The slow 1990s implosion of My Bloody Valentine: “There were chinchillas”
Somewhere around the dawn of the 21st century, My Bloody Valentine arguably became more famous for the length of their hiatus than for the influential ‘shoegazey’ guitar sound they’d helped pioneer in the late 1980s and early ‘90s.
As the exploits of guitarist Kevin Shields were cited by a growing number of young musicians in the 2000s, the conspicuous, lingering absence of any new music from Shields and MBV only managed to raise the intrigue around them. This wasn’t some culty ‘Nuggets’ band from the ‘60s, after all. Shields and singer/guitarist Belinda Butcher were still in their 30s. How had they recorded an epic record like Loveless (1991), only to pack up their tent and go home forever?
Gradually, the answer came into focus, particularly as the burned bridges of the past were slowly rebuilt ahead of the long-awaited My Bloody Valentine reunion in 2007.
“I lost it,” Shields confessed to The Guardian in 2004, taking most of the responsibility for MBV’s original ‘90s demise, “I lost what I had, and I thought, ‘You know what? I’m not going to put a crap record out…’ Everyone has a certain thing, and they lose it, and they should move on. But I wasn’t ready to move on. I reached a sort of stalemate with myself. I wanted to be where I used to be and have that powerful, strong sense of direction. But I wasn’t inspired the way I used to be.”
Countless songwriters in his situation have felt mounting pressure from their label, their fans, and their bandmates, simply forging ahead to put another album out, so, in a way, his unwillingness to compromise looks commendable. Then again, one shouldn’t get the idea that Shields was purely choosing art over money, or that he was being a good sport to all those folks around him with reasonable expectations.
MBV’s record label, Creation, had already cut ties after Loveless, due to the high costs and constant frustrations of dealing with Shields during the production of that seminal album.
“Loveless was a factor in my personal meltdown,” Creation chief Alan McGee said in 2004, before describing the even greater meltdown he witnessed in Kevin Shields during that period, “Kevin’s a genius artist, a visionary, but you have to have brass balls to get in the ring with him”.
McGee recounted having to tearfully plead with Shields to complete work on Loveless, as Creation was losing boatloads of money at the time, but Shields had “lost the plot completely. Everybody became the enemy. He lost his friends, and he lost the band… I went to [Kevin’s] house once with Bobby [Gillespie, of Primal Scream] and there were chinchillas, these weird little rat animals, in cages, about 20 of them, all over the room, with barbed wire everywhere. It was definitely a meltdown.”
Despite the chinchilla-based mental health concerns around Shields at the time, Island Records still swooped in to sign MBV after Creation moved on, giving the band a £500,000 that was poured into a new home studio. Famously, of course, that studio produced zero new My Bloody Valentine records, as Shields required another decade of sorting himself out before the idea of regrouping and, lo and behold, finally delivering a new MBV album, was on the table. After a mere 22 year wait, m b v was released in 2013, and the band have continued touring into 2026, presumably sans chinchillas.
