My Bloody Valentine
English festival exclusive!
Very occasionally a band will come along and completely redefine popular music as we know it. My Bloody Valentine arrived into a mid eighties dominated by anti-rock, style over substance art pop. Never a band to conform to preconceived conventions they spent their first few years releasing Jesus and Mary Chain and Sonic Youth influenced EPs before releasing their first album ‘Isn’t Anything’ to universal critical acclaim in 1988.
The record blended the ethereal melodies of the Cocteau Twins with a wall of distorted guitars that created a sound that was beautiful, disorientating and incredibly powerful.
Lead by the enigmatic Kevin Shields the band built up a reputation as the country’s most formidable live act, even though they very rarely moved on stage or even engaged their audience, the sheer power of their music was simply transfixing and like nothing that had come before them. Inevitably their sound turned into a whole movement, branded shoegazing by the music press it would go on to dominate the UK music scene as bands such as Chapterhouse, Slowdive, Ride and Lush found themselves riding on their coattails to success.
In late 1991 at the height of what had become a shoegazing phenomenon My Bloody Valentine released their masterpiece ‘Loveless’ which took their sound to even higher levels of intensity.
They had become one the most influential bands of the nineties with a critical success unrivalled by any other band. One 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”, but for all this praise the band failed to achieve huge commercial success and in 1992 they parted company with heir then record label, Creation.
Immediately signing to Island they retreated back into the studio and straight into a creative black hole that would mean that to this day we have never been treated to another release from the band. As other band members drifted off onto other projects it seemed to become less and less likely that we would ever see the band again.
In January 2007 in an interview with Magnet magazine Shields tried to explain the situation and in doing so opened up a glimmer of hope by stating “I do feel that I will make another great record," he explained. "We are 100 per cent going to make another My Bloddy Valentine record unless we die or something.”
That glimmer of hope turned into a shining beam of light when in November
2007 the band announced that they would be reforming to play their first gigs for 16 long years in the summer of 2008 and we are unbelieveably proud to annouce that one of those shows will be to headline our mainstage on the Friday of Bestival 2008.
www.myspace.com/mybloodyvalentine
www.mybloodyvalentine.co.uk