Sonic Power Pop: My Bloody Valentine

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
My Bloody Valentine were an Irish-British rock band known for their creative use of guitar distortion and vibrato. Sharing their name with a Canadian slasher movie, they formed in 1984 in Dublin and continued into the early 1990s. Original members were guitarist/singer Kevin Shields and drummer Colm O'Ciosoig. The band's lineup during their heyday also included singer-guitarist Bilinda Butcher and bassist Debbie Googe.

Early history
Colm and Kevin met in the late 1970s as teenagers when they both answered advertisements placed by another musician. The two joined the band in question, The Complex, and soon discovered they shared an interest in punk rock.The pair quickly became friends and played in many bands around Dublin over the next six months, including a band with Liam Ó Maonlaí, later the lead singer for Hothouse Flowers.

Toward the end of 1983, the two formed their own band with Dave Conway. The band was filled out by various members and split up and reformed on several occasions during 1984. Also during this period, Conway was travelling through Europe and, on the strength of the band's home recordings and the contacts he made on these travels, had managed to book the band a concert in Holland. The three recruited Conway's then-girlfriend Tina to play keyboards; adopted Conway's suggested name, My Bloody Valentine, for the concert; and moved to Holland. They stayed in Holland for three months before a dearth of opportunities and a lack of correct documentation meant they had to leave. The band then chose Berlin as their next destination, where they recorded the mini-LP This Is Your Bloody Valentine for Dossier Records. Unfortunately, the record failed to have the expected impact, and, after four months, the band left Berlin, returning to Holland briefly before settling in London around the middle of 1985.

The bands early years are often characterized by Kevins low and brooding vocals typical of the 80s.

Settling in London
After a period when My Bloody Valentine members lost contact with each other as they looked for places to stay, the band regrouped and decided to audition bass players. The band lacked a regular bassist; like The Doors before them, they relied on keyboards to fill out the bottom end of their sound. However, Conway's girlfriend had decided to leave the band, not feeling confident in her abilities as a keyboard player, and as the band had taken to using a bassist towards the end of their stay in Berlin, they felt recruiting one was vital to furthering the band. Having been given the telephone number of a bass player in London, Debbie Googe, they invited her to audition, and, ultimately, to join the band, fitting in rehearsals around her day job.

At this point the band were rehearsing at Salem Studios, which was connected to the record label Fever Records. Impressed by what they heard, Fever agreed to release an EP. On the strength of this, Googe left her job, and the EP, titled Geek, was released in December of 1985. The band soon began to play on the London gig circuit, but the record failed to make as much of an impact as the band had hoped. With the band not progressing quickly enough, Kevin contemplated moving back to New York, where some of his family lived.

However, Joe Foster, an associate of Creation Records, had decided to set up his own label, Kaleidoscope Records, and persuaded the group to record for him. The EP, The New Record by My Bloody Valentine, was the result, released in early 1986. The band also began to step up their live appearances, developing a small following and venturing outside London for gigs. Unrecorded songs from this period include Destination Ecstacy, a song in the vein of their later works on Isn't Anything and Loveless.

The band's next record was Sunny Sundae Smile, an EP released in February of 1987 by Lazy Records, which also managed The Primitives. The label had been interested in My Bloody Valentine for awhile, and the band turned to them this time due to Foster's indifference. The band then spent a few months performing in London and managed to secure a support slot with the Soup Dragons. During the shows with the Soup Dragons, Conway announced his decision to leave the band; he had been ill for awhile and felt he was not reaching his potential with the band. Conway has since pursued a career as a writer.

Conway departs; Butcher joins
Conway's departure left the band without a vocalist, a situation they decided to remedy by placing advertisements in the music press. This process proved torturous, Shields noting, "It was pretty dangerous, I made the mistake of mentioning The Smiths because we liked their melodies, the whole thing was disastrous and excruciating, you should have seen some of the fruitballs we got."

The band eventually turned to recommendations and experimented with having two vocalists: Bilinda Butcher and a male vocalist named Joe. It soon became apparent that Joe was unsuited to the band, and Shields took on second vocalist duties alongside Butcher, whom he noted "sounded all right and she could sing one of our songs which sounded fine, we just had to show her how to play guitar."

Under pressure from Lazy Records to produce an album, the band compromised, citing the need for time to stabilize their line-up. The band agreed to record an EP followed by a mini LP. The EP, Strawberry Wine, comprised three tracks and was released in August of 1987. The mini-LP, titled Ecstasy, followed soon after. The EP has been described as "certainly the better of the two releases." Ecstasy has been criticized as showing "a group who appeared to have run out of money halfway through recording," which was indeed the case. Ecstasy also suffered from production difficulties, as Shields described errors in mastering the recordings.

Creation Records
The band were approached by Creation Records and, upon being told "not to worry about anything, just do it," they signed, entered the recording studios, and emerged eight months later with You Made Me Realise. The group followed with Feed Me With Your Kiss and the LP Isn't Anything (1988), which, together with the followup LP Loveless (1991), are considered representative of their sound: a distinct blend of noise rock, ambience, and off-kilter pop. The thick, swirling, multi-layered guitar sound developed by My Bloody Valentine later would be termed shoegazer by the British press because of the band's tendency to look down while performing on stage. The tag was applied to a number of new alternative pop-rock or rock outfits of similarly heavily layered and distorted guitars and soft, hushed vocals like those generally sung by Bilinda Butcher.

Shields wrote the songs, except "Touched", a short instrumental by Colm O'Ciosoig. In 1999 Pitchfork Media declared Loveless to be the greatest album of the 1990s[1]; in their 2003 revision of the list, however, it moved to number two, swapping places with Radiohead's OK Computer. Kevin Shields also has been described by Alan McGee as "a genius artist. A visionary.", while a NME review of Loveless declared, "...however decadent one might find the idea of elevating other human beings to deities, My Bloody Valentine, failings and all, deserve more than your respect."[4]

After leaving Creation Records in 1992 and signing with Island Records, the band did not produce another release, and their final recorded song made available for release was a cover of Map Ref. 41N 93 by Wire, appearing on Whore: Tribute to Wire in 1995. Rumors spread among fans of albums being recorded and then shelved. Debbie Googe left the band to form Snowpony, although she had not played bass on a My Bloody Valentine recording since You Made Me Realise. Colm O'Ciosoig eventually left and recorded an album with Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star. Kevin Shields collaborated sporadically with other artists, most notably Experimental Audio Research, Curve, Sugar and Primal Scream. He claimed in a fall 2003 NPR interview that Island Records had stopped financing My Bloody Valentine after they had spent half a million pounds of Island's money.

As of 2004, My Bloody Valentine were rumored to be re-recording five additional tracks for the re-release of 1990's Glider EP, however, if anything was recorded, it has yet to surface.