How My Bloody Valentine’s biggest anthem took years to record
Nobody would expect that anything about My Bloody Valentine would move quickly. As a band, they near enough invented taking things so slow that it was hard to sustain your neck upright, and shoegaze was born. But taking years and crafting a classic anthem in a piecemeal fashion is a very singular way to transfer your artistic outlook to your studio methods.
‘When You Sleep’ was the first single from My Bloody Valentine’s most celebrated album Loveless, released in 1991. But producing the genre’s seminal release was no easy task. In a 1992 interview with Select, My Bloody Valentine founder Kevin Shields detailed the lengthy process of recording the shoegaze anthem across a period of three years: “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.”
He continues, “So it doesn’t have vocals at this stage? No. Does it have words? No. Does it even have a title? No. The track was simply referred to by a number, ‘Song 12’ it was called.” The melody line and vocals weren’t to be done until 1991, but there were still “huge gaps”. “Months and months of not touching songs. Years.” It’s no surprise, then, that Shields remarks, “I used to forget what tunings I’d used.”
Characterised by its fuzzy, distorted guitar and layered vocals, the latter element was to cause some of the delays in the recording process. Shields stated, “The vocals sound like that because it became boring and too destructive trying to get the right vocal. So I decided to put all the vocals in.”
Though the track sounds like vocals were contributed both by Shields and vocalist and guitarist Bilinda Butcher, he reveals that “it’s just me – me slowed down and me speeded up at the same time.” Their perfectionist recording techniques were to prolong the track but also contributed to its defining vocal sound: “Some songs we sang over and over until we got bored – usually between 12 and 18 times. I started sorting through the tapes, and it did my head in, so I just played them all together, and it was really good – like one, vaguely distinct voice.”
Though the three-year-long recording process was to “do [Shields’] head in”, and Loveless was even rumoured to have cost the label £250,000 to produce, ‘When You Sleep’ would go on to become My Bloody Valentine’s biggest anthem while Loveless became the defining release of the shoegaze genre.
Listen to the shoegaze anthem that took three years to finish below.
