A few weekends ago No Badger Required posted about My Bloody Valentine's 1988 album Isn't Anything as part of the weekly Almost Perfect Albums series. Isn't Anything is indeed almost perfect, the band finding their way towards the noise and sound that existed inside Kevin Shields' head- walls of guitar noise, half asleep vocals, loud guitars, distorted guitars, hazy, gauze- like guitars, woozy guitars that lurch sounding like a tape that's been stretched and is spooling out of control, a swooning, out of body trance inducing set of songs that was like little else in 1988. Noise as beauty.
Despite all of this, Isn't Anything isn't the follow up, 1991's Loveless. The recording of Loveless is legendary. It was recorded almost entirely by Shields with drummer Colm O'Ciosoig recording drum loops for Shields to work with and Debbie Googe and Bilinda Butcher largely leaving it up to Kevin after realising they were going to spend a lot of time waiting around in recording studios (Bilinda contributed vocals and lyrics). At first Creation were confident that the album would be recorded in five days. It soon became clear that wouldn't happen.
Shields worked his way through nineteen studios and a slew of engineers, circumnavigating London's various recording studios for two years. Alan McGee claimed it cost £250, 000 and almost bankrupted Creation. Loveless is an amazing piece of work, a record that stands in a field of its own. Desperate to get some product out and to give Shields the nudge McGee blieved he required to complete the album, McGee got MBV to release four songs as the Glider EP in April 1990. The lead track was Soon, a highlight of late 20th century guitar music, a track Brian Eno said reinvented pop music.
There's a story that by 1990 Shields was giving his songs titles that were actually gnomic answers to Alan McGee's increasingly desperate questions about the album's readiness- Soon, Don't Ask Why, To Here Knows When, Sometimes, What You Want...
In February 1991 My Bloody Valentine released another four track EP, Tremolo. In reality Tremolo is a seven track EP, with three extra, untitled pieces of music but chart rules prevented EPs from counting for the singles chart if they had more than four songs. Shields added the three extras in between the other songs, untitled. The first track on Tremolo, which would also turn up on Loveless later in 1991, was To Here Knows When, surely the strangest song to ever enter the UK Top 30 singles chart.
To Here Knows When (EP Version)
Woozy ambient guitar music from the middle of the night, a gentle noise that is both soothing and a little unsettling. Play it loud, really loud, and it engulfs you completely. Loop it round and round on a tape and it becomes the centre of everything for the time its playing. The guitars were Shields' self- named 'glide guitar' technique, playing chords while bending the strings using the tremolo bar. Kevin said that despite what it sounds like, there's actually little in the way of FX pedals. Bilinda's vocal is barely there, sunk in among the layers of guitar sounds. It's as if they recorded a song and then took the song away, leaving just its shadow, the remains of the guitars and vocals. The ghost of a song.
The coda section, an untitled extra piece of music on the EP version but not the album version, is a different but similarly ethereal thing, lops of guitar and reverb. To Here Knows When wasn't just guitars- there are samples from a BBC sound effects album that created the track's bottom end and there may be a tambourine in there too.
On Tremelo this segues into Swallow, a song constructed around a sample from a Turkish belly dancing cassette, four minutes of the prettiest, most magical distortion over a drum break. A song that suggests a million things and creates something entirely new, the samples and drums providing some ballast for Bilinda's voice and Kevin's layers of glide guitars. It also sounds like Shields had been touched by acid house, had taken on board what Andrew Weatherall had given Soon with his remix in 1990. This also has one of Shields' extra tracks attached to its ending, a coda that shifts and spins, that has no centre and is all swirling, loose edges.
There were three more tracks on the other side of the 12", Honey Power, a third untitled coda and then Moon Song, each one an essential part of Tremolo, all linked but different. The Glider and Tremolo EPs and Loveless are the My Bloody Valentine legend, the result of Shields's obsessive pursuit to record what he could hear in his head alone late at night. Whatever it cost Creation, however long it took, whatever it did to the relationship between the band and the record company, it was worth it.
