Oh, to be young in the Thames Valley in the early nineties. Everything was beautiful and wondrous, and a thousand skinny indie boys with terrible fringes frowned over their effects pedals, crafting giant washes of sound that deafened the happy masses in their thousands. We’d heard the future, and it consisted of overdriven guitars and whispered vocals, reverberating and echoing forever in the student bedsit of the mind.
Or something.
According to the popular orthodoxy, the world woke up, showered, and re-discovered the Tune. The Stone Roses, then Oasis, Blur, Pulp and all the rest showed us that choruses could work, and the three-minute pop song wasn’t entirely the domain of moronic ladette fascists in union jack mini-skirts, or terrible European synth-pop by idiots in leather hats. Intelligent music could compete in a pop environment, and Shoegaze was condemned as last year’s fad, a willful turning-inward which betrayed a lack of ambition, a self-defeating lack of confidence. It was a dirty word.
That’s a shame. A lot of amazing music came out of Shoegaze, and is still inspiring people today. If you don’t know much about Shoegaze, here’s a look at some of the key artists of that movement:
My Bloody Valentine; simply put, they created the movement, and arguably perfected it. Their debut LP, ‘Isn’t Anything,’ laid down the blueprint that everyone else- Chapterhouse, Slowdive, etc, was to copy. This consisted of a wall shimmering, searing guitars, loud, angry bass, vague, half-heard lyrics which seemed to be about sex but could have been anything at all, and an absolute commitment to sonic assault. Their second album, ‘Loveless’ took five years to create, almost bankrupted Creation Records, and is the towering achievement of the genre. It’s like single song- one piece of music runs into another, in an ecstatic fuzz of layered guitars and melodies that sound like they come from outer space. The bass is sinuous, pulsing, and the drums have a rattle and a bounce to them which meant you could even dance to them, if you didn’t want to just lie back and feel ecstatic.
I can’t talk enough about My Bloody Valentine’s influence. All the bands I’m mentioning after them talk about their influence. Bands like Garbage were ripping them off almost a decade later (compare the opening riff of ‘My Lover’s Box’ off their first album to ‘Soon’ off Loveless, and you’ll see what I mean!), and Kevin Shields, their genius guitarist, has remained busy over the years, most notably in a latter incarnation of Primal Scream, and on his soundtrack for ‘Lost in Translation.’ The band reformed last year, and made a large group of aging fans very happy, and very deaf, indeed.
the boo radleys were another band who happily followed in MBV’s shadow, but brought a more varied instrumentation to bear in their sound. Their classic album, ‘Giant Steps’ makes use of beach-boys harmonies, dub basslines, trumpets and pretty much anything else you can think of, including the kitchen sink. The result is a glorious symphonic album which owes as much to the spirit of Pet Sounds and Sergeant Pepper than anything else in music. It’s remarkable, a decade on.
A year and a half later, they went pop in the great Britpop boom. You probably heard annoying trumpet-led hit single ‘Wake Up Boo’ if you listened to the radio at all in the nineties, but please don’t hold them accountable for that. The next album, ‘C’mon Kids’ is perhaps a more successful balancing of their earlier eclecticism with a pop instinct, containing as it does, ‘What’s in the Box?’ which is the only song I know of which rips off both ‘Material Girl’ and The Who at the same time.
Martin Carr has recorded solo stuff under the name ‘Brave Captain’ and is currently looking for people to invest in the making of his latest album. You know it makes sense, kids.
The third band I want to remember is Lush These were a band that didn’t quite fit the mould. No shy and retiring male guitar obsessives here! Miki Berenyi, the band’s brassy, scarlet-haired singer, was loud, assertive, and outspoken, and gave a great interview. Every week, the NME’s gossip columns seemed to feature another story about their drunken antics. Musically, however, they were wonderful, ethereal, wispy, slow, and astounding. Their masterpiece is the album ‘Split’, a beautiful collection of songs from beginning to end, and a glorious fulfillment of the promise of their earlier recordings, ‘Spooky’ and ‘Thoughtforms’.
Lush were different from most Shoegaze bands per se, in that they weren’t as reliant on distortion and feedback as the rest, relying more on echo and atmospherics, which gave their music a sense of dusky space. I remember first listening to their standout track, desire lines on Radio One DJ Mark Radcliffe’s late-night show, and feeling like I was transported to a desert.
Once again, sadly, they declined, in the aftermath of commercial failure. They were reportedly told by their manager before the making of Split that they should sound ‘more like Pearl Jam,’ which thankfully they ignored. Before the making of their next album, ‘Lovelife,’ it appears someone told them that they should sound more like Elastica (possibly Chris Acland, their drummer, as he was at the time living with Elastica’s drummer!). As with the Boos, this album was a pop album, consisting of commercially crafted songs. ‘Ladykillers,’ ‘Single Girl’ are good, serviceable mid-nineties punk-pop, but to my mind at least, something was missing. Still, it’s hard to begrudge a long-running band some chart success.
Sadly, Lush’s career came to an end in 17 October 1996, after their drummer Chris Acland killed himself as a result of a depressive illness. Their legacy still remains, however. Their Best-of, ‘Caio!’ was released in 2001.
There. That’s three. There are many others, of course; I haven’t mentioned the Cocteau Twins, Chapterhouse, Ride, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Mazzy Star, the Blue Nile, Curve or This Mortal Coil, but I could have. Take these three as a gateway drug, if you will, on a slow and mysterious journey into this much-maligned genre. You can then also explore forwards, through bands like Mogwai, Gifts from Enola, Explosions in the Sky and the rest of the so-called ‘Newgaze’ bands who are carrying on this kind of music.
If you only ever hear three Shoegaze albums in your life, however, then your list has to be ‘Split,’ ‘Loveless,’ and ‘Giant Steps.’ Trust me on this, because I am right. Ok?
There. And I didn’t mention Sonic Cathedrals once.