“While the band stood on stage, most felt that they might lose face by retreating.” My Bloody Valentine at The Roundhouse, London (2008)
Lest My Bloody Valentine’s fans be any doubt what they were in for, staff at the Roundhouse were on hand to give out free earplugs. Depending on your view, it amounted to a daring statement of intent or an attempt to indemnify themselves against any resulting damage. Either way, the gesture served reminder that My Bloody Valentine’s reunion shows – some 17 years after their final tour, and twenty after their debut album Isn’t Anything – were unlikely to feature any concessions to the mellowing effect of middle-age.
Just as earthquakes have epicenters, My Bloody Valentine had one in co-frontman Kevin Shields – self-styled architect of the indie quartet’s “glide” guitar sound. Looking just a little greyer than his younger self, the tousled Shields seemed just as impassive and distant as ever. To his far right, it was left to the smiling Bilinda Butcher to convey any sense that My Bloody Valentine might be finding all of this as exciting as their fans were.
All of which, if you remembered them the first time around, was pretty much as expected. Immersed within the white heat of Shields and Butcher’s playing, I Only Said saw drummer Colm O’Ciosoig forging a physically irresistible clatter that he miraculously kept up throughout the entire show. Harder to replicate was the startling impact that these songs had the first time around. If it sounded derivative, that was because it evoked a past – a long if short-lived explosion of “shoegazing” bands such as Ride, Curve and The Telescopes – that My Bloody Valentine had helped invent.
If the earplugs didn’t initially seem necessary, then Come In Alone – the sound of raga rock being fed through an internal combustion engine – had several onlookers hastily searching their pockets to revise their opinion. Heralding the intro of Only Shallow, pupil-shrinking footage of white clouds and blue skies suggested that some sunglasses alongside the earplugs wouldn’t have gone amiss.
With the exception of those who had attended the preceding two shows, few could have imagined that, in terms of sonic endurance, the main event had yet to come. A pulsating reprise of their 1988 single You Made Me Realise ended in a… well, quite what it was exactly, was hard to say. A chord? This noise didn’t seem comprised of notes, exactly. So it was a noise? Well, in part, yes. But one of almost subsonic enormity, such as the space shuttle might have made when taking off. Even the space shuttle didn’t sustain this whatever-it-was over 20 minutes.
My Bloody Valentine, on the other hand, stood stock-still staring at a crowd, who – in turn – saw fit to react in a number of ways. Most put fingers in ears that already had earplugs in them. Some used phones to photograph the “noise”. In a sort of indie-rock equivalent to theatre-goers who make a point of laughing loudly at Shakespearean humour, some closed their eyes and danced along. But while the band stood on stage, most felt that they might lose face by retreating. And so, gradually, My Bloody Valentine’s wall of sound turned into a wall of attrition. To they best of my knowledge, they might still be there now.