“We all expressed a desire to do something different…”

David Conway, the band’s original singer, recalls his time in My Bloody Valentine

“Summer, 1983 in Dublin – I’d just finished with a band I’d been in for a little under a year. One day, I was in an old independent record shop, Freebird. I saw an ad from a band looking for a vocalist. I called the number and spoke to a guy called mark ross who was then playing bass with Kevin and Colm. We arranged to meet outside Sallynoggin church in Co Dublin. my first impression when I saw Kevin, Colm and mark was that they looked reassuringly normal.

“Back at Kevin’s family home in Cabinteely, Kevin and Colm had taken advantage of the fact that the Shields family were away on holiday to set up a drum kit and a couple of amps in the front room. They played a few pieces for me and I was hooked. At this point Kevin’s guitar style was mostly heavy chords and riffing filtered through layers of distortion, chorus and analogue delay — a big, scary wall-of-sound. Colm’s drumming style was already in evidence: a driving, atavistic attack. In a way they struck me as outsiders — as far as the prevailing Dublin music scene was concerned;.

“Initially, in the first few months or so, the songs tended to mostly emerge from the basic rehearsal process. Kevin and Colm — and, while he was still us, mark — would come up with the music and I would put the vocals to it. At this stage — July ’83 to April ’84 — we were also composing backing tapes on a four-track Tascam, which we incorporated into our live gigs. Though Kevin took responsibility for the lion’s share of this, we all usually contributed. In fact, this approach to songwriting – eventually ditching the backing tapes – lasted for a few lineup changes including the writing and recording of This Is Your Bloody Valentine in West Berlin in December 1984.

“After we re-located to London and Deb Googe joined, the songwriting approach changed. We agreed it was important to write real songs. While I came up with the words, most of the melodic lines incorporated into the vocals derived from Kevin’s ideas, since he was creating music with very specific melodic/harmonic/ rhythmic relationships in mind. The first really tangible results of this approach appeared on ‘The New record By my Bloody Valentine’.

“There were two main reasons why I left the band. In late ’86, I began to develop gastric ailments that became increasingly debilitating. I’d also begun to feel that – after recording the “Sunny Sundae Smile” eP – I had less and less to contribute to the band in terms of direction. The split was amicable. The last time I saw mBV would have been at the Brixton Academy on the rollercoaster tour with the mary Chain, Dinosaur Jr and Blur. As for what I thought of the band they became, it didn’t take me by surprise quite as much as it might have done with some people. When I first heard ‘You made me realise’, it took me back to when I first met Kevin and Colm and we’d all expressed the desire to do something different. It finally validated that promise.”