UNCUT

“We didn’t fit in…”

Kevin Shields on the haircuts of the mid-’80s indie scene

- The vinyl remasters of Isn’t Anything and Loveless are available now from www.mybloodyva­lentine.org

Netherland­s. “in Holland, you get paid by the government for gigs, even if there’s no one there,” says Ó Cíosóig. “it was like a union fee, i guess. We sent a demo tape. We got one gig and decided to emigrate.”

Without a regular bass player, they were joined on a Casio keyboard by Conway’s girlfriend Tina Durkin. “When it worked, it was good,” says Ó Cíosóig. “Those early Casios had this cool, organy sound like a Farfisa, which gave the songs a distorted groove.”

“in Amsterdam, we stayed in a dive called The Last Water Hole,” remembers Shields. “it was pretty rough; it was run by bikers. There were no sheets on the bed, just a cover on the mattress. everyone slept in their clothes.” A sympatheti­c promoter offered them the run of his house in the countrysid­e near Gouda. Aside from a commendabl­y well-stocked record collection, the band discovered the house also contained a modest cannabis factory in the attic.

“We were pretty broke so were started smoking weed instead of tobacco,” says Ó Cíosóig. “i got used to carrying a big tobacco pouch full of weed around with me. One day, i walked into a police station in Amsterdam with a huge bag of weed in my pocket without even realising it was there. We tried to get work. Kevin managed to get a job herding cows for a couple of months.”

A move to berlin in winter 1984 facilitate­d an introducti­on to a dynamic local promoter, Dimitri Hegemann. Under his patronage, they record a mini-album – This Is Your Bloody Valentine. “The studio was so cheap that the engineer who was doing the mixing for us had to do a live gig that night, so he had to leave at 6pm,” says Ó Cíosóig. “it took an afternoon to mix the record. One of the tracks was mixed in 10 minutes. We just put the faders up. ‘Done! Next track.’”

“WheN we arrived in London in 1985, we didn’t fit in. By that point, we were still looking a bit like The Birthday Party – we didn’t think of it as goth because make-up and looking weird was normal back then for us. One day, I just cut my fringe and suddenly I had a ramones haircut! Colm had the next one, Dave next, and then Debbie. everyone followed each other. I remember seeing Bobby Gillespie. The Jesus And mary Chain still had their hair up. But the band that actually influenced us the most in the way we looked was The Scientists. They all had really long versions of the ramones’ haircuts. We were at a gig in holland once and the whole band arrived with these crazy identical haircuts. I just thought, ‘Wow, they look so cool.’ But people couldn’t tell if we were goths or punks or what. So when we arrived in London we stuck out a lot, we would get yelled at on the street, even. At gigs I realised we weren’t the same as everyone else. everyone else had their ’60s haircuts, but more stylish and more mannered, and nicer dressed. We stuck out quite a bit.

“The only other band that had a similar look we came across about a year later was The Primitives. They all had a similar look, but again theirs was more mannered, more prim and correct.”

Debbie Googe came to My bloody Valentine by a circuitous route. Originally from Yeovil, she had been involved in Somerset’s anarchopun­k scene in the late ’70s, where her band bikini Mutants self-released a cassette on local label, All The Mad Men. in the mid-’80s, she was in London, working at the Rio cinema in Dalston. Her then-partner, Annie Lloyd, was based in berlin, where she fronted Hegemann’s band, Leningrad Sandwich. When My bloody Valentine decided to relocate to London, Lloyd recommende­d Googe as a potential bassist. “They were so sweet and innocent,” she laughs. “Colm took ages to decipher. We used to practise in the squats where Kevin and Colm lived. They were pretty smelly, as you can imagine with three boys in a very small room and no open windows.”

As it transpired, the London squat scene proved critical to the band’s growth. “We lived a very free life,” confirms Shields. “i liked it that way. it was very positive. Most of our gigs were squat gigs, too. Some of the squats in London, they’d literally take out the first floor to make it more like a venue. We played in a squatted church in bath once. it was like Mad Max. Kids running around with ripped clothes and hair black with dirt. it was the hardcore end of the convoy people, basically. They really didn’t like us. i have a tape of that gig somewhere. it’s very funny. You can hear us playing, then they got us to stop and you can hear a guy with a real hippie voice saying, ‘Hey, man. We told you to stop. it’s too loud.’ That was late ’85.”

The picture that emerges of My bloody Valentine during this period is one of guileless aspiration. The music – evident in songs like “The Devil Made Me Do it”, “Tiger in My Tank” and “The Love Gang” – was reaching for an aesthetic ideal not yet completely formulated. “They needed to get something down

“It was like the Partridge Family on acid!” biliNdA bUTCHeR

that was more in spirit of what they were like when they played on stage – which was astonishin­g,” recalls Joe Foster, who produced the band’s 1986 EP, “The New Record By My Bloody Valentine”. “There was total chaos going on.”

“They were great,” says Bilinda Butcher. “I was a bit of a fan. They were a bit different. They all had bowl haircuts. Dave was quite impressive as a frontman. Then my boyfriend at the time said they were looking for a backing vocalist and I went along for an audition. I remember Kevin was hitting pedals and amps, chucking things around. His glasses were stuck together with a plaster. I knew the words to some of the songs; I think that did it for Kevin. For Deb, I sang Dolly Parton’s ‘Bargain Store’ a cappella.”

In fact, Butcher was walking into a more fluid situation than she might have imagined. The band was growing restless with their direction; then, shortly after a tour in 1987, Conway decided to leave. Shields was now unsure how best to manage this event. Take on lead vocals himself? or was a more radical approach necessary?

As Shields sees it, the arrival of Googe and Butcher – while two years apart – initiated a change not just in the band’s personal dynamic but also their sound. The music the quartet first made together – a single, “Strawberry Wine” and a mini-album Ecstasy, both in 1987 – was, they all agree, necessaril­y transition­al. Stylistica­lly, the songs shared a number of attributes with the jangly independen­t music of the mid-’80s.

“It was the first time I’d ever written lyrics and sung them,” recalls Shields. “I remember coming home from Waterloo in the morning going, ‘I’m a songwriter!’ In ’87, early ’88, we very, very, very quickly decided that we didn’t like them. Then we were going to drop the name. We just wanted to erase the whole history.”

“You can hear where we’re going in songs like ‘Clair’ or ‘Please lose Yourself In Me’,” says Ó Cíosóig. “But we wanted to rock out more. We were very inspired by the American scene – Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth and Hüsker Dü. Then Kevin got a great new guitar, discovered the tremolo arm and the reverse reverb effect. That gave him a whole new place to play in. A whole new sonic world.”

“I used reverse reverb all over the Ecstasy and ‘Strawberry Wine’ records to no great consequenc­e, because I was using it the way it was meant to be used,” explains Shields. “Then in ’88, I discovered that it was extremely sensitive to velocity and how high you hit the string. You could make huge waves of sound by hitting it

softer or harder. At the same time, my friend Bill Carey from Something Pretty Beautiful lent me his Fender Jazzmaster. It had a tremolo arm. I played it on ‘Thorn’. The second I did that, something jumped inside me. It allowed me to play in a way where I didn’t have to think about what I was doing, I could just feel it.”

Change came, and not a moment too soon. My Bloody Valentine showcased these exciting new developmen­ts in late 1988 via two EPs, released a few months apart on Creation Records, “You Made Me Realise” and “Feed Me With Your Kiss”.

“To me, the biggest shift was ‘You Made Me Realise’,” says Googe. “I remember when we were mixing it, Kevin said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘It sounds like Jefferson Airplane.’ He said, ‘Fuck that!’ and started pushing things.”

“When we were doing ‘Feed Me With Your Kiss’, I made the bass so heavy it popped the speaker off the wall,” admits Shields. “Instinctiv­ely, the engineer put his foot out to stop it hitting the ground and it broke his foot.” “By the time we got to Isn’t

Anything, it wasn’t just the sound that had changed,” continues Googe. “It was something about the way the songs were falling rhythmical­ly. It sounded different. It felt like a different thing entirely.”

FoEl Studio, Wales, summer, 1988. My Bloody Valentine take up residence to record their debut album, Isn’t

Anything. “It was quite a spooky place,” remembers Bilinda Butcher. “The studio was in a converted barn. Kevin used to fall asleep there a lot and wake up completely freaked out. The guy who owned it, Dave Anderson, had been in Amon Düül. He had some weird stories of stuff that had gone on there. There was a time where something peculiar happened and the tape went into a strange shape on the tape machine, like a pyramid.”

Sessions were dictated by Shields’ habit of sleeping long into the day and working through the night. “When it came to doing all the vocals, Kevin only had about two hours sleep a night,” remembers Ó Cíosóig. “That’s where the weird, broken lyrics come from – this dream state of the language itself being twisted around and placed in a different space.”

Paranormal activity? Fugue states? There’d be more of those to come. But for now, despite such otherworld­ly conditions, the music of Isn’t

Anything was surprising­ly gritty. “It was purposeful­ly raw,” acknowledg­es Shields. “We didn’t add compressio­n or reverb to the vocals. We kept to single takes. The idea was, it’s just us doing what we do – without trying to be something that we’re not.”

“People weren’t prepared for Isn’t Anything,” says Jeff Barrett, then a publicist for Creation. “I went up and down the country with the Valentines. I remember a gig at Nottingham Trent Poly where they were phenomenal. It didn’t feel necessaril­y year zero, it didn’t feel like scorched earth, but I knew it was going to be a big record. It put a fire up everybody’s arse. There was some good British noise bands. You could go see Godflesh or Jackdaw With Crowbar. loop were doing their thing. But there was something different about this. The Velvets weren’t the reference point. It was contempora­ry.”

While Isn’t Anything was an exciting artistic breakthrou­gh for MBV, over the next year the band found the pressure mounting. Shields recounts two failed attempts to record follow-up EPs during early 1988. Domestical­ly, meanwhile, his relationsh­ip with Butcher was also beginning to unravel.

“At that point, things were breaking down between us, I think,” she says. “We were living in this house together and we’d see each other – but be in different spheres. Loveless is called Loveless not just because of our relationsh­ip breaking down, but because the whole process of making Loveless was difficult.”

Shields’ best work – then, as now – comes to him during the hypnagogic state when the brain transition­s between wakefulnes­s and sleep. Butcher recalls him writing songs at night on the sofa in the flat in Brixton, often nodding off with a guitar on his lap. During an American tour to support Isn’t Anything, a fan gave Shields a cassette of The

Beach Boys Today! and Pet Sounds. “I fell asleep to it all the time,” he says. “It became part of my life. Maybe because of it, I developed a certain ideas about production.” Inspiratio­n came from other sources, too: from his home on Brixton’s Tulse Hill Estate, Shields was exposed to a vibrant mix of gospel, reggae, ragga and – crucially – hip-hop. These various factors began to coalesce, towards the end of 1989, into a follow-up to Isn’t Anything. The making of Loveless has been the subject of much conjecture and myth-making over the past 27 years. Joe Foster, then an ally at Creation, attempts a definitive take on what went down between September 1989 and January 1991. “There are all kind of stories. Some of them make it look like Kevin was an orson Welles-like genius. others make it look like he’s a stoner, just useless. Neither of those things were true.”

What Foster leans towards is a kind of third way, where Shields’ creative vision for Loveless was effectivel­y frustrated by bad luck, administra­tive ineptitude and the band’s own slow, meticulous working practices. The experiment­s Shields

“I got into some serious mind meditation shit after the ’91 tour” KeviN sHields

and Ó Cíosóig conducted in South Kensington during June and July, 1989 initiated a shift in Shields’ attitude to the possibilit­ies of sound. among the songs they worked up was an embryonic version of “Soon”, which would later lead off the band’s “Glider” EP. In September, the band decamped to Elephant Studios in Wapping, south London, for an eight-week period where, Shields claims, “we put down about 20 songs.”

Their relationsh­ip with alan McGee’s Creation label, however, was faltering. “They were penniless, they couldn’t afford £1,000 to do the next Felt record,” says Shields. “They knew we were slow and decided there was no point putting us in an expensive studio. They found these good deals, but that meant the studio wasn’t looked after properly or it was run by weird people. at Elephant, we worked at lot at night and the studio owner was always hanging around. He told us he was hiding out as MI5 were after him. The tapes were confiscate­d three or four times, because Creation didn’t have the money to pay the bill. That characteri­sed Loveless. Then Colm got really ill.”

“I was going to be evicted from my squat,” says Ó Cíosóig. “I didn’t have a new place. Creation couldn’t even afford £300 deposit for a flat. I’d go to the studio and then as soon as I left, I’d walk the streets looking at places to squat. This was November, it was cold, and I’m out walking the streets. all that got to me. I had this nervous breakdown. I was able to function mentally, but my brain-to-arm muscle control mechanism stopped working. I managed to get it together for a

couple of songs – two songs on the record have live drums. ‘Only Shallow’ and ‘Come In alone’.”

“It was like a fucking meltdown,” recalls Shields. “So then we got the idea that we would program the bass drum parts and he’d just play the hi-hat and snare.”

“The initial process of doing drums was very lengthy,” says debbie Googe. “You would turn up every day and not really do anything because Kevin and Colm were tuning a drum. You lock into that. It becomes what you do. a lot of time goes by. We were all perilously close to losing our sanity at a certain point. For me, I guess, my sense of self-worth got a little low at times. I wasn’t doing an awful lot.”

“It felt like ploughing through mud,” says Butcher. “Kevin was going through such a lot. I would swan in and out when I was doing my thing, whereas he was there all the time, dealing with everybody, with alan McGee and the engineers.”

Even now Shields shudders as he recalls the perceived intransige­nce he encountere­d firsthand in recording studios. “When we recorded ‘Glider’, I remember the guys at the studio saying, ‘You guys are out of your mind, what you’re doing.’ at another studio, one of the engineers wanted to run a pizza place, the other one wanted to move into advertisin­g.”

“Kevin had a vision, we could all see it,” adds Ó Cíosóig. “We needed a proper studio from the get-go that didn’t break down, where there were no faulty channels and no crap going on. We were firing engineers all the time. We didn’t do things normally. They’d be freaking out. ‘That frequency, 4hertz, is distorting! You can’t do that!’ ‘We don’t give a shit about your fucking 4khtz! It sounds good. So what?’ They couldn’t get the weirdness of the record, the warpiness. It didn’t help when you had somebody sitting in the corner looking at you like a freak.”

“I used to really love watching Kevin creating his various sound booths in various places – his little blanket tents,” remembers Googe. “He would construct these things out of foam and blankets and God knows, these crazy little shanty towns inside the actual studios.”

aside from Ó Cíosóig’s work earlier on, Shields recorded much of the album alone. Butcher recorded her vocals late in the process, at London’s Protocol and Britannia Row studios between May and June, 1991. “Kevin would give me a guide vocal and I’d make up lyrics for it,” says Butcher. “He might not be singing real words, but it would sound like something to me so I would write down what I thought he had sung.”

In February, 1991, the “Tremolo” EP brought into woozy focus Shields’ gifts for crushing sonic power and delicate vulnerabil­ity. One track, “To Here Knows When”, appeared on Loveless, when the album finally appeared in November. “I always thought Loveless was a really great pop record,” says Googe. “Kevin has got a really strong sense of melody that people don’t always pick up on. People talk about how he reinvented guitar – which is true – but actually the reason it works and why people remember it is because you do go away whistling these little hooks.”

“How many studios did we work in?” says Shields. “25, I think. It nearly sank us, to be honest, but it didn’t quite. It was just a lot of bad luck. Some people, they would get into a situation like that and then stop to regroup. That’s the smart way to do it. Otherwise you use too much energy and it slows you down. don’t just plough through hell.”

Had it ended there, Loveless alone would have granted My Bloody Valentine an unshakeabl­e place in rock history. But the protracted process that led to its follow-up proved the band unable, in this instance, to play the cards they had been dealt. “I don’t know what the hell happened,” reflects Bilinda Butcher. “I look back and think, ‘God.’ I mean, that was really mad.”

The plan, everyone now agrees, seemed sensible at the time. In 1992, My Bloody Valentine signed with Island Records. Shields bought a house in Streatham and began building a recording studio at the property. “We did it really fast,” says Shields. “We got the house in January ’93, paid for it in March, we had the studio finished in June. Then the desk died.”

“We didn’t understand all the technical aspects of wiring a studio,” admits Ó Cíosóig. “Problems with electricit­y, tones, frequencie­s. It took months to try and figure that out; engineers were scratching their heads.”

a second desk proved to be equally problemati­c. Meanwhile, Island proved unwilling to help the band recoup their outlay. Shields estimates they lost a year. There were other considerat­ions, too. “The house was full of madness,” admits Googe. “We smoked way too much weed. It was like the Partridge Family on acid. It was quite a mad scene. and then there were the chinchilla­s. I think Kevin bought one as a present for Bill. They thought it might be lonely, so they got another one. Then, like rodents do, they bred. at its peak, I think there were 13 or 14 chinchilla­s and they had the whole of the upstairs floor.”

“I don’t know what kind of pressure Kevin must have been under to follow up Loveless,” admits Butcher. “But a lot of songs got written there and eventually things were recorded there. That was a spooky place too, I have to say. There were some weird things going on. Both Colm and I saw this apparition like a hooded monk hanging out round the tape-machine room. Kevin saw all sorts of stuff there. He was going on a voyage of I-don’t-know-what while he lived there.”

“I started getting into serious mind meditation shit after we finished the [1991] tour,” explains Shields. “I read a book by Terence McKenna about using psychedeli­cs as a way to explore the mind. I started experiment­ing on myself. I’d close my eyes and visualise a cow, for some reason. Then I realised I couldn’t just see the cow, but pass around it. It was solid. That led on to an infinite amount of experience­s. I really looked forward to having my own time when everyone went to bed. I’d sit there, close my eyes and trip out. In a very short space of time, I was flying around this solar system: my imaginatio­n.”

Shields admits that the music made during this period was essentiall­y “lots of ideas… we were trying not to write songs in a normal fashion. We were listening to a lot of drum’n’bass. We were experiment­ing with vibrations – how when something’s really distorted it shakes as well and that creates a rhythm. But we lost momentum. We were all right to make a record in our heads, and excited by the studio – but somehow it went a bit sideways.”

“There was work done,” adds Googe. “But we were dysfunctio­nal, ridiculous­ly slow. Every day, Colm would get up and say, ‘Today’s the day we’re going to make the record!’ Then Colm left. I really missed him! We were always up first and we’d sit and have our coffee together in the morning. Then I left. I’d driven over to Island to deliver a tape of the Wire song we recorded [“Map Ref 41°N 93°W”]. It was a Friday evening and as I was driving back to the house, I

thought, ‘For my own sanity, I can’t go back.’ So I went back to my flat and phoned Kevin. That was late 1997, I think.”

“I moved back into my council flat in Brixton,” says Butcher. “But I wasn’t leaving, I was there waiting, anytime, to do whatever we needed. But after we all left the house, I think Kevin felt a bit abandoned.”

ONE regular visitor to Shields’ Streatham home during 1998 was Primal Scream guitarist Andrew Innes. In his home studio, Shields was working on mixes for Primal Scream’s new album, XTRMNTR. “At the time, Kevin wasn’t living a 24-hour day,” recalls Innes. “He’d get up at 6pm and work all night. But he’d work through the next day and go to bed at a different time.”

Shields’ involvemen­t with Primal Scream lasted from 1998–2005, where his talents were felt both in the studio and the live arena. “In the studio, he’d say, ‘What do you want me to do?’ We had these little phrases, descriptio­ns of what particular sound we wanted. ‘Can you get that one where you’re cutting down the trees?’ He’d hit the pedals and it would sound like a chainsaw. Live, there were certain tracks on XTRMNTR that were aggressive; we’d hold him back and hold him back and then give him the nod, ‘Kev, hit that button.’ He’d take it to the next level of intensity and pain. There’d be some little kids down the front and they’d be smiling and by the time Kev had played three songs, you could see they were thinking, ‘This isn’t actually very funny.’ It was brilliant.”

Brian Reitzell, meanwhile, speculates that Shields was financiall­y “trapped in Primal Scream. It’s not such a bad trap, but still a trap.” As drummer for Air, Reitzell had met Shields on tour in Japan in 2001. A few years later, he approached Shields in an altogether different guise: as the soundtrack producer for Sofia Coppola’s new film, Lost In

Translatio­n. Reitzell remembers making three, week-long Transatlan­tic trips to Shields’ studio in Camden between November 2002 and March 2003. Reitzell describes a familiar pattern for these sessions: “We had a different engineer each time because Kevin would burn them out. We would show up at the studio and the engineer had to be there at eight o’clock, but we wouldn’t roll in until 11 at night and then we’d work through until nine or 10 in the morning.”

Along with insight into the recording process, Reitzell also also offers a tantalisin­g glimpse of material that didn’t make the final cut. He outlines trips to a Camden shop selling instrument­s from around the world and an attempt to “put an e-bow on one of these weird Asian stringed instrument­s” that was ultimately ditched. “Kevin and I also did a cue with Martin Duffy on electric piano and Duncan McKay playing layers of trumpet – both from Primal Scream. It was a full-on Miles Davis/Gil Evans trip. I loved it, but it didn’t make the film.” They also recorded “three proper songs” – although only one, “City Girl”, appeared in the film when it opened in September 2003. Critically, Reitzell says that the success of the Lost In Translatio­n soundtrack allowed him greater financial latitude on his next film with Coppola, Marie Antoinette, for which he “grossly overpaid” Shields to do two remixes, facilitati­ng his economic independen­ce. It is possible to view Shields’ work with Primal Scream and Brian Reitzell as a process of rehabilita­tion after the Valentines’ split. In the immediate aftermath, Shields undertook remix work – for artists ranging from the Pastels to Placebo, Mogwai and Yo La Tengo. He also quietly continued to work on the band’s long-gestating fourth album. “I would bump into Kevin here in Camden on his way to the studio, doing the album,” says Googe. For Shields, though, a turning point came in 2005, when Patti Smith invited him to participat­e in The Coral Sea project at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. “I never really used the tremolo arm after the last recordings I made in 1997,” says Shields. “I can’t add that way of playing on as an effect for people, so I developed a whole different approach with Primal Scream. When Patti asked me to play Meltdown, I got my tunings from the My Bloody Valentine days and a bunch of guitars and we improvised. Patti really inspired me to start playing guitar again like I used to.” Paul Weller witnessed first-hand the rejuvenate­d Shields when the two collaborat­ed together on a track, “7 & 3 Is The Striker’s Name”. “When he came down to here to the studio, be had a big bag of effects and pedals,” he tells Uncut. “They were all buzzing and cracking, almost on the point of explosion. I watched Kevin during that session and I still can’t really figure out what it is he does. But I know something – only he can do it.”

FOR the other members of My Bloody Valentine during their extended hiatus, time passed in different ways. Colm Ó Cíosóig began playing with Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval. Debbie Googe “floundered for a while; I’d been ‘Deb in My Bloody Valentine’ for years and I didn’t know who I was” before she formed Snow Pony with her then-partner, Katharine Gifford. Bilinda Butcher, meanwhile, opted out of music to raise a family. “But I never gave up faith that it was going to happen again,” she says. The band are all individual­ly keen to stress that they never actually fell out with one another – “They’d had enough of me, but they didn’t hate me or anything,” laughs Shields. In 2006, they received an offer of $300,000 to play the Coachella festival; “it put the idea into our head,” says Shields. In 2007, they decided to make a go of it, booking five nights at London’s Roundhouse. Coachella, meanwhile, upped their offer to a million dollars – but, according to Shields, ”it was too early, we’d literally just got it together in time to do those Roundhouse gigs, so even for a million dollars we couldn’t do Coachella.”

“The first day of practice, it was like I’d gone to the toilet and come back in,” remembers Googe. “There’s a lot of shared history and familiarit­y that comes in to play in those situations. But we’d had eight, 10 years away from each other. We chose to come back.”

On June 13, 2008, My Bloody Valentine performed in public for the first time in 16 years during two live rehearsals at the ICA. An extensive world tour was announced, to run through the summer and autumn months. And in the middle of all this sudden, unexpected activity Shields mentioned that the band’s long-gestating third album was at last near completion.

Finally, after 20-odd years of prevaricat­ion, false alarms, teases and disappoint­ments, mbv was released through the band’s website on February 2, 2013. Ó Cíosóig describes the album as “closing up a chapter. A lot of the music was from back in the time, the house, pre-implosion. There were some great songs there.” Shields reveals that he began writing the oldest track on the album, “New You”, in April, 1994 “the night after I heard Kurt Cobain killed himself.” Another song, “Only Tomorrow”, was only slightly younger – dating from around 1996. “I went back into the studio and recorded some drums over the drum loops to give it a bit of character,” says Ó Cíosóig. “Give it a bit of push and pull.”

“The m b v record has a theme, for want of a better word,” says Shields. “It’s about change and death and what was happening in the world, as I saw it in the late ’90s. Nostalgia’s part of it. Funnily enough, it all made even more sense in 2012.”

Five years later, and Shields seems confident that a fourth album will appear soon. Early forays in the studio began in Ireland over summer 2017. “Kevin was working on drums with Colm,” says Googe, identifyin­g an all-too familiar pattern in My Bloody Valentine’s recording processes. There was lull, meanwhile, as Shields concentrat­ed on the new vinyl editions of Isn’t Anything and

Loveless and a collaborat­ion with Brian Eno, called “Only Once Away My Son”.

“I know he’s got some stuff pretty much nearly ready for me,” says Butcher. “I’m really looking forward to it. It feels really exciting. Kevin’s working on songs in the way he always does. He’s always got millions of songs going round his head.”

“I’m keeping things clear in case I’m needed for Valentines stuff from April,” says Googe. “Certainly, from June on I think we’ll playing live. Between June and August, stuff will happen.”

“Everything’s going really well,” adds Ó Cíosóig. “I’ve been recording with Kevin recently. He’s got his studio, I’ve been helping out. The trip. It’s now or never, I guess.”

“In the last few months,” says Kevin Shields, “when things have got quite tense with the remasters, I’ve pulled back from it. I really want to make this new record and I don’t want to get burnt out. You see, I don’t feel like I’m finished. I will be exploring things until I’m dead. I feel like if I don’t do this myself, no-one else is going to do it.”

“Even for a million dollars we couldn’t do Coachella 2007. It was too early” KeviN SHieldS

 ??  ?? Backstage with Primal Scream in 1999: (l-r) darrin Mooney, Robert ‘Throb’ Young, Mani, Bobby Gillespie, Kevin Shields
Backstage with Primal Scream in 1999: (l-r) darrin Mooney, Robert ‘Throb’ Young, Mani, Bobby Gillespie, Kevin Shields
 ??  ?? With Brian Reitzell at the BAFTAs, 2003
With Brian Reitzell at the BAFTAs, 2003
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 ??  ?? Jazzmaster­s and Jaguars: shields, loving his Fenders, london, 1990
Jazzmaster­s and Jaguars: shields, loving his Fenders, london, 1990
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 ??  ?? Shields and butcher backstage in london, 1990
Shields and butcher backstage in london, 1990
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 ??  ?? Cum on feel the noize: UK tour, 1990
Cum on feel the noize: UK tour, 1990
 ??  ?? My Bloody Valentine in 1986: (l-r) Dave Conway, Colm Ó’Cíosóig, Kevin Shields, Debbie Googe
My Bloody Valentine in 1986: (l-r) Dave Conway, Colm Ó’Cíosóig, Kevin Shields, Debbie Googe
 ??  ?? MBv at Coachella, 2009
MBv at Coachella, 2009

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