This is the new record by

There was a chance twitter feed – a facebook post – and suddenly there was a new album – new sounds from the past. Existing out there in spite of the industry - maaaan. A rush and a push and the songs are ours – they just threw them up on the net. This is not how things used to be done. The times they are a changin’. Everyone has gone a little Bowie – a touch Radiohead.

You used to have to live with the anticipation of something emerging – hints that the band were recording – that they’d played a new song live in someplace in Norfolk. You might find a bootleg cassette at a record fair in Doncaster with the track listing saying ‘New One’ on it. Could this be on the new album – would it sound like it did on the tape – would the lyrics have changed?

I saw The Smiths in 1985 – in Scotland – a short tour of the isles – an intimate thing before the onset of superstardom – if you count getting to number 14 a blast of the big time (mind you  - you did have to sell more records then – to be in the charts) and they played Frankly Mr Shankly and Bigmouth Strikes Again – two new ones – real things played for our very ears. A glimpse of something fresh coming our way. It made the wait that much harder – us – that is my Scottish counterparts and I knew that The Queen is Dead would already have two wonderfully lyrical ditties that we could fail our arms and look effete to. What I’m getting at is that the wait and anticipation of the ‘next’ album was both exhilarating and frightening.

Or seeing Smile performed by Brian Wilson in the Royal Festival Hall. These familiar songs all fitting into place as Wilson let us all share in his vision – his sound and vision. It wasn’t released at that point – it was bootlegged and shared and discussed and whispered about  - this long lost long player – and now we we’re hearing it. And we knew it would be released. It built the anticipation. It filled the waking hours. Okay – not quite – I had a newly born beauty at that time and she was taking up most of my thoughts – they tend to take most of them these days too. I do remember buying SMiLe though – I was so worried that the local shops wouldn’t be stocking it (this is in London mind) that i left work – boarded a train to the centre of the city and purchased my copy in HMV on Oxford Street and then zoomed home – to the loft to listen and feel the psychedelia (do you get me?)

Our two bit rock n roll band once played some merry dates with Primal Scream and I remember Gillespie playing Automatic by the JAMC over the PA – it was just out and he was digging it. This new record (well cassette) in his hands. Was it living up to expectations? In Bobby’s eyes you could tell he was happy – you could tell that this third record by his friends was a beauty – full of scowl and growl – tight drums and loud guitars. There’s something beautiful and tangible in a new release – a new record by.

In some ways I’ve known this record was coming for years – we knew Kevin hadn’t given up on music – on sonic experimentation – on turning his amp on and making a racket. No he’d continued that trend since the inevitable collapse/ demise/ retirement of My Bloody Valentine in the early 1990s. There where snippets and gossip – map references that led us nowhere. So Sugar given away with a magazine was a song buried in layers of dirt with squirming guitars and rolling electronic drums – a continuation but a difference. Then suddenly nothing. Rumours on pages and casual conversations that heralded Shields as the new Lee Mavers – obsessed by ancient equipment and elusive sounds that couldn’t be drawn from his head to his strings – from his hands to his amps. It was as if we forgot that Belinda, Colm and Debbie also played a part – they have ideas too. So over the years Shields became this revered thing of sonic manipulation of playing with the very foundations of pop music. Ephemeral and concrete – loud and soft – right there with you but dancing in the distance. I have downloads and bits from ballets and outtakes but what I didn’t have until Saturday was the new record by My Bloody Valentine.  There was a fading hope that there would never be a new record by My Bloody Valentine – but here it is.

And already there’s disappointment floating and filling cyberspace – oh if only it had been more like this – or I think it should have pushed the boundaries more. You know as if the valentines were a contrived thing like Sigue Sigue Sputnik – out to unite the pointless and facile. They weren’t making music that they considered new and dangerous they just happened to forge out this sound – you could see it building from This is your Bloody Valentine – it’s already there – visceral, pounding and in your face. They are a band who make music. Some of it sounds similar. Christ, The Beach Boys put out an album last year – it kind of had harmonies and eulogies to God on – maaan that’s so 67 – soooooo Petttt Sounnnds. It was bound to be. And this is My Bloody Valentine – the guitars take off like aircraft and shimmer like the heat on the pavement – they are loud and the words are not clear. What did you want a fucking U2 meets Radiohead type of vibe?

It’s music – and it’s very good music too. M B V is a wonderful modern album – an extension of and looking back at the past. Why? Because it was always going to be like that. And I’m alright with that. I do think the sound has changed though – it sounds more live in its feel. Guitars are scratched and strummed – they feedback and jar at times. Nearly drag the song to a standstill. They sit on top of the mix – they are instruments in themselves – not the wash and blur of Loveless. It feels a little hurried – which is ironic – you know twenty years in the waiting all that. Perhaps it is the download copy I have - but the songs stop and start – they explode into sound whereas Loveless just felt like it floated along – these songs were there to breathed.

But it isn’t Loveless – and that’s fine.

I’ve already found myself singing along with the opening tune – making up sounds like a male Liz Frazer to fill my lack of real words. It takes off from where Loveless ended – it skips around the houses – pops to the shops and ends back where it started – with flanged double speed breaks and stuttering guitars.

There’s always been a beauty in the noise that the Valentines create, something aching at the heart of it. And it’s there tucked inside every tune – a fragility covered in bombast – as guitars breakdown and seek therapy. This post shoegaze psychedelic melee – this unique sound of a band as an army – taking down the enemy through sonic prowess. I fucking love ‘em. Once again I trawled the comments and barbed quotes about waiting 20 years to post a review because that’s how long it took to release the album and someone on The Guardian debating whether Throbbing Gristle were the real experimentalists – of course they were – but we’re not all listening to them on a regular basis. They hurt your ears. Someone even managed to get into a spat about whether Ned’s Atomic Dustbin really had pushed the boundaries in the 1990s rather than My Bloody Valentine. There was no irony – or a knowing wink – it was all genuine.

The thing is – Shields and co have released a beautiful noise ridden long player – it isn’t polished – it is neither contemporary nor rooted in the past  - bar those early 90s drum and bass riddim breaks. It sounds like the valentines – it has new songs on it. Brian had to follow Smile – Jonny Carson on Fifteen Big Ones was not a step forward – so why are we wanting and expecting more from this? In some ways I wish there was more of the ambient textures of Loveless – that unif(r)ied sound that captured waking in a dream. I used to listen to the Tremolo EP at New Cross Station – up for work and travelling to Euston - on a cassette player from Boots – kind of a walkman – but you could record with it – and those songs used to merge with the outside world – sounds swapped over – cars, birds, trains and announcements, conversations and shouts, bleeps from ticket machines and the very thoughts inside my head mixing in the spaces and shapes that they created. I used to drift to work.

So here drums are buried and sounds layered – except this time you can seem to tell when Belinda’s axe is riding over Kevin’s – this is a guitar band writ large. There’s the sound of computerized bass – but with added feeling – and tremolo guitars in a song like ‘new you’. Or synthesised organs, like a futuristic ‘Meant for You’ and heartfelt honesty in ‘if this and yes’. Then grinding repetitive posturing in ‘nothing is’. It’s like Panda Bear got angry. If you understand what I mean.

This is the new record by My Bloody Valentine. I like the new record by My Bloody Valentine. 

and like they invented disco and grunge and new wave and that

I found a copy of one of my fanzines – tucked in a file and stuffed in a cupboard. All courier new and cut up – pritt stick and photographs sitting behind words that meant something once. I laboured over those fanzines, those words – in between school then college and setting up market stalls and serving old folks in Kwik Save. Because I guess that it mattered. Like it does now I suppose.

Nowadays words come ready selected from Oxbridge journalists mining pop culture in broadsheet pages. Everybody’s clever nowadays. I say this because we take The Guardian in our house – all delivered and that – rolled up and half stuffed in the letterbox. When I was paperboy – I was told to push them all the way through – stopped them getting wet and all that.

Anyway lately I have found myself more reluctant to read the thoughts of these people. So I know how people might feel about all of this self indulgent scribing. But what seems to have offended me was the ‘free guides to music’ that appeared this week for Pop, Hip Hop, Rock and all the rest. I mean I was already having my gander put up and out by the fact that the Friday Film & Music supplement has a blurb that reads voted the UKs best Music Newspaper – I mean what other fucking newspaper exists – and it isn’t a music newspaper – it has seven reviews, an article by Bob Stanley and someone ripping off my blog and calling it Hail Hail Rock n Roll [that actually was meant without irony].

Now, don’t get me wrong I wasn’t hoping for an in depth discussion of the micro-politics of the death metal scene in Norway but I was looking for something more than the ‘clip culture’ we have come  to view as the norm. Sort of a Blue Peter for the rave age – a sound bite – a record mentioned and a touch of glo-stick – you know what I mean. Before I left this morning to get to work I managed a paragraph – well actually the journalist had only managed a paragraph – it was on Blondie – it said that Blondie was like a punk icon and that she released like an album and that it had some songs on it – and she named a few – because she could google ‘Parallel Lines’ and then it ended by explaining that she did like disco and new wave and rap.

And that was it.

And I was all huffing and puffing and thinking I was sweating blood over the words I wrote about The Impossibles, pale saints, Spaceman 3 and The Field Mice all those years ago and stuck down on card to be taken to a printers and manufactured for the masses. Which demonstrates how you don’t get a career in music journalism – although I read an interview with Danny Baker recently [okay it was in The Guardian] and he said he never gave a shit what the public thought rather he wanted to make his mates laugh in the office. Yeah cheers Dan – I think I bought The Chesterfields ‘Ask Johnny Dee’ because you made it SOTW.

This is a lie.

But part of me felt that yeah – if you’re getting a reaction somewhere from your writing then at least to see that happen where you work – well it helps. And the thing about these guides these listless lists for nothingness is the fact they reinforce the utter banality of popular culture. And whilst I fill up my head with the superficial sounds of Blondie or The Stones or the Pistols and Autechre I still want people to give it credence and write with some feeling about it – not simply serve it up as the commodity it is. Before I turned thirty I read countless biographies and auto biographies of bands and weighty tomes on the rise of bass culture and rebellion. I will be forty this week and here I am looking for some more answers in pop music.

In music.

It’s not like I’m after a great deal is it?

And sometimes the answers stare you in the face and tell you that with them everything will be alright. I used to get that feeling listening to The Impossibles. The Impossibles were Leeds’ answer to Simon and Garfunkel in mini-skirts and pea coats – they sang with harmony and finesse but could pack a punch. I fell in love with it all – and so did Kevin Shields who produced their first single – simple songs and simple strumming. All falling through the music hedge – through the forties and fifities, the sixties and seventies, even the eighties and finding parts sticking together at the end – but somehow sounding alive in the 1990s as rave raved and we looked to softer sounds in our comedown times.

Lucy and Mags were funny, unpretentious and joyful.

None of it was studied and The Impossibles have not made it into The Guardian’s Guide to the greatest pop moments in History – but being in The Duchess as the exploded into song or seeing them nervously take the stage supporting The Primitives at their all day event at Tufnell Park - you know that these are our secret histories – our own Top 50 events. It is hard to explain all of this in a few paragraphs and perhaps I should find my teenage ramblings – delve back into those feelings untainted by age.

I know there will be no paragraphs, epitaphs or half full baths to The Impossibles. They did not bring us new wave, punk, disco nor rap – but they did bring a great deal of joy. I Think they may well have been No.51 in The Guardian list and couldn’t be fitted in.

The Impossibles How Do You Do It?

when they scream they hurt your ears

There was a time when the incessant screech of feedback would be enough to hook me – to reel me in. This anti-musical sound. As the children now scream at the tops of their voices over everything from the type of spoon they have to whether they can have a bath – ‘right now’ it seems that I am living in my own version of Metal Machine Music – endless looping on the locked groove of side four. This appeal to wallow in the primal [scream] sound of fuzzing guitars and discordant melody that rattles and shakes the windows – let alone the bones was amply fulfilled in the teenage years of angst and anger.

There is a point in Sister Ray where the feedback curls into a phrase that I am sure was sampled by the Beasties. It’s the simplicity of the thing – the movement of the guitar, the speaker, the volume – and you can hear it – rushing to fill the emptiness. I would listen to those frequencies throughout my teenage years.

I think a steel town is made for feed backing guitars

And those moments in You Made Me Realise where guitars breakdown and the sound of screaming emerges. I had been into the valentines for some time – that anorak rush of ‘paint[ing] a rainbow’ while we [sunny sundae]smiled. It had all been bowlheads and treble guitars – our band ventured to a Leeds studio to recreate the highs of the Ecstasy long player – we were shrill [they were brill]. But the valentines kept on subsuming, rewriting, becoming fluid, this sound – this heavy heavy sound. Another Adelphi moment was had in the company of My Bloody Valentine, as I fired inane questions at Kevin Shields whilst he ripped pieces of paper from my question list to sort the floating tremolo on his Jaguar guitar. This was the start of Isn’t Anything - a disengagement from that Lazy past to a lazy future.

I stumbled across the video for You Made Me Realise – this super Super 8 footage of broken things and destruction as looped psychedelia washed over and over – not a bad way to start your day – as the Chart Show counted down the Top 10 Independent tunes. You knew it was a good day if you had managed to wake up early and have watched the Chart Show – how do you set your achievements with a rolling video station? If you saw the Chart Show you had made it up by 11.30 am – you’d seen in a morning.

And I would spend many a time in the company of My Bloody Valentine – I mean I would listen to them a great deal. The Tremolo E.P on tape- pushed into a Boots tape player all hiss and fizz in itself – as Honey Power played through the speakers as trains pulled in at New Cross Station – not the station’s speakers my headphones – but those merging of the everyday and the slow pulsating noise of Shield’s and Butcher’s guitars combining to create a new way of sensing the world – through haze and dreams as aeroplanes landed just outside. I witnessed the explosive effect of MBV several times – in Leeds, in York and London. Standing in the ULU alone within the crowd for two nights on the bounce – my body burning from the searing heat I had allowed it to be revealed to – this lobster turning redder – this celtic complexion having no favours done as the rough denim and large black jumper rubbed against that sunburnt skin. But I was there – right within the experience as You Made Me Realise came to a stop and the growl was released – slowly unfolding – sending us back – literally to the doors. I had a ticket for the Manchester MBV reunion – my brother having sorted them out – the tickets not the band that is. I couldn’t make the London shows and instead plumped for the sonic Sunday shenanigans in the North. Except I never made it – in a sad attempt to focus on my career I decided the futures of potential sixth formers was more important than Colm, Belinda, Debbie and Kevin’s attempts to make eardrums bleed and stomachs somersault. So the train was not caught and a well earned day off from school not had and the ticket remained unused – and my hearing was intact for a little longer.

So I have been listening to the ‘holocaust section’ from the ICA warm up concert – a stop start shambling sonic experience as the band slowly begin to lock into that symbiotic soul set up – creating beauty from noise. It lasts for fourteen minutess – I think it was stretched to around twenty minutes by the end of the tour. It isn’t the kind of ‘tune’ you kick off your Saturday night with. No that’s going to be a Sly and the Family Stone track. But as Kevin kicks in the effects and the initial squall begins to settle and through the chaos comes ambience [with teeth] it hurts and it rattles around and I have the option to switch it off – to forward the file. But I linger – I stay sucked in and listen – as pitches descend and tones ring with one another, against each other – discordant and melodic and slowly these frequencies take on even more shape – more substance as the rise and fall of the decibels continues – and somewhere in there I hear a plane – pushing its engines – searching for lift as the sky explodes in strobe light. As we begin to lose our breath and wake within that dream that Kevin and co. are beginning to soundtrack – and slowly we sway – we lose ourselves in this expansive mess of sound.

And then when we are thoroughly submitted – stupefied by the screech –we are jolted back with Debbie’s push of bass and Colm’s thump of the skins. That final riff – left ringing in the air.

This is music.

It may be in debt to this and that – the Stochausen and Sonic Youth and No Wavers and 60s chancers – but this is music that asks to be acknowledged – to be confronted – fought with.

And sometimes I feel like a fight.