art for heart's sake

Around the turn of the 90s, My Bloody Valentine redefined guitar music with a string of releases whose impressionistic soundscapes would help shape a generation of alternative rock bands.

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Although their initial flame of creativity would burn out, leader Kevin Shields falling into a state of perfectionist inertia for decades, they have since returned to find a hugely expanded audience, to the point where they are about to fill Wembley Arena — a possibility that would have seemed laughable even back when they first made the covers of the “inkies”.

David Stubbs hails The Last Guitar Band.

My Bloody Valentine were, in the late 80s, happier to be called a pop band than a rock band.

Certainly, there is a honeyed, lush, melodic centre to them, obscured, even obliterated, by their blizzards of guitar.

My Bloody Valentine are not rock in the rock-solid sense - they are liquid, gaseous, evanescent. Nor are they rock in the blood and thunder, guts and passion sense.

“The sound literally isn’t all there. It’s the opposite of rock'n'roll,” Kevin Shields told Melody Maker's Simon Reynolds in 1988. “There’s no guts, just the remnants, the outline. The sound’s an aftereffect.”

He also explained, “I'd almost forgotten about 60s music, but then I saw this video of 60s stuff. And what all those bands had in common was this laziness in the way they sang. Ray Davies, Syd Barrett - their voices just seemed to come out of their mouths, without any kind of big put-on. The opposite of Bono, that projection of passion.”