I'VE been in the front line of Motorhead gigs, had my head in the bass bins at Iron Maiden concerts and been close enough to the speakers at AC/DC shows to be anointed with Angus Young's sweat. Still, this is the first gig I've been to where it is so
loud that everyone is offered ear plugs on the way in. Having been off the radar for some 16 years, My Bloody Valentine are obviously determined to make themselves heard.
Last sighted around 1992, the one-time NME darlings vanished into a murky swirl of rumour when John Major was still PM. Frontman Kevin Shields is a notorious perfectionist and it was widely assumed that he had been crafting a meticulous follow-up to the critically acclaimed Loveless album. It now seems more likely he was building an amplifier whose volume knob cranks up to 11.
Back in the day, MBV were the unwilling mascots of the shoegazing genre. Slightly more melodic than drone rock, the fashion was for dense slabs of interweaving guitars that pulsed and throbbed while studiously ignoring bourgeois songwriting conventions such as hooks, verses and choruses. Nothing has changed.
Most of the songs are built on the endless repetition of subtly changing guitar riffs that coalesce into big washes of sound. The vocals are looped and laid over each other so that they become abstract sounds rather than distinct words. The backdrop shows surreal images like a naked woman endlessly falling down a stairwell or coloured lights that morph into one another. It could be the birth of a star or a close-up of a joint tip glowing in a blacked-out student bedsit. At times, it is beguilingly hypnotic. At other points, there is the sneaking suspicion that someone is having a laugh.
The show climaxes with an extended work-out of 'You Made Me Realise'. A 20-minute squall of feedback and relentless drum battery, it sounds like a chopper landing on a tin roof during a hail storm. It is supposed to be the musical equivalent of the American armed forces' shock and awe tactics: a bowel-quaking onslaught of extreme noise terror. Under the right conditions, it could be truly fearsome but the effect is undermined somewhat by a small section of the crowd cheekily doing the hand movements to the Village People's 'YMCA'.
The full article contains 406 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
