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.

Here We Go

Another Andrew Weatherall sample spotting post, my continuing attempts to try to identify and pull together the sounds that made the remixes. Today, the monumental, ground breaking, juddering dance/ rock remix of My Bloody Valentine's Soon. The long gestation period that led to the release of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless album has been well documented and is the stuff of indie legend- the record that broke Creation, the album that illustrates the manic attention to detail and difficulties of working with Kevin Shields and his single minded drive and obsession with the process and art of recording guitars, the failings of various London recording studios, the hand to mouth cash existence of Creation Records, the poor health of various participants (tinnitus not surprisingly given the volume the group played at) and so on. David Cavanagh's My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize book describes the myths and the reality in detail. 

Soon first saw the public light of day as the lead song on 1990's Glider EP (along with Glider, Don't Ask Why and Off Your Face. David Cavanagh speculates in his book that the song titles from MBV's releases at this point can be seen as ripostes to Alan McGee and his frequent requests to give him some music to release). Soon is arguably the pinnacle of Shields' famous 'glide guitar' sound and technique- playing the strings and bending them using the tremolo bar. That underestimates Soon somewhat- Soon swirls and shimmers, disorientation and delight in equal measures, a riot of melodies and feedback, ghosts of guitars and washes of vocal. It rattles in with some percussion and then a storm of guitar chords, the queasy topline melodies (one that sounds very like a flute and may well be), echoing feedback and Belinda Butcher's barely there vocals. Soon is vaguely danceable and the guitar sounds, the vertigo inducing tremolo chord changes, give it a swirling, slightly out of control feel- you've had one too many, the edges of your vison and hearing are fuzzy, you're spinning and not in control. The video version here is under four minutes but the version on Glider and different mix that made it onto Loveless are seven minutes long, an ecstatic headrush of sound. 

When it came to remixing it Andrew Weatherall entered the studio armed with the records he wanted to sample and MBV's master tapes. It seems that the band were a little reluctant to hand over control to a DJ/ producer/ remixer (this was before Screamadelica had been released so Andrew's reputation in the studio wasn't established). The resulting remix, released in 1990, turned the highwater mark of shoegaze into a stomping, shuddering leftfield dance record, one that as much as any is where his reputation as a remixer rests. MBV accompanied him in the studio, either to keep an eye on him or to see how the process of remixing worked (or both). Indie- dance would quickly become tainted as a label, used more in derision than admiration- people use the term to describe Weatherall's remix of Soon, but there's a lot more going on in it than just sticking the Funky Drummer underneath the guitars and adding some cowbell. There would be plenty of guitar bands queuing up to have their feedback and four square rock refashioned but no other remix of a guitar band from this period comes close to Soon in its execution or the effect it can have on a dancefloor. 

Soon (Andy Weatherall Remix)

The Geiger counter intro, impossibly loud in the mix, is followed by a very un- MBV voice declaring, 'Here we go'. Then one of those guitars, stripped from the original song, appears high and centre. A thumping bassline and percussion hit in. The flute/ guitar part is punched in, on its own. 'Here we go' again. More layered guitars. The drums thunder away, the guitars are looped round and round. The 'aaah aaaahhhh' vocal sample is dropped along with a guitar part that sounds like wire being wound very tight and hit. It sounds like Soon but moreso, the drift and ghostliness of the original snapped into focus, equally narcotic but a different drug. The ending is dramatic too- the elements being stripped out one by one, faders, pulled down until there's just a voice, 'aaahhh aaahhhhhhhh/ aaahhhhh aaahhhhhhhhhh'. 

West Bam's Alarm Clock, a manic 1990 breakbeat/ house 12",  provides some of the feel of the remix and the clattering rhythm that Andrew uses to underpin Shields' wall of noise.  

Alarm Clock

West Bam had already borrowed guitars from this, Gang Of Four's What We All Want, from their 1981 Solid Gold album. Stentorian, Marxist funk rock which Andrew would surely have recognised instantly when he first heard West Bam. 

What We All Want

Some of the vocals are taken from this song- Tides- by Claire Hamill, released in 1986, an entirely acapella album, Hamill's voice overdubbed to produce all the sounds. Go to 44 seconds in and you'll find the vocal part Weatherall dropped in- it repeats throughout the song. 

Hugo Nicolson, Andrew's assistant, engineer and studio whizz, tells us that some of the voices were sampled from a Volvic advert (I can't find any trance of the advert on the internet). If you go to 3 minutes 15 seconds in this 1975 song, Funky Music Is The Thing by Dynamic Corvettes, you'll find a rhythm break that appears in the remix too- or one that sounds very like it. 

The website Who Sampled Who says that Weatherall's remix takes elements, the bassline probably, from this- The Rhythm, The Feeling by Rich Nice, a 1990 hip- house single. 

If anyone knows where the 'here we go' sample comes from, write in to the usual address and I'll add it to this post. 

The remix came out first as a white label 12" and was labelled the Andy Weatherall Remix. Later versions would by credited to his full name. It also appeared on Creation's superb 1991 compilation Keeping The Faith (and if you're after a vinyl copy now you'd be better off finding a copy of the compilation- cheaper and containing a slew of other era defining tracks to boot). Soon in Andy/ Andrew's hands is a record and remix in a class of its own. It still sounds like Soon but it's a Soon that My Bloody Valentine hadn't imagined and one that blurs all the lines and boundaries that existed at the time- not rock, not dance, not indie dance, not shoegaze but something new built from all of these but something else as well. 'Here we go'. 

Alarm Clock

This is the tune I was looking for before getting distracted by West India Company, a 1990 offering from German DJ West Bam (Maximillian Lenz). Offering doesn't really do this speaker shaking 12" justice. It's a slap in the face and a shiver down the spine with a juddering riff (sampled from Gang Of Four apparently and then borrowed from this by Weatherall for his legendary My Bloody Valentine remix) and a Tutonic breakbeat. Wakey wakey!

Alarm Clock

In 2013 West Bam released a new album which had this song on it, She Wants, with vocals by Bernhard Sumner (sic) and a slightly disturbing, NSFW video. If last year's new New Order album had been more like this, I'd have liked it more.

Don't Be So La-Di-Dah

I happened upon this recently (thanks to  reader Paul Bob Horrocks) and rather like it- a song from a forthcoming Westbam album with the vocals of Richard Butler (him from Psychedelic Furs, still going somewhere near you). You Need The Drugs has a lovely skippy rhythm, wobbly bass and big synthy strings and Butler's vox ('Don't be so la-di-dah, you need the drugs'- quite). Find it at Soundcloud and lose part of the last working day of the week.

No d/l I'm afraid- listen only. Besides at the rate things are being 'listened to' from my Boxnet account I'll be out of bandwidth by the end of next week.

Weatherall Remix Creation

I can't let this Creation series go by without including Andrew Weatherall's remix of My Bloody Valentine's Soon, which was and is a stunning example of the art of the remix. Weatherall said recently that indie-dance remixes just involved sticking a breakbeat under a guitar track but I think there's a bit more to it with this one, with that Westbam sample, the clanging riff, ghostly noises, the 'here we go' vocal refrain and the crunching beat. Su-chuffing-perb.

This track was the starting point in a way for me- it was looking for an mp3 of it that led me firstly to Stx's Audio Out blog. The link had expired but he kindly supplied me with it, and many more tracks besides. That led to exploring a load of other blogs, which led eventually to Bagging Area. So, Soon Weatherall Remix, you've got a lot to answer for.

I was in indie nightspot South on King Street at some point in the late 1990s. The Stone Roses bassist Mani was djing and he played this. Coming through the speakers it sounded huge, distorting South's iffy soundsystem, reminding me of the greatness of the track and with a Stone Rose playing a Weatherall remix joined a few dots neatly for me. Yep. I should probably get a life (popular early 90s saying).

Soon (Weatherall Remix)