Forty Minutes Of My Bloody Valentine

The other night I was about to go upstairs. Lou was halfway down, a quizzical look on her face.  

Her: 'There's a horrible, whining, drilling sound coming out of the computer... what is it?'

Me: 'Dunno'.

I rushed upstairs to see what was happening. I'd left my mp3 player plugged in to the USB slot to charge it. When it's fully charged it switches itself on and starts playing random songs, through it's own tiny, tinny speaker. The 'horrible, whining, drilling sound' was You Made Me Realise by My Bloody Valentine. 

Me: 'That's not a horrible, whining, drilling sound. That's You Made Me Realise by My Bloody Valentine.'

A My Bloody Valentine Sunday mix had occurred to me a while back and this seemed like an ideal opportunity to put it together. They are an acquired taste I think it's fair to say and there are times when if the mp3 player is in shuffle mode in the car, they can jar and disrupt a good flow of songs like few other groups. The string bending, feedback, tremelo, full on assault of Kevin Shields and Belinda Butcher against the sometimes raging rhythms of Colm O' Ciosoig's drums and Debbie Googe's river dredging bass can be a heavy jolt to the senses. Equally, the same noise can be uplifting and life affirming in a way all of their own. They also do a beautiful line in a sort of head- spinning, post- coital comedown wooze, something Sofia Coppola knew when she put the soundtrack for Lost In Translation together. 

The music below is almost entirely from their 1988- 1991 heyday. There's nothing from the 2013 mbv album- not deliberately as such, I just didn't have it to hand and couldn't remember anything about it, so if nothing else I will go back to that record and see what it sounds like now. When it came out in 2013 it was their first album since Loveless in '91 and was recorded in bursts up between 1991 and 1997, then resumed by Shields in 2006 and then again in 2011. Instead I've gone for songs from Isn't Anything, Loveless and the EP releases around those albums apart from a cover version they recorded in 1996. 

Forty Minutes Of My Bloody Valentine

• Don't Ask Why
• Slow
• Feed Me With Your Kiss
• Loomer
• Drive It All Over Me
• Map Ref 41°N 93°W
• You Made Me Realise
• Soon 
• Soon (Andy Weatherall Mix)

Don't Ask Why is my favourite MBV song, a gorgeous, swooning tripped out song, gently strummed, chiming, slightly off kilter guitar and Kevin's voice, very clear and upfront. Belinda coos in the background and a shimmering reverb covers everything until the moment at three minutes six seconds where a second guitar comes in like a weather system. It was on the Glider EP released in 1990 in the run up to Loveless, which kept getting pushed back. In his book on Creation Records David Cavanagh speculates that many of the song titles from this period were coded messages to Alan McGee- Soon, Don't Ask Why, Off Your Face. 

Slow was a B-side from the You Made Me Realise 12" in 1988, an indie rock (with the emphasis on weird, disorientating rock) about oral sex. You Made Me Realise is from a point in time when indie guitar music, as made by this band and a handful of others, was going somewhere it hadn't been before. Drive It All over Me is from the same EP, effortless, late 80s brilliance. 

Feed Me With Your Kiss was a single in 1988 and appeared on Isn't Anything. A friend of mine bought Isn't Anything on cassette, played it and took it back, assuming there was something wrong with it. 'The guitars keep slipping out of tune and time, the tape must be too slack or stretched or something', was the gist of his complaint. 'That's what they sound like', he was told.

Loomer and Soon are both from Loveless, released in 1991, a year not sure of groundbreaking, high quality albums. It sounds as breathtaking now as it did then. Soon is Brian Eno's favourite MBV song, the song which sounds like the six minutes where everything Shields was searching for came together- it is both very vague and sharply in focus, guitars hinted at and right in your ears, a blur of memories and feelings worked into something approaching a song. Belinda's vocals sighs and Colm's drums provide the top and the bottom. Everything in between is like the ghost of indie guitar rock, recorded onto tape and then faded, blurred, bleached. Loveless is according to legend the record that nearly bankrupted Creation and McGee's relationship with Shields and the group broke down as a result. He went from My Bloody Valentine to Oasis (you can probably insert your own sentence here depending on your point of view).

Andrew Weatherall's remix is a groundbreaking record too, the acid house dancefloor dynamics and samples taking Soon into another place. Hugo Nicolson, Weatherall's production partner at the time, was presented with the records Andrew wanted to sample and the pair (with the band in the studio wanting to check what was happening to their music and apparently wanting also to see what remix culture was all about and what the process was) went about inventing indie dance and then destroying it at the same time. I wrote about this remix here and the various samples Weatherall and Nicolson used- West Bam, Gang Of Four, Claire Hamill, The Dynamic Corvettes, Rich Nice and as Hugo told us, the voices from a Volvic television advert. 

Map Ref 41°N 93°W is a cover of a Wire song, recorded for an album of Wire covers that came out in 1996 called Whore- Various Artists Play Wire. Lush, Band Of Susans, Bark Psychosis. Lee Ranaldo, Mike Watt and Godflesh are among the other contributors.

Soon

My Bloody Valentine made the four piece indie guitar band sound like something else entirely with their 1988 album Isn't Anything. There were other bands in a similar area- Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth for two- but they don't really sound like what Kevin Shields, Colm O' Ciosoig, Belinda Butcher and Debbie Googe were doing.  MBV's 1990 single (and a year later Loveless album closer) Soon is another thing again.

Soon

Shields found a new way of playing and most people assumed it involved tons of pedals but apparently not. Shields mainly just used open strings and tunings and the tremelo bar. In the studio (or multiple studios in the case of Loveless) Shields sent his guitar through one amp, his and Belinda's vocals split through different amps and mics and made a huge sound. The drums on Soon sound sampled, played by Colm but in pieces and then sampled to make drum tracks. Shields got into sampling while recording Loveless but says he was mainly sampling the guitars, feedback and distortion mostly, while the vocals were often done early in the morning after being up all night recording. In 2007 Shields said that what you can hear on much of Loveless is 'the sound of the guitar bending. What you hear is the sound between sound.'

Soon is a stunning song. The video, a little dated now perhaps, manages to do it some kind of justice, a low budget hazy and washed out approximation of what Soon sounds like.

Fear

Flaming June eh? How come it's nearly half way through 2016 already? Today's offering is a treat for noiseniks from 1998, Kevin Shields remixing Mogwai and their already fearsome Mogwai Fear Satan song. Shields goes for broke with this sixteen minutes long song, adding flute and what at one point sounds like bagpipes to the guitar feakery. The first play of this on 12" when it came out made me wonder if the stylus or stereo were broken and although the breakdown section at around nine fifty is pretty beautiful it's probably not best served at a family barbeque. Credit where it's due, thanks to DH for his photo of a forest in the Lake District taken at the weekend.

Mogwai Fear Satan (My Bloody Valentine Remix)

Slow

Just a year or so after making (yesterday's) Strawberry Wine single MBV were going further and deeper, as this beauty from the You Made Me Realise ep shows- the bass riff is like, erm, trippy sex. The picture shows Kevin Shields' guitar pedal board. I saw him when he played with Primal Scream once and on some of the songs his hand movements had no obvious relation at all to the sound his guitar and amp were making.

Just plug that in there, stamp on that knob and off you go...

Slow

Strawberry Wine

Oh dear, back to work. It's only when you have time off and actually relax that you realise how consuming your worklife is.

It's funny that My Bloody Valentine sounded like this in 1987- sing song and 60s and lightweight.

Strawberry Wine

More Light

On reflection I think the new Primal Scream song, in it's full nine minute version, is rather good. I mean, they've gone back to the sound of their XCLTR and Evil Heat albums in order to move forward, and this is good right ? Because their last two lps have been at best average, at worst poor. The siren/sax part is great, Kevin Shields is on guitar, the rhythm rocks, Holmes is in the production chair, the remixers should have a ball. The lyrics- well I know we should be applauding because no-one really addresses anything 'political' anymore do they? (but they're a bit silly too, constant rhyming on words ending in tion leads to cliche in my book, and we all know TV talent shows are shit but are they really 'the subjugation of the rock 'n' roll nation'?).

So, on balance... good I think. You may disagree (as Drew and Ctel will I suspect).

Don't Ask Why

I'm not saying that Don't Ask Why is necessarily any better than Soon or You Made Me Realise but recently when I've listened to this year's remastered version off the My Bloody Valentine ep's 1988-1991 compilation it seems like the perfect blend of narcotic, post-coital wooze, melody, distortion and noise. It is total MBV perfection.

Don't Ask Why

Yo La Remix

I found this recently and was going to wait for autumn but frankly that involves planning- Yo la Tengo put out a career spanning double disc about a decade ago. Limited quantities came with a third disc, the main highlight of which was this- Autumn Sweater remixed by MBV's Kevin Shields. Autumn Sweater is a beautiful, slow burning song of lost love, shyness, leaves turning brown and the need for an extra layer of clothing. Kevin Shields sidesteps that for a drum loop, a repeated organ part, an isolated and distorted vocal, an overloaded bass riff. Then he begins to add some other loops, all running on and on for just shy of nine minutes. Stunning.

Autumn Sweater (Kevin Shields Remix)

City Girl

A return to recent postee Kevin Shields and a song from the soundtrack of Lost In Translation (which came out in 2003. It really doesn't seem that long ago). Lost In Translation starred Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray as a pair of Americans marooned in Tokyo. The soundtrack was pretty good, featuring two other Shields songs, Death In Vegas, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Phoenix, Air and Squarepusher. This song is full of overdriven and distorted guitar, sleepy vocals and the sense of waking up very slowly, disorientated, while an amp overloads in a nearby room.

City Girl

Living Room

Apparently the remastered versions of My Bloody Valentine's albums are imminent. At least four years after they were first mentioned I think I'll believe it when I can actually pick up physical versions in a record shop. My vinyl copy of Loveless sounds pretty good but the cd versions of Loveless and Isn't Anything don't sound so good, so while I'm not always a fan of re-mastering maybe the MBV stuff will benefit from Kevin Shields tinkering and twiddling. There's also a cd gathering the e.p.s, B-sides and extra tracks which should be good. If it exists outside record company promo releases.

Kevin Shields has done numerous remixes. I've posted some of them. Here he remixes David Holmes and his track Living Room, first available on the David Holmes 'best of' from a couple of years back. Living Room was on Holmes' 2000 lp Bow Down To The Exit Sign, which I loved back then and looking at it now, reads like 2000 in a capsule- guest appearances from Bobby Gillespie, Martina Topley-Bird and Jon Spencer, found-sound clips from the streets of New York, funky instrumentals (69 Police), fuzzed-up Stooges style punk, and a mixed up stew of hip-hop, soul, rock and funk and little of the techno he made his name with. It's good and very of it's time. This remix, as you'd expect, is noisy.

Living Room (Kevin Shields remix)

We Need Nothing More

As far as I'm aware, since they delivered Loveless in 1991, My Bloody Valentine have recorded only two songs- one was a cover of a Wire song Map Ref 41n 93w (posted here some time ago) and the other was this cover version of Louis Armstrong's Bond theme We Have All The Time In The World. This is very swirly and dreamy and has Bilinda Butcher's vocals to the fore (by MBV's standards) but it's also a pretty straight cover with Kevin Shields keeping the melody and strings intact. It hasn't got that totally disorientating, weightless, headswimming effect that Loveless or Isn't Anything had. Well worth a listen as a starter, especially if you stick Soon on afterwards for the main course.

We Have All The Time In The World

You Better Run, Run, Run

A Primal Scream song for Monday from their sonic terrorist, war against vowels phase. When The Kingdom Comes was the second B-side on the 12" of the Accelerator single, the last record Creation released. It features Paul Weller on 'auto-destructive 12 string Rickenbacker' and Kevin Shields 'sonically speaking' (both quotes from the back of the sleeve). You can probably guess who was responsible for which bits when you listen to it. The song sounds a bit like they made it up on the spot at the end of the night when they'd dragged Weller out of the pub and into the studio, Bobby Gillespie's lyrics probably took longer to sing than they did to write, and it's a fairly derivitive piece of pop-art, rock 'n' roll- despite all of this, I like it.

When_The_Kingdom_Comes.mp3

Wired

My Bloody Valentine cover Wire's Map Ref 41N 93W for a Wire tribute album released in 1996. Wire's original has an instantly recognisable guitar part, and a sing-song vocal. Kevin Shield's noisy bunch manage to keep the essence of the Wire tune while drenching it in their own distinctive noise, adding the boy-girl MBV vocal.

My Bloody Valentine - Map Ref 41N 93W.mp3

4AD #3

Three 4AD posts in a row, this time from Lush, the Camden Abba. Lush had a few good moments, although their drinking often seemed to overshadow their music in the press. Of which they got plenty, partly due to their female front two Emma and Miki. This track Sweetness And Light was one of their best known, and I think turned up selling cars at some point. They split up in 1998, after drummer Chris committed suicide, and went their seperate ways. Bassist Phil plays with The Jesus And Mary Chain, not sure about Miki and Emma- I think one of them resurfaced in a band some time ago. This version of Sweetness And Light (Orange Squash) is a My Bloody Valentine remix (which essentially means Kevin Shields), done for a film called Splendor.

Me either.

Sweetness and Light_MBV remix.mp3 - 4shared.com - online file sharing and storage - download

Bow Wow Wow 'I Want Candy' (Kevin Shield's Remix)

Malcolm McClaren has died aged 64. Lydon hasn't spoken good of him since about 1978 but without Malcolm, no Pistols, no.... anything really. This lot were a second attempt to subvert popular culture and made some good records. This is the Kevin Shields remix, done a few years ago for that Marie Antoinette film. Don't be expecting MBV-style sonic cathedrals though- this is the Bow Wow Wow cover of The Strangeloves' song with slightly different drums.

No picture I'm afraid- my computer currently thinks almost everything internet-based is 'unsafe'. You're lucky I've managed to get it to publish this.

I Want Candy (Kevin Shield's Remix).mp3