As someone who occasionally takes a stab at writing about music, I’m always keen to read those who have already ploughed that furrow: Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Robert Christgau… and, more recently, Jon Savage, John Robb, Nick Kent, Stuart Bailie and, of course, Simon Reynolds.
The latter has penned a myriad of books about music and popular culture over the past two decades or so – I first discovered his writing through Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture, which tracked the evolution of the rave scene, while his book on the post-punk era, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984, is one of the most fascinating chronicles of arguably popular music’s most creative era.
The former Melody Maker journalist has also written about hip-hop (Bring the Noise), glam rock (Shock and Awe), pop music’s tendency towards self-reference (Retromania), and the evolution of electronic music (Futuromania). His latest work, Still In A Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers And The Reinvention Of Rock, 1984–1994, published by White Rabbit Books, turns its attention to the rise of shoegaze, dream pop, slacker rock and grunge.
It’s a fascinating examination of a period that remains relatively underexplored – covering everything from Cocteau Twins to Hüsker Du to My Bloody Valentine to Spiritualized – and as with other examples of Reynolds’ work, contains some killer lines: My Bloody Valentine’s Bilinda Butcher is described at one point as ‘cooing like a dove accidentally fed MDMA instead of birdseed’. So when I was offered the chance to chat to him about the book, I jumped at it.
White Rabbit has also put together a fantastic Spotify playlist to accompany the release of Still In A Dream, which can be found below… and may also work as a background accompaniment to this interview. 🙂
I started by asking Reynolds whether this was the most personal book he had done to date.
Yeah. I mean, I think all the books have a personal element – even when I’m not using the word “I,” it’s kind of like one person’s perspective. I talk in Retromania about my son’s collecting and how it mirrors my collecting. Also, a lot of the stuff in Energy Flash is about my experiences on the scene. But this is one where while it’s not a memoir, it has a memoiristic element.
It has a sense of what it was like to be a music journalist at that time, how the music press worked, the excitement of it, and the ‘bromance’ as well, of being part of a gang of fellow writers. We were thick as thieves, cooking up these ideas together.
And there’s even some romance in there – I meet my future wife, who’s also a Melody Maker writer, Joy Press. So I wanted to have something of the flavour of life then.
It’s quite a long time ago, and the world is very different – the way music came to people, and the way you had to wait every week for the music press. I was the most exciting day of the week if you were a music nut.
Now you can get music instantly, and you can listen to anything you want. There’s no scarcity, there’s no having to save up for a record, or tape records off a friend. The future paradise we live in is something I would have dreamed of at the time. Now I kind of think there was more intensity to the old way.
At the start of the book, you say that this was the most exciting time of your life. Was that excitement twofold – partly from the music itself, but also partly from you being young, discovering your own voice as a writer, and becoming part of that gang, as you said?
Originally, I sort of nuanced it a bit, and I had a little footnote, like, ‘of course, getting married and having kids was very exciting’. And then I was a raver in the ’90s, so that was very exciting. But my editors said, ‘This makes it weaker, just make it a strong statement.’
I had other great periods being excited about music, like post-punk, obviously, as a teenager and student. But now there was this extra element, in that I was doing what I dreamed of doing. Finally, I was in print. I was working for the music press. That aspect was an extra level of thrill, really.
We were lucky in that when I first started, there wasn’t that much around to rave about. And then suddenly you started to get the Pixies and Throwing Muses, and My Bloody Valentine came along, and Spacemen 3, and so many others. It suddenly seemed to erupt with music that you could gush about and wave a banner for, because it wasn’t really getting any attention from the wider world. With Melody Maker, we could kind of make that music our own patch, really, and shout about it.
I mean, there were lots of other things – hip hop was very exciting. It was the early stages of rap. Acid house came along, and even metal had a sort of wave of interesting music – much harder and more intense. Metallica, and all that thrash stuff. But particularly this area of underground rock… I guess it was ‘indie’ in a sense, but it was also much more psychedelic and crazed than the word ‘indie’ sometimes suggests.
That word ‘indie’ – I seem to remember it got somewhat tarnished when Stock, Aitken and Waterman were suddenly indie. They were topping the indie charts.
Weirdly enough, I just watched a documentary about Stock, Aitken and Waterman, actually almost to kind of remind myself of what we felt the enemy was. Because pop music in the late ’80s was pretty barren.
There was Prince, who would come along and do something great, and Janet Jackson, and some good R&B club records, and some odd hip-hop writers, but Stock, Aitken and Waterman ruled everything. They had all these soap stars that they turned into pop stars. Or, there were a lot of white guys trying to sound soulful, likeWet Wet Wet.
It just seemed a very dull time, pop-wise. Whereas in the early ’80s, you’d had all that stuff like Bow Wow Wow, Altered Images and Japan. There were weird people in pop, like Dexys Midnight Runners – he’s a weird guy, Kevin Rowland. So is Adam Ant. So pop seemed very exciting.
And then suddenly it’s all this cookie-cutter kind of music, this kind of very plasticky stuff. So yeah, we championed the underground things that were around at that time, which were the opposite.
The first part of the book covers a period that maybe has been under-mythologised, I guess. There’s a kind of school of thought that, out of that post-punk new wave, as you said, things kind of migrated into very commercial pop. And then, all of a sudden, along came grunge and Britpop and everything, and rock was back. But that period between new wave and grunge in the ’80s, people haven’t really written that much about it. Why do you think that is?
There are individual books about individual bands. Some of the American side of the story has been told in books like Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life. But the UK perspective on this period between the end of post-punk and Britpop – there isn’t really a single book that covers that period.
That attracted me both because of the music, but also because I like to write about eras and what holds them together, and the way people talk about music.
If you look at something like shoegaze, it’s there at every level – the band names people choose, the artwork, the vague confusion of desires in the lyrics, the song titles, the sound, the way bands behave on stage. They’re just lost in the sound, very shyly looking at their shoes – which is where the name comes from – or looking at their effects pedals in a lot of cases. It all hangs together as a culture that you can read about – it’s like an era.
That changes when Britpop comes along, and it goes back to vocalists who project a lot of attitude, and their voice is really high in the mix. Whereas in shoegaze and a lot of that music of the late ’80s, early ’90s, the voice is quite small, it’s low in the mix, it’s buried under waves of guitar. It all hangs together as something you can see as a whole phase, an era of music. And it’s very different from post-punk in lots of ways.
There’s a sense in the book that ‘year zero’ for this era was Cocteau Twins, where there was something fundamentally different. As you said, the vocals are down in the mix, unintelligible, and there’s an ethereal kind of element to it.
Elizabeth Frazer is quite prominent, actually, vocally. But yeah, you can’t understand what she’s singing. I think the lyrics were demoted in value. If you compare that, say, to the groups of the previous era, whether it’s Elvis Costello or Gang of Four or ABC, they’re very wordy. And the words are delivered with a great deal of articulation.
They’re full of puns and they’re very clever lyrics trying to say stuff about the world or life. Language, a lot of the time, is the subject of songs – the language of love. Elvis Costello wrote endless songs about that. So did Martin Fry. It’s very cerebral, but also clear-cut.
But this phase that I’m writing about, that starts with the Cocteau Twins, is where people are much more confused and vague. And they’re not necessarily trying to say something, lyrically. They actually have cool lyrics – Sonic Youth had really cool lyrics when you can hear them. My Bloody Valentine lyrics are actually pretty great, as lyrics go. But the words are not the central thing. The sound is what it’s really about.
Suddenly the guitar is dominating all these records. Whereas, if you think about post-punk, the guitar is important, but it’s one element. There’s a kind of equality in the mix, and it’s quite a small guitar sound. But I think from the Jesus and Mary Chain, and also from Robin Guthrie in Cocteau Twins, the guitar becomes this huge, heavily affected wash of sound that you kind of lose yourself in.
It basically works through texture. Guitar texture becomes this thing that Kevin Shields is trying to invent – new timbres, new tone colours for the instrument.
That kind of embracing of transcendence and the intoxication of the noise, as you say – what do you think sparked that shift? You mentioned in the book about it kind of being almost political apathy in a way, that people were seeking sustenance, for want of a better term, in a dream as opposed to reality. But was that enough of a trigger, really, for that kind of new sound?
I think there was a sort of narcotic use of music, in a weird sort of way. I don’t think heroin use was that widespread at all in this scene – in fact, although the imagery and the music were quite druggy, it was not that debauched a scene particularly.
But the way the music affected you was kind of like a drug. Sometimes even the way people looked, like the way the Jesus and Mary Chain looked in their videos, very withdrawn and pale, they actually looked like the people in those famous heroin adverts. I suppose you might say the more middle-class way of dealing with the era was, “let’s lose ourselves in noise”.
I mean, some of the groups were definitely exploring drugs and things like that. But there was much more interest in drug records from the past.
So the Heroin they were taking is the Velvet Underground version, in other words.…
Yeah. Also I think by that point, after Thatcher won a second election in a row, there was a feeling of great disbelief, I think, amongst young idealists, young people. There was so much unemployment, and not enough people seemed to give a shit about that – that she’d been re-elected.
And then by the third time, it was just absolute, like, what the f**k? There was a kind of fatalism, a feeling that time was against you. It just didn’t seem like there was any point any more.
Think about early in the ’80s, you had a band like UB40. They did One in Ten, which is about unemployment, and they did The Earth Dies Screaming, about nuclear war. It just didn’t seem like there was any point doing songs like that, because they wouldn’t work.
I can’t imagine that My Bloody Valentine, if you think of their aesthetic, would have done a song about unemployment or the poll tax. It just wouldn’t fit what their aesthetic was.
Well, that’s in the book – you call it miserabilism, right? That kind of idea that suffering is innate in society…
There’s all the stuff you wish would be changed about society, and you vote hoping to get nearer those improvements or changes. And then there’s the stuff that governments can’t deal with. And I think that’s what a lot of miserabilism is about.
Certainly, Morrissey’s lyrics, or the lyrics of Lawrence in Felt, are about feeling so incredibly bored, so empty, like waiting for your life to start. That’s a sort of theme.
And living a lot in dreams. Morrissey would have these unrequited dreams of impossible loves. With Lawrence from Felt, he would dream about almost any other period in history apart from the present. He would be writing songs about 17th-century explorers and all those sorts of people, or Paris in the 1920s. It was like any other period in history was more romantic, and you kind of wished you lived there.
So there was a lot of dreaming your life away – that was kind of thematic in a lot of this music.
And rejecting adulthood as well, a little bit – that kind of childhood innocence. The ‘cutie’ movement is mentioned in the book, and this kind of idea, again, that links in with the dream state. Harking back to all that 13th Floor Elevators kind of stuff, I mean, there must have been a sale in WH Smith of old ’60s records at the time?
I was friendly with this guy, Gerard Langley. He was a singer and a poet in Blue Aeroplanes. He worked in a record shop, and he said to me once, ‘every week someone comes in and buys a Velvet Underground record or a Stooges record’. There was this thing called ‘mid-price’ – the record companies would put out classic records at mid-price.
So you were as tempted, really, to buy records from the past as the present. That meant a lot of people were discovering The Byrds and the Velvets, Jonathan Richman, the Stooges. This was a huge thing. So it’s this very particular lineage of the ’60s. We weren’t listening to the Moody Blues or Traffic or Cream – but we were listening to this dissolute, noisier end of the late ’60s, which then comes out in groups like Loop and Spacemen 3 and, in a different way, the Butthole Surfers.
Custodians of the ‘Arsequake’ movement, as you mention in the book. That’s a new one on me, I’d never heard of Arsequake, to be honest. Every time I read your books, there are all these artists and genres I’ve never heard of. Arsequake is brilliant.
I couldn’t honestly say that Arsequake has much currency beyond the pages of Melody Maker. It was almost like a word that me and David Stubbs and a few other people used. We even called ourselves the Arsequake League, sometimes, as in the name of our gang of writers.
But it did pop up. Kevin Shields referred to it decades later, where he’s saying, “Do you remember the Arsequake days, when Melody Maker put bands like us on the front cover?” So it was a word for a more gnarly end of the scene, like the Butthole Surfers.
There were a lot of groups that had lyrics about death and decay and horrible things, tragic, grotesque things – murders and psychopaths and serial killers. So there was a little bit of that fascination with the dark side of humanity and also the kind of absurd yet horrible things that life can produce.
On that as well, it’s interesting the way the book segues, because that seems like a world away from Cocteau Twins in terms of ideology. Maybe there’s a link there in terms of detachment from society, perhaps. What’s the connection?
The Butthole Surfers, again, did not have any songs about Ronald Reagan. I mean, you could say maybe they were rebelling against conventional life and being yuppies.
I recently posted a thing on Instagram, which is this amazing clip of Gibby Haynes, the singer of the Butthole Surfers, from the yearbook of his college. And he’s a star student. He’s a star football player. He was on the Dean’s List, which is this American term for the top students. And he gets hired by one of the best accountancy firms in America. So he’s in line for a very conventionally successful life.
Then he throws it all away and forms the Butthole Surfers. In fact, recently, one of the reasons came out: he was doing a fanzine that was full of gross images called Strange V.D., and he was running them off on the office photocopier. He left one of these ghastly images in there, and some secretary lifted the lid up and saw it. So he got fired. But I reckon his unconscious made him do that. I think that was a Freudian slip.
Deep down, he didn’t want to go on earning half a million dollars a year as a top accountant working for these corporations. He wanted to join this band of crazy people who ran around America, starving half the time and sleeping on people’s floors.
There’s a subtitle in the book, Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock. And the slackers are a big part of it.
Slackers are people who do have opportunities but choose not to take them. It’s generally college people, people who graduated from college, who could go down that career path to a very prosperous but boring life, and they choose to do something weird instead.
The book mentions a tension between maybe the traditional hippie mindset and the slacker mindset, in that the hippie movement didn’t have that built-in safety net, essentially. You’re from a good upbringing, you can always slot back into daddy’s company if your grunge band goes awry, whereas hippie culture was much more idealistic. Or am I wrong on that?
I think the hippies were a bit of a middle-class movement. The whole ’60s thing was very strong in colleges and things like that. But yeah, I think they were more committed, in a sense, because they actually believed that they were going to cause this generational change, that it was going to be led by them, and they were going to change the world. Also, they had a war to protest against.
They had a focal point.
And then when that didn’t work, a lot of them kind of decided to leave society, and there was a huge movement to form communes and live off the land and all that.
That side of the ’60s we don’t get in the ’80s at all. It’s people who are kind of living on the dole or squatting, so there’s a little bit of a hippie-esque thing, but they’re not really involved in protesting stuff or trying to live like that.
I mean, the Buttholes said they lived like a commune, but they just meant they shared what little money they made, put it in the pool to buy pot, beer, and enough gas to get to the next town. It wasn’t really a commune in the ’60s sense.
As you mention in the book, it was AR Kane who came up with the ‘dream pop’ genre. As a writer, and obviously you were in competition with NME and the other publications, how much pressure was there to invent these frameworks and narratives? To put certain bands in certain genres and come up with a witty name for it?
It wasn’t a requirement. My editors didn’t say, “Simon, it’s been four months since the last genre. We need a new stupid name.” I think the editors were amused by how excited we were and sort of gave us a long leash. Whatever we came up with, up to a certain point, they allowed us to do.
And there was tremendous rivalry with NME, which was very odd because NME and Melody Maker were owned by the same company. And at one point, later on, we were all moved into the same building, and they were on the floor below us. So we would be in the elevator with them.
But there was this fierce rivalry. We were pushing this noisy, new psychedelia kind of thing, second-psychedelia music. And they were pushing something else. Half of them were pushing that more word-literate sort of indie rock, and the other half were pushing hip hop and house music and stuff like that, which we covered as well.
But there was this sort of ideological rivalry about music. And there was definitely a competition between all the music papers – Sounds as well—to do bands first, to get on a new sound. I think both Sounds and Melody Maker were quite early to get on grunge, and then Melody Maker, with Everett True, really kind of made grunge our thing, just giving it insane, super-intense coverage.
I don’t think the coining of words was really part of that. And with ‘dream pop’, it was unusual because AR Kane came up with that themselves. Most bands didn’t like to be labelled or categorised or pigeonholed at all. But they came forward with their own term. And they had a whole sort of theory behind it. Well, not a theory, as such, but it was interesting.
They came with a story, in other words.
They actually used lucid dreaming techniques to write songs, or to go into their dreams. And then sometimes, in their dreams, ideas for music would come up. They were able to wake themselves up and write down a song title or the idea for a melody or something like that. Inspiration would literally be gleaned from their dream life.
And they talked about wanting to make music that other people would hear in their dreams. The music felt like a dream. The dream idea was the overarching thing in their whole view of what music could be. You go into dream worlds.
Did you encounter many artists at the time who had such a defined story like that? Or did they pretend they didn’t, when really they were meticulously positioning themselves? You mention the Manic Street Preachers later on in the book, and how they had a very structured, planned idea about how they were going to position their band. Was there a lot of that? Was there kind of a “we stand for this, but we’re not going to say it out loud” thing?
I think the ethos at the time was the absolute opposite of post-punk, where you had all these people with very clear ideologies and manifestos and mission statements. Here, it was a kind of inverted mission statement.
It was almost like, “Well, we don’t know what we’re doing. We just use intuition.” And there was a lot of talk, actually, of, “I don’t know where the music comes from…” It came from some other sphere, or the idea that you were possessed. It was almost a religious kind of language.
Yeah, there were some very interesting people, and they had this sort of line of patter that was, “We kind of don’t know what we’re doing.”
But at the same time, they would come up with great phrases. Sonic Youth had “the reinvention of the guitar” as one of their ideas, or “the reinvention of rock.” Kevin Shields and My Bloody Valentine talked about their “not really quite there sound” – that blurry, hazy sound without any defined edges they were trying to create. And they also talked about “glide guitar”.
So they would come up with these cool little phrases. But AR Kane were unique in having this idea of, “We are a genre” – a genre of one, I think. I don’t think they necessarily thought they would have dozens of followers.
I interviewed Alex Paterson of The Orb a while ago, and he was saying that when he formed The Orb, it was almost like a scrapbook or a collage of different sounds. By not having a set plan, it became a genre in itself, which I thought was really interesting.
Sometimes you would get bands who were very kind of mumbly and seemed like they were really out of it. J Mascis from Dinosaur Jr – that was kind of how he really was. But also, it became almost like an image that you, as a writer, would kind of exaggerate.
Actually, he’s a very intelligent guy – he’s got quite a lot of opinions, and has a very interesting knowledge of rock history. He’s always been an entertaining person to interview. But part of his image was this slacker, perpetually out-of-it kind of thing.
They were the archetypal slacker band. And yeah, they weren’t a band that you would imagine drawing up a list of principles like some of the post-punk bands did.
Obviously, when you were writing about this scene, there was a sense – and you mention it in the book – that the underground was never going to go overground. But then something like Nirvana happens, and Sub Pop explodes, and all these very underground things suddenly become the mainstream. Was that surprising to you, or was there an inevitability about something like that?
It was totally surprising, yeah. And it’s weird, because all these bands that we’d written about in Melody Maker initially were on indie labels, but they all got signed to majors. It wasn’t like the majors weren’t trying.
They signed Hüsker Dü and The Replacements and Dinosaur Jr. And I think Pixies, certainly in the States, were picked up by larger labels than 4AD. They were licensed to Sire or something like that.
So the majors were trying. There were people in the majors who liked this kind of music. And they were sort of wondering, “how could you get on the radio?” That was the thing. The radio wouldn’t play something that had that kind of fuzzy sound and raspy vocals.
It was just not well-produced enough, and it was too downbeat in vibe, I suppose. But there was a sense of something building. There was this thing where, just before Nirvana broke, the first Lollapalooza happened.
The funny thing is, not a single grunge band was on the lineup at the first Lollapalooza. It’s really weird. Within months, Nirvana broke through, and then all the other groups. It was all bands like the Butthole Surfers and Siouxsie and the Banshees and Nine Inch Nails.
But it was a big deal because it felt like this alternative nation had gathered. There were enough people across 26 states around America, and 15,000 to 20,000 people would come to each event. It was a very new and clever concept.
I guess MTV had changed as well, right? Because MTV had gone from being pure pop into embracing programs like 120 Minutes and things like that?
Yeah, they had a show called 120 Minutes. But that was 120 minutes out of – I’m not very good at maths – how many minutes are there in a week? It’s a lot more than 120. And this was late at night. It wasn’t peak time. They had a little tiny spot for this kind of music. And often they would mostly play stuff closer to the mainstream, often British music.
But then what happened was somehow Nirvana, and their producer, Butch Vig, found a way of taking that sound – that sort of Dinosaur Jr.-type sound– and making it somehow dirty and messy, yet clean and punchy at the same time. The production was amazing. It totally had the underground sound, but it just glistened on the radio.
And then they had the amazing video [for Smells Like Teen Spirit], which did the same trick. It was very grungy-looking. It was dirty, and Kurt’s hair is all matted, and it’s in this yellowy, dingy sort of high-school gymnasium-type setting. So it looked different from most videos, but it’s a brilliant video. It’s edited brilliantly.
It somehow turned all this underground imagery, and the look of everything, and the sound of everything into this brilliant pop. It was absolutely, totally surprising. I never thought this stuff would ever go that mainstream.
You mention somewhere in the book that the underground’s role is to change the mainstream rather than become the mainstream. You also mention, at some point, Kurt Cobain and how he’s almost disillusioned, or the whole thing is alien to him. But at the same time, he’s the one signing to Geffen. He’s the one who’s kind of playing the game. So there’s an element of words versus actions, as compared to, was it Steve Albini earlier, who just completely shuns the mainstream altogether?
Steve Albini had this whole creed. It was a ridiculous creed, really. I interviewed him, and then a few years afterwards, when Big Black’s records were being put out on CD, I did another interview with him.
And he looked back at why they had broken up Big Black. He said, “We started to feel uncomfortable as soon as we were playing shows where we didn’t know everyone in the audience.”
And that’s a ridiculously limiting thing for a musician, or any artist, to feel about their work. That’s not going to be many people. If you believe in what you’re doing, then you kind of want to get it to a bigger level.
But at the same time, you can sort of see the logic. Soon you’re spending all your time with people in the business and being ferried to events in cars, in limos and stuff. That sort of prospect of thinking about the crossover – you can see how musicians get sucked into it.
And I think Albini was obsessed with the idea of autonomy and integrity. So killing the band as it was getting very big was something they were very proud of. They took great pride in it.
I think the trouble with Kurt Cobain is that he did kind of want to be a rock star. But he also put a lot of credence in this Steve Albini idea of the underground and staying on little tiny labels, and a scene where you almost do know everyone in the room. It’s a room full of fanzine editors and people in other bands and people who have little labels or whatever, and there aren’t many punters as such.
Yeah, I think there’s another bit of the book where you mention this idea of “Well, if we change one person’s mind, that’s fine.” And it’s like, well, actually, that’s bollocks. Music and popular music are a lot more than just, “Oh yeah, we connected with that person, and that’s enough.”
I think it’s a difficult thing, because there’s a lot of evidence as to why it’s not a good idea to get very big, because it does mess with your head. And it probably is insidious.
You’ve got people surrounding you, giving advice. “Maybe you should produce the record to sound a bit cleaner”. Or “do a couple of tracks that are really obvious singles”, so that you can get onto certain radio formats.
In America, radio is very, very complicated. They have all these different formats and radio programmers who programme the music for hundreds of stations – not just one station, but they’re like consultants.
So it’s a real science, actually, of how to make a record become a hit. And then, once you get into that world and start making strategic decisions to build your career, it probably does slowly corrode your creativity, and you lose touch with the reasons you did it in the first place.
So I can totally understand why someone like Steve Albini would not want to go into that world. And also why Kurt, having been led into that world, would feel more and more cut off from the original inspiration of the band.
He obviously had many problems, but I think that was one factor. He had been happy in the underground ‘womb’.
And then you have, of course – I’m drawing a parallel here – Nirvana, going from Nevermind into In Utero, while at the same time My Bloody Valentine go from Loveless to, well nothing. Actually, before I get on to that, there’s a great record shop near me, Volume Records & Books. Neil is the guy who runs it. I said to him, “There’s something controversial in this book, Neil. Simon says that MBV peaked before Loveless. I’m not sure I agree with that.” And Neil was like, “Absolutely, 100%.”
It’s amazing how divisive that is! There certainly is an Isn’t Anything camp. There was something a little wilder and looser about that record.
I think Loveless is a great record, and it’s a landmark. And clearly it’s the thing that many people discover them through, so it’s the record. But I actually think their EPs might be their best music – they did these four amazing EPs.
Stuff like Instrumental No. 2, which is basically trip hop. It is completely far removed from the noise.
No one ever mentions Instrumental No. 1, because it’s not very good. I think it’s more like a metal kind of track. Instrumental No. 2 is amazing. It’s a looped breakbeat, and there are these ghostly, wavering sounds over it. Very, very ethereal and sort of sweetly spooky.
I think all the music they did in that period – the two albums and the EPs – it’s just this amazing block of music. It’s the best music of the era, really. And then they can’t really find a way to go any further. It was just too hard. They had sort of taken it as far as they can, I think.
To hear those moments when it’s just completely gaseous, amazing, reimagined psychedelia, and then Soon comes along, and it’s them doing that sound with a dance groove. And then, where do you go?
Of course, when they would tour, they started doing the middle bit of You Made Me Realise, as this 10- to 20-minute-long noise chasm. That’s like the ultimate statement of shoegaze, the ultimate statement of the era in a weird way – this absolutely overwhelming thing.
They still do it now. They were playing it at Primavera Sound in Barcelona a couple of weeks ago. I like the way you say in the book that it’s kind of shoegaze’s ultimate endpoint, and its ultimate expression of ideals, in a way. And yet it wasn’t a full stop, because they’re still playing it, 30-odd years later.
They did squeeze out some more music, and there were some nice things on it. And they did some experiments with jungle that were kind of interesting. But they never really did the proper follow-up to Loveless. It just kind of got lost in the studio.
I think it’s nice to know that they have this legacy and they are what people in the business call a ‘legacy act’. But I could never have dreamt in a million years that they would play to 13,000 people in Ireland. And obviously, they’ve played Wembley Arena and the Royal Albert Hall.
I used to see them in pissholes, little tiny dirty clubs. You never would have dreamt they would have got that big.
You mentioned their ‘jungle’ experiments there. This is one of those “what ifs” of music history. How do you think that might have changed or evolved the MBV legacy if they’d gone jungle? That would have been fascinating, right?
Yeah, I suppose it might have been like their Kid A or something like that. It might have thrown a lot of their fans, but then it might have won them new fans.
And I think one of the problems – I think about it not as a musician, because I’m not a musician, but trying to imagine what they must have felt like – is that working with computers didn’t really sit well with them. They were much more into touching the guitars and feeling the sound, making the sound manually.
But if you think about the MBV aesthetic, it’s very, very blurry. And jungle music isn’t really. It’s actually very crisply produced. You hear the drums very distinctly, and the bass, and all that kind of stuff.
I mean, I guess there are sort of woozy elements here and there, but I just don’t think the sound aesthetics would gel. It might have been interestingly messy.
There were a few groups who actually did quite interesting combinations of breakbeats and jungle breakbeats. This group, Third Eye Foundation, in the Bristol area, did some stuff later in the ’90s that was kind of noisy, yet also had the rhythms – the broken, crazy rhythms.
You do sort of have a link there between the emotionally seductive noise of MBV and the seductive basslines of jungle. I think it might have worked. I mean, they obviously have, on the m b v album, that Wonder 2 song, right? Which I guess is probably as close as they got.
Actually, having said that, there was a kind of oceanic, blurry sort of drum and bass that LTJ Bukem did.
I love LTJ Bukem. Liquid drum and bass.
Another term we did bandy around at Melody Maker was “oceanic rock” to describe groups like AR Kane and Cocteau Twins. So ‘liquid’ sort of fits. Sort of flowing, dreamy.
Seefeel, as a band, are actually a kind of fulfilment of some of these ideas. I don’t think they ever made anything that was jungly, but they did things that were very techno- and dub-influenced. And also had the woozy guitars and all that sort of thing.
I love the remix that you put on that playlist, actually, of Seefeel. Is that an Aphex Twin remix?
Yeah, it’s brilliant. It was unusual because he kept a lot of the original. At that time, he was notorious for accepting sums of money from labels that had groups like Jesus Jones, and then doing these remixes that had hardly anything of the original in them.
And there are even a few stories that he might occasionally have substituted – this is just hearsay – a track he had lying around and just faithfully executed the commission. But he was famous for doing these remixes where there’s really nothing audible of the original.
But with Seefeel, he clearly liked them because he kept a lot of the original. He just added that little bit of Richard D. James magic to it.
I guess, wrapping up, there’s a couple of questions that came in on Instagram. One of them is around: having been around to see music culture evolve over time, are there any certain styles you anticipate coming into vogue? Or have you found that music isn’t predictable, and innovations come from nowhere? Are innovations predictable?
I think sometimes you can see what’s going on and you can sort of do the logical extension of it. You can extrapolate from existing information that a trend is going to build and something’s going to come out of it.
But a lot of the time, it’s very surprising what happens in music. And critics are often very bad at it. Generally, when they try to make a prediction, it’s woeful.
There are quite a lot of rock books that have been written at the end of a certain phase of music, and the person says what they think is going to happen next. And it’s something completely different.
There’s one where a guy wrote it—Tony Palmer. He wrote a book about the history of pop. And when he’s finishing it, it’s the era when Mike Oldfield has the biggest album in the charts. And Alice Cooper has just done his first Broadway show.
So he says something like, “well, clearly, in the future, we’re going to have more and more showbiz spectaculars from rock, and we’re going to have more of this sort of quasi-classical instrumental rock”. Major labels will be signing up lots of people who are like Mike Oldfield.
And, of course, the next two things that happen are punk and disco, which are both the opposite. Punk is very much the opposite of showbiz, and it’s two-minute songs again rather than 25-minute instrumental Mike Oldfield-style things.
I think music works through swerves and sudden leaps and often takes you by surprise.
My wife’s from the northeast of Brazil, and the biggest artist in Brazil at the moment is a guy called João Gomes, who plays a style of music called baião, which basically originated in the ’50s and ’60s as almost like a minstrel music. And this has suddenly become the biggest genre in Brazil. And everyone’s just like, “where did this come from?” It’s so out of sync with everything else. But that’s what music does. It suddenly, as you say, swerves back into vogue with some artist or some movement.
In the book, you talk about how My Bloody Valentine spawned a million imitators, because they just took maybe the disparate things that were going on and said, “This is the template,” almost.
There’s a reaction as well. Current music might be doing one thing very, very well and have particular qualities, but something is missing. Then the next people go to the other extreme.
I think in the late ’90s, when there was all this electronic music and big beat and stuff like that, you would have confidently predicted that it would just carry on and get bigger and bigger.
In fact, there were two reactions against it. Young people got back into guitars. There’d been a moment when turntables were outselling guitars, and then it flipped the other way. And you had all these bands like The Strokes and The White Stripes.
And then you also had the folk thing as well. You had all these bearded minstrels singing like Nick Drake, and girls with long frocks and long hair, and Joanna Newsom, and this sort of back-to-the-human-voice movement, back to acoustic sounds.
So there’s always a dialectic in music where, whatever something is, you could almost bet on the opposite thing. If you were playing the stock market of musical trends, you probably could bet on the opposite.
I like that idea – a stock market of musical trends. Another question from Instagram. When you were writing the book, were there any bands involved at the time that you didn’t like that, upon revisiting, you had a change of mind on?
There weren’t really, actually. Some of this stuff I hadn’t listened to in a long while. I was a little trepidatious starting out. Was I going to feel what I felt at the time? Were all these huge claims I made as a young man writing for Melody Maker going to hold up?
But for the most part, it all stood up. I was pleasantly surprised by how much of it still sounded really good. It still sounded like the best things of that time, the original era, and the things that were worth shouting about.
I can’t really think of anything that I disliked then that I suddenly had a change of heart about.
Well, do you think you were maybe too hard on pop music at the time?
I don’t know if I was, really. I mean, I think there was always some good pop music in the era. Even Stock, Aitken and Waterman had Mel and Kim, who were great. And there were fun things in the charts in what I would call a ‘barren era’, like Neneh Cherry and S’Express, and things that were coming out of dance culture but turned into pop music.
But generally speaking, I’ve been watching old Top of the Pops from across the whole ’80s, and it is astonishing how poor they are, generally. My wife and I like to watch them towards the end of the night because, as soon as something shit comes on, we jump to the next one. And you can cut an episode of Top of the Pops down to six minutes. One and a half good songs.
It’s the same when I looked at charts from that time. In the book, I actually look at an American Billboard chart from 1989, and I couldn’t believe how dire it was. I mean, Donny Osmond had a number-two record in the summer of 1989. Bette Midler had a huge hit. There was maybe one hip-hop record in there. Hip hop was beginning to come through.
In that period, the only stuff that would sort of excite you – very occasionally, a Smiths or an R.E.M. would be on Top of the Pops, or there would be a rap record. That would be exciting.
But it was a pretty barren time. People would say Prince was great, Janet Jackson. But I wasn’t a very big fan of Madonna – that’s one other big figure people would say made that period great. And I wasn’t really a big fan of Pet Shop Boys, another sort of ‘saving grace’ of pop.
So to me, it was a blank period, and the underground was where it was at, really.
I think you reference that in 1988 or ’89, that yourself and David Stubbs were like, “This is the greatest year for rock” or something like that.
That was David Stubbs. He came up with the line: “The greatest year for rock ever.” And the headline of the piece was The Emergent Underground.
He was sort of looking back at 1988, listing all these amazing records that had come out, and just saying, “Don’t listen to all these boring old gits who say rock is dead. There’s all this amazing stuff happening.” It was a really nice thing to do. It was kind of a pitch to the readers, really. It was saying, “Be excited. You’re not living in the wrong era. Don’t wish you lived during the ’60s.”
‘Be here now’, isn’t that what you say in the book?
Be here now, yeah. “Be here now… and behold the bounty.”
Another question came in about New Wave – that you might get around to writing a book on that? You kind of cover that in Rip It Up and Start Again, though, don’t you, to a certain degree?
Well, it is actually a dream of mine to write a book about New Wave, because I wrote about post-punk, which was either the very tortured, angst-wracked Joy Division stuff or the political, militant stuff, generally. There was all this stuff I didn’t really write about at all, which was a golden age for radio. So: The Police, The Pretenders, Elvis Costello, Lene Lovich, The Jam, all kinds of quirky, oddball things. These are groups I don’t really mention at all in Rip It Up.
What I like about this New Wave period, as well as the great music and how it was a golden age for singles, is that everything changes. The graphic language of records is totally different. It’s all geometric, and the clothes are all bright, plastic colours. Coloured vinyl was a big thing in the late ’70s. Records would come in weird shapes, and they would be yellow or pink or whatever.
So there was this whole set of aesthetics. It was a total change. The kinds of things bands wrote about changed too. There were lots of observational songs about everyday life and ordinary people. It was a wonderful, wonderful period of music. And I think if I were to write about it, I would probably write about it in a fairly unabashedly nostalgic way.
I mean, the Sex Pistols were my first love, but my second love was Ian Dury and the Blockheads, who were a great group, with funny lyrics and great grooves and a very gritty, everyday-world sort of perspective. Lots of swearing as well.
A lot of New Wave is about clever words, and that’s what hooked me originally into music. Being a kind of bookish child, I was like, “Gosh, these songs by Ian Dury are really clever and funny. They’re like little short stories. I didn’t know pop music could have this in it.”
Would you write a book on any genres today, or over the last 20 years even? I think there’s a book to be written about grime and its various subsidiaries, maybe?
There was a good book on it by Dan Hancox, called Inner City Pressure. I did love grime, and I wrote about it a lot at the time, in magazines but also on my blog. But I don’t think I could sustain a book about it.
I mean, who knows? Something really amazing might come along that I felt I had something to say about. But I feel like I had a couple of really good phases: the stuff that’s in Still in a Dream, that shoegaze-like era, and then the rave era and jungle. In Futuromania, my last book, there’s a chapter based on a very long story I did about Auto-Tune. And a lot of the impetus for it was this rap that uses Auto-Tune in really creative ways – artists like Playboi Carti and Migos.
So that was sort of the last time, as an older journalist, that I really felt like something happening now was as exciting to me as anything I’d ever seen or heard before. But there are younger people who are doing that job in magazines, covering it well. And those are the people who should be doing the books on it.
Thanks to Simon Reynolds for talking to us. Still In A Dream is out now on White Rabbit Books – check it out here.
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