My Bloody Valentine live 2008: Manchester Apollo
It’s strange to think that the last time MBV played a full live show I was in my final year of primary school; suffice to say that after sixteen years then, expectations were high but at the same time nobody was entirely sure what to expect. As it stands, we have yet to hear any new material so all that we have to comfort ourselves with is that the new record is, in the band’s own words, “three quarters finished” and that the recent performances held so far in London, Manchester and, later this week, Glasgow, are providing them with a bit of extra motivation to get it completed.
The move back into the rigours of playing live and facing their fans once again seems to be taken in a somewhat tentative fashion judging by the timid and restrained on-stage presence that helped cement the ‘shoegaze’ title that their music is supposed to be categorized under. The support act for the evening, Spectrum, proved to be a well chosen warm-up outfit for the occasion, however: their ambient post-rock atmospherics (not dissimilar to Spiritualised, a band that was spawned from Spaceman 3 as Spectrum were) set the mood perfectly; and perhaps promises a comeback for Peter Kember too. The main event of the night was of course MBV’s comeback, which proved to be quite an experience.
MBV effectively drew a line under the ’shoegaze’ scene with their album Loveless but its predecessor Isn’t Anything is a timely reminder of how they themselves helped define the genre in the first place. It may lack the polish and perfectionism of what followed yet in some aspects it actually meets the greatest heights that Kevin Shields and co attained. One point on which this album scores higher than Loveless is how each song, whether the listener finds it to be a highlight or not, is a separate part of the whole rather than a succession of pieces that blur into one; that is to say, it is an album that contains memorable songs that stand out as individual pieces.
The cover says it all. A saturated, colourful shot of a guitar in mid-chord with the band name in barely-noticeable text: My Bloody Valentine. The record that represented the pinnacle of shoegazing after almost bankrupting the label that supported it, Loveless was a commercial failure at its release but it has stood the test of time and inspired countless other proponents of the ‘wall of sound’.