My Bloody Valentine: Part 1: What happened?

Buick6 said:

5. Colm O'Ciosoig joined other bands, and co-wrote most of the last Hope Sandoval ablum, which I beleive is possibly the greatest-post 'Loveless' 'blissout' 'rock' record, and one of the most seriously neglected albums in recent times.

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Seconded, a classic record. Colm was also in that Clear Spot group, and is he involved with Le Volume Corube? I think Kevin was in some way...

(Did you grab the singles off the Sandoval LP - a few amazing tracks that shoulda been on the record proper - if not message me and I'll get 'em over to you...)

Ultimately their demise was becuase of Shields - he just lost his mojo. Is this true or false? I do have some of the collaborations he did with E.A.R and the Porter Ricks/Koner Experiment, but none were a patch on MBV, in fact I found them totally unlistenable.

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Shields only ever played guitar on one or two E.A.R. tracks from recollection...

So folks, if you feel, please help me fill in the gaps.

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Don't know how helpful I can be. There's been a bit of just-on-the-radar action from Shields these past, oh, 14 years (has it been that long since Loveless? I feel old.) Remixes - God, Mogwai, Primal Scream, The Pastels, Yo La Tengo, some other folks.

There was Kevin joining the Primal Scream live troupe (I think it was Simon R who said something along the lines of 'why have such a great guitar alchemist in yr group if all he's going to do is play sub-MC5 riffs?')

Kevin on several Dinosaur Jr records as guest vocalist/guitarist. (Bilinda on vocals too.) - also I think he worked a bit on the first J Mascis LP. Kevin playing guitar on The Pastels' Peel Session from a few years back, rumours he would be playing on their new record (I don't think that happened), and he composed an 'Outro' track for the You Don't Need Darkness To Do What You Think is Right compilation on the Pastels' Geographic label.

There have been other sightings too...

Plus he just played live on some project called The Coral Sea in London - as part of Patti Smith's Meltdown - June 22nd. Catpower was involved.

I don't know if Kevin 'lost his mojo', he's just found it incredibly hard to get things together. The mojo is dormant, not dead. I think building his own studio caused him a lot of trauma, and there were some financial obstacles too. This is just hearsay. But yeah it's fairly obvious that it'd be like pulling teeth to get any more music out of Kevin for a while. He seems to encounter too many variables, plus he's a perfectionist/pedant (depends how you look at it.)

(NOTE: Why has no-one written a book about MBV, considering in time, they have become one of the most significant UK bands/artists of the last 20 years? Now THATS a crime!)

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There will be a book on Loveless as part of that 33RPM series of books on classic albums. Originally supposed to be written by David Keenan but it's been passed on to someone else.

I guess that's a start... I'm researching all this stuff for an article - if anyone has any other sightings let me know. (This is all off the top of my head, I haven't really started serious research yet.)

Buick6 said:

Yeah I saw Kevin Shields with Primal Scream here in Australia, and wasn't even aware it was him!

Kinda sad he's become some sort of journeyman hack..

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He's credited with producing and mixing bits and pieces from the album XTRMNTR. Once you know that you can kind of recognise the barrage of sound style production he contributes. Seems to be something that bands such as M83 have taken to a new level, but that's for another thread.

i did an interview with Shields in 95 for a piece called 'Where the Fuck Are My Bloody Valentine', can't find the piece but hhere's some bits from the transcript

on the follow-up to Loveless:
touring Loveless, then parted with Creation, signed to Island October 1992. built own studio

Shields: "we had a in retrospect totally over-ambitious plan to find a premises, build a
studio and half the record out by July 1993. all in six months. we could have done it cos we had so much nervous energy from the tour, from not sleeping a lot. personally I meet more people, and i go
into a manic state, and you can do things really fast. but when things go wrong
you don't handle in the same way as you normally would. we built a studio in South London and it was all going according to plan -- everything was finished, ready to go -- then we discovered that the desk we'd
bought, every single moving part was faulty --- it was like the desk had cancer or AIDs, it was eating itself apart --- took a year to sort that out - - and we'd spent all our money --- that was also sposed to give us incentive to be quick, that we'd have run out of money by July. By July we realised the desk
wasn't working, and we were given some more money, but we discovered the problems
were huge. the stereo image was fucked. exactly like when an old TV set where
you can only have it really quiet or really loud cos the middle's all distorted. it took a whole year, up til May '94, before we had a new desk and could start again. and then we basically lost, all the nervous energy was gone, and we was more like we were banging our heads against the wall. the whole fun side of building our own studio and breaking the pattern of doing things over a really
long period [as with Loveless] all that had gone -- we'd fallen back into that pattern -- we had
excuses but they don't really matter"


"when we completely ran out of money and totally depressed, we were so broke that
everyone had to live in the house with the studio -- we were like a commune -- it
was exactly the wrong time for us to be living together -- this is all through '94 up
to Christmas -- we'd isolated ourselves from the record company and everyone, and
were selling off gear that we'd accumulated over the years, 'cos we had so much
stuff we didn't need --then around January '95, the repossessions started coming
in -- Debbie had to go out and get a job, cos she owed a year's back rent to her
flatmate -- it got very crap, basically --in the end, Island bailed us out again,
and Warners came in with some money too ---"


on his having a kind of breakdown:
Shields: "I was dealing with all the hassles of the house, the studio, the changing character of the band, and my own self, struggling between what one part of me really wanted and what a more superficial part of me was producing --- all this resulted in a melt-down --- and Im glad i went through it and the things I experienced psychologically were quite unreal --- I've been out there, totally out there--- I can honestly say I've experienced everything that Aldous Huxley ever wrote
about it's quite bizarre--- it was an existensial crisis --- drugs did play a part in it -- I got into the usual thing of smoking so much grass, it's gotten stronger too, grass --"

he also talked about getting sidelined by his obsession with jungle (they were fans of the pirates from early on, 93 or so, and lived in South London), but ultimately being unable to master that way of making music -- and also about an equally unproductive phase of being obsessed with metal -- bands like sepultura!

but at the end of the interview he was being cautiously optimistic that MBV were back on track to complete the follow up to Loveless and they'd got some rhythm programmer guy in from a Swiss outfit called 16/7 or something to help them

this was the spring of 95 if memory serves!

Oh come on now, Kevin's production work on the last Primal Scream LPs are amazing, some really incredible sound wizardry going on - especially the track ACCELLERATOR which is indescribable. Also, his guitar work on their Japan-only live album was pretty bloody impressive as well.

puretokyo said:

Oh come on now, Kevin's production work on the last Primal Scream LPs are amazing, some really incredible sound wizardry going on - especially the track ACCELLERATOR which is indescribable. Also, his guitar work on their Japan-only live album was pretty bloody impressive as well.

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I listened back to XTRMNTR recently and "Accelerator" was the only track that stood out - I attribute this pretty much to Shields. Very funny that that song was meant to be a conscious tribute to the Royal Trux album of the same name (which had a really amazing, hyper-compressed, almost surreal sound.)

Garbage are Curve influenced pure and simple.

I've got a cover of MBV doing What a Wonderful World - it came on an Island CD on the front of Select I think. Must have been 1992 or so.

Rambler said:

Garbage are Curve influenced pure and simple.

I've got a cover of MBV doing What a Wonderful World - it came on an Island CD on the front of Select I think. Must have been 1992 or so.

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he did a mix for curve - a one sided thing on a 12" about the same time afx did that falling free mix.
its almost like jesus jones but a bit better, a break beaty type thing, not all that hot tho sadly.

Seeing mbv live years back in plymouth was a real treat, the held chord thing really threw everyone though

i saw a bit of garbage when they interrupted (for some unknown reason ) brian wilson at glastonbury on the goggle box earlier and it struck me how much of a one dimensional band they are, one miserable tune, but with a very stadium sound.


question is really what would he do now if he started to do music?
that album is haunting him, the greatest and worst thing he's ever done.

i know he's going to start remixing again, which is a way into it from a tech angle i reckon.

I haven't heard anything among all the odds and sods post-'Loveless' that I found that interesting. I think the Wire cover they did was pretty good, but also pretty redundant given the original sounds a bit like a blueprint for MBV anyway. That was also on a full tribute album called 'Whore', fyi.

Something else that hasn't been mentioned was a comp called 'Offbeat', which was part of those Red Hot & ... HIV benefit comps. Had Krush, DJ Spooky, Skylab, acts like that. The My Bloody Valentine tracks were short interludes, from memory. "Slight" being the word a music critic might use to describe their contributions...

There's one actual song on the Lost in Translation soundtrack that did sound very much classic MBV, but have no idea whether that was an older song. Not talking about the one from 'Loveless', it was something I didn't recognise. Maybe the track you're referring to Buick?

I'm definitely not looking forward to new stuff. If a release surfaces I will listen to it, but I've had 15 years of listening to the back catalogue now, so that's bound to impact heavily on how I take in any new material.

Buick6 said:

The remixing stuff Shields has done is pretty dull - all that Basic channel stuff has eclipsed and expanded the whole MBV/blissout shmegaggie.

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You are so right re: Basic Channel! Damn it though - I'm currently writing a piece on post-MBV music & I'd had Basic Channel down as one of the artists/etc who had followed through on the MBV blueprint in some way. Actually I wonder if the Various Artists tracks on Chain Reaction and Fat Cat aren't the most MBV-ish...

speaking of MBV and Primal Scream (R.I.P) did

anyone see the Glastonbury live set on BBC3 yesterday when Primal Scream fell apart? im sure shields was playing with them....can anyone confirm this?

also mms what do you mean by the 'held chord thing'?

my bloody valentine are irish and are in no way an example of english or UK rock

other than loveless,my favourite kevin shields related thing is the remix of if they move kill 'em off exterminator

Tactics said:

anyone see the Glastonbury live set on BBC3 yesterday when Primal Scream fell apart? im sure shields was playing with them....can anyone confirm this?

also mms what do you mean by the 'held chord thing'?

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primal scream interviewed came across as cunts of the highest order , they've always been shit save the work they did with weatherall.

the held chord thing is when they held all held a chord for ages as it droned on, left loads of peoplel confused but blew few heads too. bit terry riley' in c ' style

I can't believe no one's mentioned this interview Shields did for the Guardian in 2004:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,,1167043,00.html


There were rumours floating around about a MBV box set coming out, a little while after Lost in Translation - including post-loveless tracks re-recorded by Shields and at least some of the original band (can't remember who though..) I think there was something on Pitchfork about it.

What else - he did some production for Joy Zipper, on their American Whip LP, and did some stuff with Death in Vegas - I'm sure I saw him playing guitar with them five or so years ago.

Oh, and there's a great MBV remix of Placebo's "Pure Morning", and I second the remix of "If they move, kill'em" as great post-MBV productions.