What does shoegaze mean to you? We Need your help!

We want your articles, views and memories of the scene that celebrated itself plus bands of today that take their influences from the likes of My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Ride, Chapterhouse etc etc.

If you want to join in, just drop us a line at mail@shaddersonline.com

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Interviews

Check out the Interviews section for an interview with american Annie Barker, whose debut album was produced by Robin Guthrie! Plus an old interview with the queen of Slowdive, Rachel Goswell.

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What does shoegaze mean to you?

Shaddersonline.com

Recently there were two things that made me think about this very question. Just prior to christmas 2007 we moved to the new shadders heights and the entire record collection went to storage, in fact eight months later about half of it is still in a loft about a mile away! But as I was unpacking a box marked R I came across the Ride back catalogue, at this point obviously you have to play them, right? Yeah and some, 'Going blank again' is still an ever present in my top five album list so the sheer beauty and intense power came as no great surprise, in fact it is one of the few albums that can make me cry for no reason whatsoever and I don't mind admitting to that fact. But also out of the box came 'Nowhere' and then the best of album or more precisely the Reading '92 live disc and after multiple plays of both it came as a sharp reminder of just how good Ride were and in fact just how great the whole scene was. The second thing was contact via the myspace interview challenge that has been run through the website and myspace pages for the last ten months or so. The band that responded as Daniel Land and the modern painters, one of the new wave of shoegaze band from this current era. This suddenly made me realise that there was a new generation of bands who took some or all their influences for the bands of the early nineties and beyond.

Now we jump back seventeen years from 2008 to the summer of 1991 to when we first came to fall in love with music the first time around. Back in sixth form I'd basically blown out 'indie' music mainly due to people who listened to it, instead I'd immersed myself in music from the sixties. It was the usual mix of Hendrix, Beatles, Stones but a lot of Doors. Obviously Morrison was the immediate attraction, if ever a frontman was the complete package it was he but as we delved further it was Manzarek's keyboards that really was the business. After I left school in the fall of 1990 a few out of town friends that I knew started passing me mix tapes and telling me about cool bands from here, there and everywhere. The first that appealed were the baggy bands, the keys of the Charlatans and Carpets were the link between the then and now. I'd then got some Cure stuff and then between the spring and summer of 1991 it all seemed to make perfect sense, the daily dinner time trawls of the local record shops began and the gigs soon followed. A friend loved early Ride and played them to death and then during the summer of '91 I was in town with a girl that I'd known from school who'd come back from Uni, she bought the brand new Slowdive album. 'Just for a day' was soon in my collection too along side 'Nowhere' and 'Whirlpool' the debut from, the final piece in what I consider the shoegaze holy trinity, Chapterhouse.

I'd started buying the indie bible, the NME every week and each issue that'd be more about what they christened 'the scene that celebrates itself', not only was the music just magical but they all looked just so effortlessly cool. From the fall of '90 I'd started growing my hair and by the time the summer of '91 it looked a bit like Mark Gardner's! Even more so as I'd added what I considered a couple of shoegazing outfits to me ever increasing indie wardrobe. This consisted of a bottle green T-shirt or the blatant blue and white hooped T-shirt along with nice blue jeans, a shoelace around the wrist and some 60's looking blue sneakers. I thought I looked the bollocks!!

What is missing really here is the music, yes they looked cool and Rachel Goswell always looked gorgeous but the music was just so different. It was a million miles away from baggy and a billion away from the grunge invasion from across the Atlantic. It was artistry, music of beauty take Slowdive's 'Catch the breeze' for example, drifting vocals on top of lush guitars. The music could suck you in and swirl around in your head; it's almost drug music without needing the drugs! I remember hearing the description of Slowdive as musical lasagne; layers and layers of guitars and vocals, it's just so right.

During '91 we caught the holy trinity live. Ride were just excellent, Chapterhouse (with the dreadful 5:30) were stunning but Slowdive at Sheffield's Leadmill venue was simply dreamy, although I must admit I possibly did spend a tad too much time staring at Rachel!

During the year the band that is often referred to as the daddies of the shoegaze scene released their opus, years in the making and nearly bankrupting their label My Bloody Valentine brought out 'Loveless'. It was an absolute monster of an album, masses of guitars and feedback. It was worth every penny that McGee lost in it's making. It stands up today as a landmark album in the field.

Then the press decided they were all rubbish. In probably the biggest build them up to knock them down NME scandal of all time shoegaze became a dirty word, overnight it was uncool to listen to, buy records by or even admit to liking 'shoegaze' music. It was an utter disgrace that took well over a decade for the vitriol to subside.

Fortunately great bands don't listen to nonsense press and in 1992 Ride brought out one of the best records of all time. 'Going blank again' had its shoegaze moments but raised the bar so high that Ride never got anywhere near it again. A lot of the bands found a strange refuge in the states where shoegaze still has a great underground following. Chapterhouse went onto mix in elements of dance into their second album, 'Blood Music' which is criminally underrated and in 'She's a vision' has one of the finest shoegaze moments of all time.

As ever after '90 / '91 / '92 the musical landscape shifted and the word 'shoegaze' remained a dirty word, in fact a new term was introduced some time later to avoid it, enter 'dreampop'. Now the term seems to be used again and so it should, it does mean something different these days obviously. Back in the early nineties it was used to describe the live style of the bands, heads down guitars frenzies now it's more just a generic musical term. The whole scene these days takes influences from not just My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Slowdive and Chapterhouse but also the likes of Lush, Pale Saints and Swervedriver. There were loads of excellent bands who created brilliant soundscapes, a later band that were merely classed at the time as indie but now class themselves in retirement as shoegaze are Adorable. Their debut album 'Against perfection' (one of the great album titles) was a blinding guitar frenzied album but more 'normal' in structure than some of the shoegaze long players, worth trying to find a copy if you can.

Nowadays obviously there is no stigma to loving anything with the phrase 'shoegaze or dreampop' attached to it. There is so much to discover; guitars mix with electronica and ambient music, the boundaries of genres continue to be blurred with the internet and places like Myspace acting as a catalyst for this to happen.

I for one am glad that shoegaze is coming back out of its exiled shadows and the critical and commercial success of the reunion of My Bloody Valentine is testament to this. There is a load of new and old bands doing great music, clubs playing great music (sonic cathedral for one), internet sites writing good stuff and fans listening to great music all under the banner of shoegaze. It's back but for us it never went away, once heard never forgotten.

Colin @ shaddersonline.com August 2008

What does shoegaze mean to you?

Daniel Land and the modern painters

In 1998 I was so out of touch with guitar music that when a friend loaned me a copy of the Cocteau Twins Milk & Kisses, I thought it was quite a 'normal' Indie record. It took me a few repeated lessons to see what the fuss was about - and even then, I would naively put the record on at parties, expecting people to get excited about it (most people were listening to things like Black Grape and the Manics).

I had grown up listening to things like Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, and Brian Eno, and I had been making pulseless, guitar-less ambient music for five years, so I was not well versed in guitar music at all. I suppose I also found the guitar itself somewhat suspect, redolent of too much posturing and a kind of machismo I couldn't identify with. I liked music that floated.

Cocteau Twins' Robin Guthrie was the first person I ever heard who could make a guitar float, and this was such a revelation to me that I pretty much listened to nothing but the Cocteau Twins for the next three years.

It took me a long time to get into shoegaze per se, and by the time I did (2001) it was deeply, deeply unfashionable - something of a dirty word in the United Kingdom in fact (as a 2007 Guardian article says, it was "A byword for naffness and overindulgence" and "A type of music that Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers had said he 'hated more than Hitler'.") But I was in a long distance relationship with someone who was the biggest shoegaze nut, and he gradually hooked me on it via a series of (yes, it was a long time ago) compilation cassettes. I thought most of it was shite, to be honest, but I loved early Verve (after much resistance; I was expecting an early version of Urban Hymns and didn't even bother listen to it for months) and my ears pricked up totally when I heard Slowdive. I'm so glad that they did, because if I hadn't heard them I probably wouldn't be in a band now.

Even more than the Cocteau Twins Milk and Kisses, no album has caused me to reassess my views as much as Slowdive's Just for a Day. Don't get me wrong, I would never argue that it is a classic album. In fact, I'm not even sure if it's a very good album - although I love it like a child. No, Just for a Day showed me that it was possible to fit that floating, ultra-ambient, Guthrie-esque guitar within the confines of "real" song - i.e. a song with a melody, English words, and a pretty normal male voice. That's the very reason why some Slowdive purists hate that album; but for me, focusing on the songs (rather than on sonic experiments) was the biggest revelation. And, like most revelations, it was the most blindingly obvious thing to do - I had just never thought of it.

It took me five years to get a band together, during which time I had amassed a career's worth of unreleased songs; so long in fact that I started to lose faith with shoegaze, and I was unaware that, starting in the states and filtering over to the UK, there was the biggest new shoegaze scene emerging.

It wasn't clear to me quite how big this movement was until I heard Ulrich Schnauss's DJ set at The Big Chill in August 2007. He played probably twenty of the best shoegaze tracks I'd never heard - and I couldn't believe that there was so much good, new shoegaze music in the world; bands that I'd never even heard of.

And what's good about this new, flourishing shoegaze scene is that it seems to have escaped the "dirty word" status of old. Even though it still bemuses some critics, there is no doubt that there is a much more receptive climate to shoegaze now, something that I am sure My Bloody Valentine (probably the most improbable reunion of recent times) are savvy enough to realise (a reunion in the late 90's would have been unthinkable). And I think it's a testament to how far the genre has come that the term shoegaze is applied to acts as varied as (to pick two random examples) Auburn Lull and Amusement Parks on Fire, bands who to all intents and purposes are polar opposites of each other. I suspect that this is because the term "shoegaze" has passed out its original, specific, meaning (Thames Valley Indie bands in the early 90's) and become a synonym for a particular approach to sound - one that has global resonances and many ways of applying, much as the term "Ambient" originally meant something very specific (Brian Eno's environmental music) but has since grown and evolved into many different areas.

The early shoegaze records of the 1990's were seeds that took a decade and a half to grow. And whilst recent film soundtracks (Lost in Translation for example) and creditable artists (Ulrich Schnauss) might have speeded shoegaze's return, history points out that people connect more with dreamy music at times of word crisis - note for instance how psychedelic music flourished during the Vietnam War. There are many similarities between that time and this, actually, as we enter the sixth year in what becomes increasingly evident is an unwinnable, unpopular war in Iraq. Under these conditions (as Ulrich Schnauss pointed out in the same Guardian article mentioned earlier) psychedelic escapism is a major part of shoegaze's appeal; or as James Chapman, leader of Mercury prize nominated Maps, says, "It offers a much more profound way of trying to cope with a bad world… offering hope rather than breaking your guitar and shouting 'fuck you!'"

Danny @ Daniel Land and the modern painters, August 2008

What does shoegaze mean to you?

Cath Aubergine

September 2004, In The City, the busiest weekend of the year for a Manchester based music writer. By half way though day two I've seen so many Franz Ferdinand wannabes I want to grab hold of the next skittering hi-hat I hear and use it to do something extremely unsavoury to its owner. I fight my way though the braying industry liggers to the back room of Dry Bar, and within seconds I'm transported to another place entirely, a warm familiar place that feels like home - but a home I've not seen for a long time, amd missed more than I ever realised. The four skinny young men onstage are dressed in black, a couple of them hidden behind face-length hair. Their name is The Second Floor, and as I wrote at the time, "guitar distortion's turned up as far as it will go - the set starts with a few minutes of white noise and only when ears are on the point of overload do they gradually introduce tune and rhythm. Next up are Barnsley's Lycasleep - "their bodies and long hair are string-thin, standing motionless silhouette-like in the red-lit glow. Delay-soaked guitar lines drift in and out on some solar wind, as the singer mouths barely perceptible shamanic whispers." It wasn't, if I'm being honest, the first time I had seen either band - but both bands absolutely blow me away this time and seeing them here one after another feels like the birth pangs of something special. But hang on, isn't this - whisper it - shoegaze? And wasn't that outlawed under the NME Fashion Police Act 1991? 

The summer of 1991 had seen the end of my first year at university. I had failed all my exams after deciding that following Sonic Boom's first solo tour around the country, the love of a beautiful boy with flowers in his hair and a considerable appetite for recreational pharmacology were more important to my life than revision. (I passed second time around, and wouldn't change a thing). I saw them all - the splinters of my beloved Spacemen 3 in the form of Spectrum, Spiritualized and The Darkside; the big three from the Home Counties Ride, Chapterhouse and Slowdive; the second tier from the vastly underrated Swervedriver to the rather average Revolver; and one of the few Northern representatives, Leeds-based Pale Saints. (My hometown was still in recovery from the previous couple of summers' raving, and didn't contribute a great deal). A summer job put proper money in my hand for the first time and I amassed quite a collection of twelve inch vinyl albums with the requisite left-field still-life sleeves, and still had enough left for a ticket to Reading Festival where many of my beloved bands were on the bill...

And then, suddenly, it was all over. The American invasion force came from nowhere, its first strike right there, at the heart of shoegazing's Thames Valley. Its name was Nirvana, and their incendiary set that weekend turned thousands of kids into plaid-uniformed grunge worshippers overnight, leaving the very British Chapterhouse to play their immediately following slot to a depleted and disinterested crowd. Well, that's what the history books say, anyway - but isn't history always written by the victors? That's not actually quite how I remember it. Neither band was the best in their respective genre; Nirvana to me were at that point just a poor man's Mudhoney (I loved the shoegaze bands but my taste was never limited to them) and Chapterhouse - despite one or two brilliant songs - Ride's understudies. Both played decent enough sets. Most people round where I was standing stayed put. That, however, doesn't make particularly great copy for a music press desperate to kill off a scene they'd got bored with so they could salivate over their new fixation. Openly admitting to being a Slowdive fan was suddenly on a level with openly admitting you had leprosy, although slightly less socially acceptable. Years later, in early 2005, the lead guitarist of a popular indie band confessed to me a secret love of the scene which had long since stopped celebrating itself, and how his bandmates strongly disapproved. The NME was still slagging off anyone vaguely related to shoegazing even by this point, but the assembled crowd - some having come from as far afield as Madrid - in Dry Bar that afternoon in 2004 knew better. 

There were others. Literally days later, from East Anglia came a demo for review, a new band called Sennen, and one listen strongly implied to me it was the Ride B-side (one of my favourites of theirs) as opposed to a small area of Cornwall which inspired the name. Spacemen 3 and My Bloody Valentine gradually ceased to be, in the eyes of lazy journalists, "the band Spiritualized's Jason Pierce started out in" and "the band who nearly killed Creation Records" and instead started to acquire tags such as "seminal", "pioneering" and "influential". Elsewhere the likes of Ulrich Schnauss and then Maps were taking the spirit and sounds of the shoegaze era and mixing them up with techno and electronica; I can't have been the only first-wave shoegaze fan driven into rave and techno clubs by the sorry state of guitar music in the mid-90s who found this the most exciting musical development for years. 

And somewhere in the south of England was born Sonic Cathedral, a club night and subsequently record label promoting this new generation alongside alumni of the first. When the night eventually made the trip up north in early 2007, its first notes were rightfully struck by The Second Floor. Down the front at a Night & Day impressively full for a Sunday night in February I felt an overwhelming sense of pride that this band I had championed in the local music press for two and a half years, and the music I and clearly many others loved, was at last getting its due recognition. Minutes later I saw Maps play live for the first time and they blew my head off (almost literally, actually, due to an exploding percussion item); the summer brought the glorious surprise that their stunning debut album "We Can Create" had found itself nominated for the Mercury Prize. Was the rest of the world finally starting to catch up? News of Slowdive reissues brought unexpectedly good reviews as the traditional music press finally relented on its effective embargo. In the grand tradition of movements reclaiming derogatory terms to wear as a badge of pride, Sonic Cathedral produced T-shirts bearing the word "Shoegazer" in block capitals. Then came the whispers, My Bloody Valentine were getting back together...

Neither of those two bands from that hazy 2004 afternoon is still with us - trailblazers who burnt out before their time. Some of Lycasleep now play in Exit Calm, tipped for great things not just in traditional spacerock/shoegaze circles but by sources as unexpected as The Sun newspaper and Tom Clarke from NME favourites The Enemy. And The Second Floor's Nolan Watkinson resurfaced in June 2008, playing bass in Sonic Boom's latest incarnation of Spectrum. And suddenly, over the course of four weeks or so, this revival that had been slowly building over the past four years and gathering pace since last summer, exploded overground in a glorious coming together of the old and the new. 

Spectrum supported My Bloody Valentine on their reunion tour, and over the two nights at Manchester Apollo I lost count of the number of members of other bands in the crowd, most not old enough to have seen the legends before. I had, but this was something else. The feedback break was like nothing I have experienced in many years of gig going; standing in front of the speaker was like being in a wind tunnel as the sheer force of the sound blew people's hair around. At the end a friend who's just finished his first year at university, the age I was in that long ago summer of 91, was so blown away he could hardly form words. Two weeks later, Oxfordshire's Truck Festival turned its indoor stage over to Sonic Cathedral for one day. The almost criminally young and fresh-faced Kyte created walls of sound worthy of all manner of flowery prose, The Early Years sounded more like Spacemen 3 than Spacemen 3 ever did (with a side order of Faust and Suicide), Spectrum threw in some Spacemen classics, and Ulrich Schnauss proved you don't even need guitars these days to create the perfect dreampop soundscapes. The headline set by Maps remains one of the single greatest musical performances I have seen this year. At the end, as Ulrich Schnauss returned to join them stage, a long lost old friend of an unmistakeable bassline emerged from the beautiful mass of electronics and guitars: an outstanding 21st century take on Ride's "Leave Them All Behind", the sound of past, present and future colliding. After that, the secret special guests were a bit of an anticlimax - a lot of the crowd had got the idea into their heads it was going to be Ride, and whilst I was aware that it wasn't, as I said earlier, despite one or two brilliant songs I always considered Chapterhouse to be Ride's understudies. And they didn't even do the brilliant songs. No matter. Five years ago they'd have been lucky to get a booking at their local. 

The Ride reunion surely can't be that far off - word has it Mark Gardener and Andy Bell are talking again, although Bell would need to arrange time off from the day job in Oasis. The "lead guitarist of a popular indie band" and secret shoegazer I mentioned a few paragraphs back was Martin Noble of British Sea Power; the band's 2008 album "Do You Like Rock Music" sees Noble's first solo songwriting credit, a beautiful, sweeping echo-drenched instrumental which sounds like something Ride might have put out in 1991. It's widely regarded amongst their fans as the high point of their current live set. The Verve's reunion performances showed a clear acknowledgement of their space-dream beginnings; at the time of writing "Forth" has just crashed into the charts at number one. I quite like it, but Sennen's recently released second album "Where The Light Gets In" is far better. About a year ago I was rummaging in the back of a cupboard, looking for something else, when I pulled out a perfectly preserved Breton striped fisherman's top - the shirt of choice for many a shoegazer back in the day, it seemed to have avoided attack from moths or mildew over the intervening years - and I've been wearing it with pride ever since.

Cath Aubergine, September 2008

Co-editor of www.manchestermusic.co.uk and unrepentant shoegazer