My Bloody Valentine
The story of Loveless and the enduring genius of its creator, Kevin Shields: features hypnagogic states and chinchillas
To the residents of south Kensington, the sound comes from everywhere and nowhere. For an hour, a strange and unaccountable low-frequency rumble rattles windowpanes and shakes paintings off their hooks. this is summer, 1989 and My Bloody Valentine are busy conducting a sonic experiment.
At this time, the band has taken up residence in a 16-track studio tucked into the side of a large warehouse space. As befitting one London’s most affluent boroughs, this space also had an art gallery attached to it. “We dragged the amps out to make it as loud as possible,” recalls Kevin Shields, the band’s chief architect. “It was just me and Colm [Ó Cíosóig, drums]. He was on bass and I retuned all the strings so they were all really low and floppy. We just created this huge, grumbling noise. The room was shaking and the lights were flickering. It put us into an altered state of consciousness. The second we stopped, we heard a noise outside. Apparently, the owner had been banging on the doors for about 40 minutes. The gallery didn’t have any soundproofing. He’d heard this crazy noise on the other side of the borough. By the time he got to the studio, the whole building was vibrating. The doors were locked so he couldn’t get in. He was furious, but he couldn’t stay angry with us because he thought we were crazy. You see, Colm and me were laughing like a pair of five-year-olds. We felt like we were on the strongest drug in the world. That’s
when we realised, ‘There’s something in this. What would happen if other people got to feel this, too?’”
As far as it goes, it is possible to pinpoint Shields and Ó Cíosóig’s wilful seismic disturbances as a transformative moment in My Bloody Valentine’s history. The band had always been preoccupied with what to say and how loud to say it: even during their earliest days, on the fringes of Dublin’s post-punk scene, when they drew from The Cramps’ gothic-psychedelic edge and the avant-garde musical philosophies of Einstürzende Neubauten. But the wild, heavy drones they conjured that day in West London introduced new perspectives and focus to Loveless, the album they began recording a few months later. “As a piece of work, Loveless is a whole universe in itself,” says Colm Ó Cíosóig. “Every time I listen to it, I hear different things in it. It’s like listening to wildlife or whales or something. It has its own space and time.”
Since it was first released in 1991, Loveless continues to exert a mighty pull on Shields and his accomplices. This month, he finally unveils a new analog edition of the album – along with its predecessor, Isn’t Anything – that has taken him two arduous years to complete. “I got the best I could get,” he says. ”But it’s not over yet.
There’ll be a doublealbum version of
Loveless eventually…” “Kevin is always open to going anywhere, but he thinks in very abstract ways,” admits Debbie Googe, the band’s bassist. “He isn’t a very linear person – he doesn’t go from A–b. He goes from A–K to somewhere in the middle. He meanders around things.”
Abstract? Meandering? Certainly, the My bloody Valentine story can be both of those things – we shall discover colourful digressions involving a haunted tape room, a colony of chinchillas and inner journeys into uncharted hypnagogic states. but critically, the My bloody Valentine story is also about the fierce connection between four people, even during trying times. “it’s an incredible, fortunate meeting of people,” says singer/guitarist bilinda butcher. “We all love each other so much that we just stay together, no matter what. We’ve got this thing nobody else has; it’s really special. each of us knows that. even now.”
“i don’t look for extreme life, i don’t,” explains Shields. “but for some weird reason extremes happen all the time, good things and bad things.”
EVeN at the start, My bloody Valentine’s story was informed by a degree of chaos. Arriving from Queens, New York in Cabinteely, Co Dublin, Kevin Shields discovered punk rock began shortly after his 14th birthday: “the first song i ever played on a guitar was buzzcocks’ ‘Harmony in My Head’.” At school, a fellow student in Shields’ kung fu class happened to be getting a band together: he already had the attention of Colm Ó Cíosóig, an enthusiastic drummer with no immediate expertise. “The first rehearsals Colm and i did, he didn’t even know about a beat,” recalls Shields. “He was just hitting his drums randomly, and i didn’t know about tuning.”
United in the first instance from the desire to play Motörhead’s “bomber”, Shields and Ó Cíosóig’s earliest bands rose and fell in line with their personnel. One early accomplice was Liam Ó Maonlaí, later of Hothouse Flowers. Shields found himself asked to leave one group after he discovered a phaser pedal – “i was so fascinated by the sound, i didn’t want to turn it off. i enjoyed moving past the point of reason.”
A union of like minds, the work Shields and Ó Cíosóig began together was made for people not catered for by the mainstream. “We were pushing boundaries,” says Ó Cíosóig. “We had a Tascam four-track portastudio and a synthesiser. We’d make tapes with weird noises and drones and then improvise over them.”
An advertisement placed in a local record shop drew the attention of David Conway, who became their singer in summer, 1983. “He was crazy, a bit like Lux interior,” says Ó Cíosóig. “it was great to have a wild man upfront, it made the gigs a bit more fun.”
The band – not yet called My bloody Valentine – played their first gig on August 18 at a small Dublin venue, the ivy Rooms. The name arrived a short while later, suggested by Conway in the bar of Dublin’s North Star Hotel. Gigs and lineup changes followed; but alas, “we weren’t popular in ireland,” relates Shields. Taking advice from Virgin Prunes’ frontman Gavin Friday, they moved to the