, but nobody seemed to notice.
It was only on embarking on their “final” tour, during which Bilinda Butcher and drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig started playing with a new aggression, that MBV’s sound began to take shape. Suddenly, people were paying attention, including Creation boss Alan McGee, who had previously regarded the band as a “joke”, only to find himself bowled over by their performance. He signed them on the spot. A few weeks later, Kevin Shields borrowed a friend’s Fender Jazzmaster and started playing around with the tremolo arm. Finally, that sound that had been swimming around the guitarist’s head for nearly a decade was coming to life.
