(Credits: Far Out / Press)
Mon 23 June 2025 8:00, UK
Long before heralding the shoegaze era they’d come to pioneer and ultimately define, My Bloody Valentine had been slogging it since the early 1980s as a rather unremarkable indie outfit across a revolving line-up and jumping between the Netherlands and West Berlin.
Having formed bands together years prior in their Dublin home city, principal creative force Kevin Shields and drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig dropped a string of EPs that made little splash before seeking fortune in London. Recruiting bassist Debbie Googe and guitarist and co-vocalist Bilinda Butcher, a signature with Creation Records yielded 1988’s You Made Me Realise EP and the sonic template that would inform their work thereafter.
My Bloody Valentine would enter the 1980s as the UK’s premier shoegaze band, drenching their ethereal pop numbers in engulfing swirls of abrasive noise and feedback din that exquisitely sculpted a noise rock blast blissfully gargantuan in its effortlessly slack heft.
Dropped amid a rumour mill of costly studio perfectionism and financial haemorrhages at Creation, 1992’s Loveless was released to unanimous acclaim, a definitive statement on shoegaze that married sonic affrontery and transportive ambience to heights untouched by the likes of Ride, Slowdive, or Curve that orbited around them.
Such a massive sound needed a massive show. Gearing up to embark on a promotional tour in December 1991, Shields sought the service of American flautist Anna Quimby to lift the live set’s high frequencies he’d captured with his samplers in the studio. Adding her piercing woodwind, My Bloody Valentine’s aural assault was pushed to intensifying levels of acute punishment, reaching its hellish crescendo on the typical finale ‘You Made Me Realise’, which often stretched into ten minutes or more of screeching white noise.
“She had a little skirt on, black tights,” a friend of the band recollected. “She was a little indie girl. But when she blew into the flute, it was like fucking Woodstock“.
As the tour moved on, so too did its tortuous finale, dubbed the “holocaust section” by fans and press for its aural endurance test. None were victims of this experiment more than the band, but Butcher suffered from a perforated eardrum, and Shields experienced tinnitus from the layered single-chord thrashing that would conjure a blistering blizzard each night. Such agony reportedly could yield rewards for those sending out and embracing the chaos, however.
“After about thirty seconds the adrenaline set in, people are screaming and shaking their fists,” critic Mark Kemp recollected. “After a minute you wonder what’s going on. After another minute it’s total confusion. The noise starts hurting. The noise continues. After three minutes you begin to take deep breaths. After four minutes, a calm takes over”.
Such dense and layered rock tundra had found its natural outlet, to be omitted onto a shell-shocked crowd in all its terrible beauty. The lore that surrounds My Bloody Valentine would grow in earnest, across their frontman’s writer’s block and the years-long wait for 2013’s m b v, but it’s the Loveless tour that marks the band first truly paving the legends that would cloud their career from then on.
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