My Bloody Valentine

Tina quit and bass player auditions ensued. Impressed by Debbie Googe, the trio asked her to join and arranged rehearsals around her day job. Salem Studios, where they now rehearsed, was connected to indie label Fever Records, which agreed to fund a release and, on the strength of this, Googe left her job. The Geek! EP was released in December 1985, but made no more impression at press nor retail than its predecessor – it has since become nearly impossible to find and second-hand copies now change hands for around £100 – but the band had became a feature on the London gig circuit. With such slow progress, Shields contemplated moving back to New York, where some of his family were now living. However, Joe Foster, an associate of Creation Records, had set up his own label, Kaleidoscope Records, and persuaded the group to record for him. An EP, The New Record by My Bloody Valentine, released in September 1986, was the result and marked a shift away from the band's early post-punk sound, reflecting the prevalent C86 shambling indie pop sound, which followed the impact of The Jesus And Mary Chain’s Upside Down debut single for Creation Records. My Bloody Valentine also began to step up their live appearances, developing a small following and venturing outside London for gigs.

The band's next record was Sunny Sundae Smile on 7-inch single and 12-inch EP – replete with coloured-by-crayon Velvets-homage sleeve – released in February 1987 by Lazy Records, a label set up by Coventry-based indie band The Primitives with their manager Wayne Morris, to whom My Bloody Valentine had turned due to Foster's perceived indifference. After supporting rising indie stars The Soup Dragons, Conway quit and has since pursued a career as a writer. The band placed "vocalist needed" ads in the music press. "I made the mistake of mentioning The Smiths because we liked their melodies," confessed Shields later. "The whole thing was disastrous and excruciating, you should have seen some of the fruitballs we got."

The band eventually experimented with two recommendations as joint vocalists: Bilinda Jayne Butcher and Joe Byfield. The latter revealed himself unsuitable, so Shields stepped up to the mike and began to teach Butcher guitar. Lazy Records wanted an album, but the band insisted on bedding-in time. A compromise was reached – the three track Strawberry Wine EP was released in August 1987. The Ecstasy mini-LP followed in November and, despite suffering from the band’s lack of production funds – the Lazy deal saw the latter funding promotion only – and mastering errors, reached #12 on the UK Independent Albums Chart. Described by the press as "bubblegum pop with buzzsaw guitars," the two EPs for Lazy were later compiled and reissued as the mini-album Ecstasy and Wine.

In January 1988 My Bloody Valentine played a gig with Biff Bang Pow!, a band that featured Creation Records’ co-founder Alan McGee as a member. Convinced that they were the British equivalent to Hüsker Dü, McGee immediately asked the band to record a single for Creation. MBV recorded five songs at Brian O’Shaughnessy’s Bark Studios in Walthamstow, East London in less than a week. Largely well-received by critics and music fans alike, the You Made Me Realise EP was a landmark release for both band and label. It forged a musical template which the band would build on and surpass, while, as time would increasingly show, influencing the next generation of young guitar-led bands on both sides of the Atlantic.

The four track Feed Me With Your Kiss EP followed to more critical acclaim and, later in the year, MBV’s debut album Isn't Anything, produced by Shields at Foel Studios in Wales, finally appeared. Featuring the thundering bass-led Feed Me.. (but not You Made..), live favourites Sue Is Fine (ambiguously sung live by Shields) and When You Wake You Are Still In A Dream and the haunting Bilinda-sung Lose My Breath among a plethora of deceptively soft but surprisingly unsettling songs, decorated with punchy fuzz bass, fairly dry drums, languorous vocals and Shields’ technique of ingenious Phil Spector-esque combinations of guitars and (reverse) digitally reverb, the album was a testament to the band’s dogged development and Shield’s vision as sonic architect. All I Need and Cupid Come in particularly exemplified the disconcerting direction – like standing on a mountain but still inside a cloud – MBV were refining, but another telling fact was that, on the free 7-inch given away with initial copies of the vinyl format, the track Instrumental was built around a Public Enemy sample. By now the band were selling out London’s Town & Country Club (capacity 2,000 approx) and similar sized venues across the UK and Europe.

The recording of MBV’s second album Loveless has become one of the great modern legends of contemporary music, an enigmatic myth born of perfectionism, procrastination, numerous studios and attendant bills, accusations, denials, frustration and bitterness – depending on which of the protagonists you listen to – wrapped in endless conjecture.

My Bloody Valentine began work on the follow-up to Isn’t Anything in February 1989 at Blackwing Studios – Creation were hoping for at least an EP to precede an extensive UK tour – but nothing was releasable. Seven months later the band tried again at Elephant Studios and spent weeks recording drum parts. By February 1990 MBV had been in six studios, yet, despite the progressively nervous state of Creation’s directors, only McGee was allowed to hear one track – the work-in-progress that was Soon. It was enough to convince him the long wait wouldn’t be in vain and he engaged engineer Alan Moulder to help finish the project. The Glider EP, led by Soon, just missed the UK Top 40 in May 1990 – it was also their debut release on Sire Records in the USA. Windsor face, ex-Shoom DJ and Boy’s Own co-founder Andrew Weatherall, who’d set the standard of the day by re-working singles by Happy Mondays, Primal Scream and That Petrol Emotion, remixed Soon for the dancefloor to great acclaim. "It set a new standard for pop," stated Brian Eno of Soon. "It's the vaguest music ever to have been a hit." MBV continued working at Protocol Studios, among others, on and off for the rest of the year.

By now the UK’s national music press had positioned them at the vanguard of a new scene/genre of bands christened "shoe-gazing" to reflect the static, introverted, effects pedal-focused posture and post-Jesus & Mary Chain feedback-drenched wall-of-guitars sound favoured by bands such as Loop, Ride, Chapterhouse, Lush and Slowdive, most of whom admitted to being MBV acolytes. The Temolo EP, led by the cryptic To Here Knows When – "Tremolo had seven tracks on it, but you're not allowed to do that, so we called it four tracks and didn't name three of them," revealed Shields later. "People just thought they were weird bits!" – was delivered in January 1991 and two days after the following Valentines Day gave MBV their first UK Top 30 single. Creation continued to anxiously indulge Shields and the stress levels among its top brass increased. At the start of 1991, the album had been assigned catalogue number CRE 060, yet by September CRE 076 – Primal Scream’s landmark Screamadelica album – had come out and MBV were still tinkering. Finally, after 19 studios and more than £250,000 (including money borrowed by McGee from his retired panel beater father’s deceased spouse insurance pay-out), according to Creation, though MBV’s camp claimed it was probably closer to £140,000, on November 11th, Loveless was finally released.

The music press’ reviews of Loveless were rapturous, NME declaring, "...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", Melody Maker describing it as "the outermost, innermost, uttermost rock record of 1991" and Rolling Stone calling it "sonic balm". The release-supporting tour infamously saw MBV ending their sets with a version of You Made Me Realise, during which the band repeated a single chord at dangerously deafening volume for up to ten minutes – known as the "holocaust" section" – as a physiological experiment on the unsuspecting audience. However, Loveless peaked at #24 on the British album chart and failed to chart in the United States, while Creation quickly dropped My Bloody Valentine because McGee could not bear working with Shields again. "It was a very, very damaged time for everyone [concerned]," Shields recently told the New York Times.

My Bloody Valentine signed with Island Records in October 1992 and used most of the reputed £250,000 advance to construct a recording studio in a house in Streatham, South London. However problems with the studio, a lack of inspiration and direction and the pressure of the third album caused the group to go into "semi-meltdown" and Shields, in particular, to become more reclusive and introvert. "We lost the plot," Shields later explained. MBV gradually fell apart and a third album was never delivered to Island, though in 1999, it was reported Shields had delivered 60 hours of material to the label and he later confirmed at least one full album of new material was abandoned. Seemingly Shields disappeared behind the cloak of sonic gun-for-hire, collaborating with Yo La Tengo, Dinosaur Jr and, most notably, Primal Scream, as well as, more recently, Patti Smith.

Until, in 2007, Shields announced that MBV had reunited and that a new album was "three-quarters finished." MBV have since played a number of live shows, including festivals such as Coachella, Benicàssim, Roskilde, Fuji Rock, Øyafestivalen, the Electric Picnic and Bestival, to great acclaim, enabling a new generation to witness the songs and blistering aural attack that built the legend nearly two decades ago. And as for that elusive third album…let’s leave the last words to Kevin Shields: "I realised that all the stuff I was doing in 1996 and 1997 was a lot better than I thought. I'm quite optimistic about the future, even though experience has taught me that I'm probably just delusional. I do feel that I will make another great record."