After releasing the excellent album Isn’t Anything, and before recording Loveless, an album that changed rock music, My Bloody Valentine passed through New York City on a short US tour. They enlisted J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr to act as soundman for them, which is one reason their set at Maxwell’s was so deafening. At this time, when they played the infamous noise break in “You Made Me Realize,” this delicious cacaphony lasted something like three minutes, but it seemed to go on forever. A day or two later, after I sweet-talked the band’s publicist into giving me half an hour with them, I asked guitarist Kevin Shields if they always stretched out that part of the song for soooo long. He replied, “Well, it depends on how bad the audience has been.” (PB)
My Bloody Valentine are Kevin Shields, Belinda Butcher, Debbie Googe and Colm Ó Cíosóig.
“I find that often if I have a dream about something, it seems that just because I’ve woken up, I don’t feel like it’s finished. For example, if you dream that you’re in love with somebody. One day you have no opinion of them, then you have this dream that you’re in love with them, and you wake up the next day, and you see them and you feel funny, you know what I mean?”
Kevin Shields
“We find it fairly boring just to play nice guitar sort of stuff. We have to occasionally, but it doesn’t give us any sort of kick. Vocally, we don’t really enjoy shouting and screaming that much. We’re not very good at shouting and screaming anyway.”
Kevin Shields
(on recording Isn’t Anything in a country studio in a valley in Wales) “We felt like we were gonna fall asleep all the time. I just don’t remember doing some of it, to tell you the truth.”
Kevin Shields
“We were in this valley, okay, in the middle of nowhere, with like, lots of sheep. But the sheep were incredibly noisy, really horrible. Every time we wanted to sleep, there were thousands of sheep milling about, making really corny sheep noises. I mean, sheep sound like people imitating sheep. But that wasn’t as bad as the jets. About two hundred feet above our heads. It’d be like silence, and all of a sudden, there’d be virtually a sonic boom of noise, like an explosion above your head.”
Kevin Shields
(on recording their next album, which would be called Loveless)
(mumbles) “I dunno. We might try and write it before we go into the studio.”
Kevin Shields (all KS quotes from a 1989 interview with Pat Blashill for SPIN magazine)