The origin story of the most important Irish band of the 21st century begins on a grey and misty Saturday in 1978, at a martial arts competition in south Dublin.
“This kid that I met at a karate tournament said that he wanted to form a band,” is how Kevin Shields, who was then an aspiring guitarist, would recall his first encounter with a novice drummer named Colm Ó Cíosóig.
Together they would go on to form My Bloody Valentine, pioneers of a dreamy, marrow-melting sound that has influenced everyone from Radiohead to Tame Impala.
“He was only 12 and I was actually 15 at the time, but he was the same height as me, so it didn’t seem that strange,” Shields said.
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The strangeness came later, as the friends embarked on one of the most unlikely and ground-breaking adventures in Irish music. Few other Irish bands have had anything approaching the impact of My Bloody Valentine, who are about to reintroduce their avalanche of otherworldly and cathartic noise with a sell-out tour that kicks off at 3Arena next week.
As they take to the stage in Dublin they’ll be latecomers to their own party, their unique combination of introversion and noise having inspired arena-conquering megastars of the calibre of Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails and U2, who drew heavily on Shields’s woozy, disembodied guitar for their finest album, Achtung Baby.
As first encounters go, that long-ago crossing of paths of the shy, diffident Shields and the moderately more outgoing – though hardly extroverted – Ó Cíosóig has nothing like the mythological aura of the encounter between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (on a train platform in Kent) or John Lennon and Paul McCartney (at a garden fete in suburban Liverpool).
Yet, judged by the musical reverberations that would follow, the birth of My Bloody Valentine ranks among the most significant events in Irish culture in the past 50 years.
True innovators are relatively rare in Irish rock; a case can be made that My Bloody Valentine are in a category of one. Having moved from Dublin to the Netherlands, and then to a squat in London, Shields and Ó Cíosóig – along with the guitarist and vocalist Bilinda Butcher and the bassist Debbie Googe – became the original architects of a sound that the music press would christen shoegaze.
Like Kraftwerk in Düsseldorf a generation earlier, they created something unique, pulling their dissonant sound straight from the void and sharing it with the world through three landmark albums: Isn’t Anything, from 1988; Loveless, from 1991; and MBV, from 2013.
Shoegaze is many things at once: comforting yet menacing, ethereal but dissonant. In the case of My Bloody Valentine, Butcher and Shields’s vocals had an angelic quality, yet their voices were paired with apocalyptic bass and tooth-rattling reverb.
This was a contradiction with a sting in the tail: My Bloody Valentine gigs salved the spirit as they punched you in the gut. Such was the sheer volume that chunks of plaster would sometimes come loose from a venue’s ceiling, pattering down like a physical manifestation of the performance’s tectonic force.
“One of their devices was to toy with the levels of audience comfort by using volume and distortion almost as weapons,” David Cavanagh writes in The Creation Records Story, his rollicking account of the rise and fall of the band’s label and its maverick boss, Alan McGee.
“Amidst the ear-splitting noise from their respective guitars, the high-pitched voices of Shields and Butcher emitted siren-like purrs, creating a plaintive and otherworldly effect.”
If both breathtaking and bludgeoning in the moment, shoegaze has proved equally enduring in the longer term. The genre is, if anything, more popular today than ever. In 2023 alone, streams to Spotify’s “shoegaze” playlist jumped 800 per cent, with Gen Zers accounting for 60 per cent of listeners.
“It’s the nostalgia,” Jenna Kyle, of the shoegaze-adjacent Gen Z indie crew Bleach Lab, told me in 2023. “And it’s people who are in their 20s. We were kids in the 1990s. But it’s, like, ‘Those were the good old days.’”
“It’s definitely timeless,” says Brian McDonald, guitarist with the Cork shoegaze act Mossy. “When the vinyl reissue of Loveless came out, me and my buddies all bought it straight away. Before that, if you wanted to get the vinyl, you were looking at €600. We all hopped on it. We were, like, ‘We have our copies of Loveless.’”
All the members of Mossy are in their 20s. Yet, to them, no modern group has the mystique of My Bloody Valentine, who grew out of Shields and Ó Cíosóig’s first outfit, The Complex (fronted by the future Hothouse Flower Liam Ó Maonlaí, a friend of Ó Cíosóig’s from Coláiste Eoin, in Booterstown in south Co Dublin).
That reverence towards Shields and company runs through modern alternative pop, where My Bloody Valentine’s impact verges on ubiquitous. Their hazy, dissociative style can be heard in the out-of-body hip-hop of Yves Tumor, the heartfelt guitar assault of newcomers such as Hotline TNT, Alvvays and the Dundalk band Just Mustard, and the chill-out electronica of Tycho and Rival Consoles.
The secret to My Bloody Valentine’s appeal is that there is always more to discover, according to Will Anderson of Hotline TNT, who are from New York City. He cites Loveless as a mystery box that can never be entirely solved. Every time you sit down with it, another secret is revealed.
“They’re the most influential band to me,” he says. “Loveless is an album that, no matter how many times I listen to it, never, ever gets old. I can put it on right now and remember how I felt the first time I heard it. It’s still interesting, and it still blows my mind.”
My Bloody Valentine feel much the same about their own music. “As a piece of work, Loveless is a whole universe in itself,” Ó Cíosóig explained to Uncut magazine in 2018. “Every time I listen to it I hear different things in it. It’s like listening to wildlife or whales or something. It has its own space and time.”
The band aren’t the only shoegazers to have been embraced by a new generation. Their English peers Slowdive and Ride – likewise signed to Creation – have experienced a similar renaissance. In the case of Slowdive, the decision to re-form was a direct result of new fans reaching out to ask whether they might reunite.
“I don’t think we had any idea. It was such a surprise to see there were all these kids into the band,” Neil Halstead of Slowdive told The Irish Times in 2023. “Initially, we thought, oh, it will be a few old shoegazers. In the time we’d been away, the internet had spread the word a bit. Or at least allowed people to discover these records”.
Slowdive recalled being overawed by My Bloody Valentine and falling dumbstruck when bumping into Shields and his bandmates at the Creation offices in London. “We met them. It was very awkward. We were too awestruck to talk to them. I still feel that way about the Valentines. It’s hard not to revert to my teenage self.”
To Halstead, My Bloody Valentine were The Beatles in baggy sweaters: it all started with them. That isn’t to say the band dropped from a clear blue sky; their influences ranged from Neil Young and The Velvet Underground to 1980s groups such as Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur Jr, Big Black and The Jesus and Mary Chain.
Yet, as with all true pioneers, they synthesised from these sources something entirely new and strikingly ageless.
That was true of early music such as their 1987 single Strawberry Wine and their 1988 long-play debut, Isn’t Anything. And it’s true of their 2013 comeback, MBV, which was inexplicably omitted from the Mercury Prize shortlist that year. (Shields suggested it was because the group had self-released the record digitally rather than through a third-party distributor such as iTunes.)
But if My Bloody Valentine have never made a less than essential record, the consensus is that Loveless is their masterpiece. As is often the case with perfect albums, its gestation was troubled, though perhaps not as troubled as popular myth would have us believe.
One frequently repeated claim is that Shields spent so long tinkering with the songs that the ensuing studio bills threatened to sink Creation (which would go on to inflict terrible harm on the world’s eardrums by discovering Oasis). The truth is more complicated: yes, Creation was anxious to put out something new by its highest-profile band at the time, but its financial issues preceded Loveless, stemming from a falling-out with its distributor, Rough Trade.
If anything, My Bloody Valentine were up against themselves as they slogged away on Loveless. Ó Cíosóig would subsequently recount the toll inflicted on his mental and physical health.
“I was going to be evicted from my squat,” he told Uncut. “I didn’t have a new place. Creation couldn’t even afford a £300 deposit for a flat. I’d go to the studio and then, as soon as I left, I’d walk the streets looking at places to squat. This was November, it was cold, and I’m out walking the streets.
“All that got to me. I had this nervous breakdown. I was able to function mentally, but my brain-to-arm muscle-control mechanism stopped working. I managed to get it together for a couple of songs – two songs on the record have live drums, Only Shallow and Come in Alone.”
However tumultuous the recording process, the result was stunning. A flawless blend of noise and emotion, Loveless was the best album of 1991, which is saying a lot in the year of Nirvana’s Nevermind, Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, Primal Scream’s Screamadelica (another Creation hit), Slint’s Spiderland, De La Soul’s De La Soul Is Dead and Metallica’s “Black Album”.
Those records have weathered the years to varying degrees. Loveless feels as new and transcendental as the day it was released.
“One key reason it’s influential is because it hasn’t dated – partly because Kevin Shields’s mix and production are so brilliant, partly because when it came out it only really referenced their own previous work, so it was essentially timeless in rock/pop history.
“If you compare it to what came immediately after grunge and Britpop, it stands apart as a sound on its own,” says Richard Blowes, who runs the Galway-based shoegaze label Blowtorch Records.
“The tracks come across more as a feeling or texture rather than traditional songs, so it offers lots of routes to bands who hear it and, knowingly or not, reference it or use it as a template.
“It also has such an appealing mystique and, like The Smiths, is avowedly not ‘rockist’ and is female-friendly. Bands such as Just Mustard, Wynona Bleach and Virgins have all taken the MBV sound and done different things with it – and all have women vocalists. Shoegaze wasn’t shoved down the public’s throats, so there’s a genuine gaze-curious audience out there.”
Now living back in Ireland, Shields is believed to be working on new music. Ever the perfectionist, he will take his time releasing it. But My Bloody Valentine are a long way from done – and, far from a postscript, the 3Arena concert may just be the start of a new chapter.
“They’re a huge influence,” says Brian McDonnell of Mossy. “Shoegaze is in at the moment – the past four or five years – especially because they’re Irish too. There’s a huge gravitational pull towards it.”
My Bloody Valentine play 3Arena, Dublin, on Saturday, November 22nd
