The musician that made Kevin Shields want to play guitar
It wouldn’t be an overstatement to call Kevin Shields one of the most innovative guitarists in modern alternative music. Pairing a Fender Jazzmaster with a whammy bar and a whole lot of reverb, Shields’ fuzzy, layered guitar sound defined shoegaze in the 1990s.
Amidst a revival of the genre, the influence of Shields can be increasingly heard in alternative and underground scenes. Every shoegaze artist since My Bloody Valentine has borrowed from Shields’ sound. Every distorted guitar strum is reminiscent of him. With the release of his limited edition Fender fuzz pedal, the Shields Blender Pedal, Shields’ influence isn’t slowing down.
Shields was interested in unusual guitar sounds from a young age. Before he was making them, he was seeking them out in the music he listened to. During a past interview with Pitchfork, Shields fittingly names two pioneering guitar bands as his favourites of all time, The Beatles and the Ramones.
The latter, in particular, would influence Shields’ interest in the instrument. He recalls, “When I first heard the Ramones, I found them really strange, like aliens from another planet. They didn’t look human. And there was no lead guitar; I’d heard punk rock up to that point, but there was too much lead guitar.”
At 13 years old, Shields had already developed a hatred for “wanky guitar solo horribleness… just this image of a guy with the Les Paul whittling away, Jimmy Page style.” Though he’s since grown to appreciate the Led Zeppelin guitarist, Shields’ younger self was drawn more to the American punk rock of the Ramones. He recalls thinking that they were “truly different”.
During his teenage years, Shields’ dedication to learning the guitar was fuelled by his love for the Ramones and Johnny Ramone in particular: “I learned that in order to play guitar like Johnny Ramone, it takes a huge amount of physical effort. A lot of people at my school could play the ‘Stairway to Heaven’ guitar solo, but they couldn’t play three chords of a Ramones song if their life depended on it because they didn’t have the strength or ability to do it.”
Far ahead of his peers even as a teenager, Shields recalls that it was all he practiced. This has since influenced his own style: “The style that I eventually fell into is more focused than people would actually imagine. There’s physicality and also nearly a meditative stillness to it.”
He continues, “You have to be right there in the moment to do it, otherwise it’s just gratuitous chord-bending that sounds like nothing. And that’s why people who copy it don’t connect with anything. You have to be there to do it, you can’t be somewhere else.”
In Shields’ bending and warping of the guitars on the seminal shoegaze record Loveless, there’s certainly a meditative, hypnotic quality. Though Shields’ own fuzzy discography is worlds apart from the power chords of Johnny Ramone, the two shared a love of volume and complexity as well as a desire to do something different with the instrument.
