Monday's Long Song

Twenty years ago Patti Smith and Kevin Shields appeared at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank in London. Patti had written a poem for her friend and one time lover Robert Mapplethorpe called The Coral Sea, a poem she started when he died of AIDS in 1989. She tried to perform it as a spoken word piece but could never get through it all, the sheer weight of the emotions, his illness related suffering and death too much for her to complete a public reading. 

Performing it with Kevin Shields changed the performance for her- Kevin's guitar and FX soundscape altered the performance and provided Patti with a bedrock to explore the words and her feelings. They performed it live twice, once in June 2005 and once in September 2006 and released both as a double CD in 2008, each disc the best part of an hour long. It's not something one pulls out and listens to very often and it was probably best seen live, a book length poem set to improvisational and experimental guitar playing by the My Bloody Valentine man but when it hits, it's very powerful. This is Part 4 from the 2006 gig, a fifteen minute long section, the climax of the performance, Kevin's glide guitar shimmering, the drones and vibrato ebbing and flowing as Patti reads her tribute to Mapplethorpe with passion. As they egg each other on Shields' playing becomes an MBV style wall of noise, an ecstatic You Made Me Realise freak out section only a flick of the finger and stomp on an FX pedal away. 

The Coral Sea 12/ 09/ 2006 Part 4

The section from ten minutes in, where Patti is silent and Kevin drones and glistens, is ripe for sampling- put a drum beat underneath it and add some flute and whispery vocals and you could have a new MBV track out before the band do. 

Forty Minutes Of That Drum Break

Back in December I posted I'm Not The Man I Used To Be by Fine Young Cannibals and then more recently Madonna's Justify My Love, both songs driven by a very famous drum break- the Funky Drummer, a drum solo played by the legendary Clyde Stubblefield on James Brown's 1970 single Funky Drummer (actually from the B-side Funky Drummer Part 2). Digging into My Bloody Valentine's back catalogue over the last two weeks brought me back to a B-side from 1988 titled Instrumental No. 2, the flipside to a 7" single given away free with the first 5000 copies of Isn't Anything. 

My Bloody Valentine and Madonna (with co- writers Lenny Kravitz and Ingrid Chavez) both built their songs around a short interlude track by Public Enemy from 1988's It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back. PE's Hank Shocklee denies that the drum break on Security Of The First World is a sample from Funky Drummer but both My Bloody Valentine and Madonna sampled Public Enemy- Kravitz denied it saying it was a drum break that was 'just lying around the studio'. Kevin Shields was getting into acid house in 1988 as well as developing MBV's guitar noise and there's a good argument that Instrumental No. 2 is the first indie- dance track, ahead of The Soup Dragons, ahead of The Stone Roses and ahead of Primal Scream. Admittedly Happy Mondays might want a word.

Anyway, the whats and wheres and who's firsts aren't what I'm here for today. I started piecing these tracks together and thought I'd try to get them and a handful of others to work together in a mix. Forty minutes seemed enough- there are literally thousands of songs that have sampled the Funky Drummer and hundreds of hip hop records including Boogie Down Productions,  LL Cool J, Eric B and Rakim, Run DMC, Beastie Boys and NWA. In fact I might come back and do a hip hop Funky Drummer Sunday mix. But in the meantime, this one is those records above and a couple of others. 

For a while Shadrach by The Beastie Boys were in the mix but it's a different drum break, more likely from Hot & Nasty by Black Oak Arkansas and I dropped Fool's Gold in too but it's not the same break either- it's a funky drummer but not the Funky Drummer. DNA and Suzanne Vega did make the cut but I don't think it's actually the Funky Drummer, it's more likely sampled from Soul II Soul, but it felt like it fitted. 

It's probably worth remembering that Clyde Stubblefield, the man whose drumming is the Funky Drummer, got nothing more than the session fee as the drummer in James Brown's band. 

Forty Minutes Of The Funky Drummer

• Public Enemy: Security Of The First World
• My Bloody Valentine: Instrumental No. 2
• Madonna: Justify My Love
• Sinead O'Connor: I'm Stretched On Your Grave
• Fine Young Cannibals: I'm Not The Man I Used To Be
• DNA and Suzanne Vega: Tom's Diner (DNA Remix)
• Radio Slave: Amnesia (Instrumental)
• James Brown: Funky Drummer (Album Version)

Security Of The First World is from side two of It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, the greatest hip hop album ever made, Chuck D, Flavor Flav and The Bomb Squad writing the book on how to splice noise, funk and rap, politics, race and music. Security Of The First World is a one minute twenty loop, the Funky Drummer, a pulverising bassline and some bleeps, that changed music. 

Kevin Shields sampled Public Enemy for Instrumental No. 2. The pitch drops a little and it sounds scratchier- maybe they sampled it from vinyl. Over the top Kevin plays ghostly guitar chords and layers of wordless vocals to create something that would inform later MBV tracks- Soon is surely born here. 

Madonna's Justify My Love was a 1990 single, banned by MTV due to the S&M, voyeurism and bisexuality on display in the video. I wrote about it earlier this month here. Madonna and Lenny Kravitz wrote and recorded it in a day according to Lenny, very quick and in his words 'authentic'.

Also from 1990 is Sinead O'Connor's I Am Stretched On Your Grave. Sinead was a huge Public Enemy fan. The lyrics are from a 17th century poem, Taim Sinte Ar Do Thuama, translated into English by Irish poet Frank O'Connor and set to music in 1979 by Irish artist Philip King. Sinead's vocal is stunning, alone over Clyde's drumming. Some bass bubbles in, there are some drum crashes and at the end there's a dramatic fiddle part by Waterboy Steve Wickham. 

In 1989 Fine Young Cannibals released I'm Not The Man I Used To Be as a single (the fourth from their album The Raw And The Cooked). They sped the Funky Drummer up and there's some house music in the chords and production. A song that bears repeat plays. Roland Gift was a star who reused to play the game. 

DNA sampled Suzanne Vega's a capella version of Tom's Diner (from here 1987 album Solitude Standing though it dates from earlier, it's on a 1984 Fast Folk Music Magazine album). DNA played it over the drum break from a Soul II Soul record. DNA pressed it up and released it without permission and it took off. Suzanne's label A&M decided to release it officially rather than sue (Suzanne liked the version) and it became a massive hit. It's not the Funky Drummer but it felt like it fitted with Sinead and Madonna and the whole 1990 drum break sampling vibe. 

Just to show that you can't keep a good drum break down, Amnesia is from 2023, a track by Berlin DJ and producer Radio Slave and a tribute to the Ibiza club Amnesia and partying under the stars in the mid- to- late 80s, something Radio Slave admits is a romanticised notion. 

I was in two minds about including the source material. Funky Drummer was released as a single by James Brown in 1970, split over both sides of the 7" with Part 2 being the source of the drum break. This is a nine minute studio version, released on a 1986 album In the Jungle Groove- surely the source for many of the hundreds of artists who followed Public Enemy's lead after 1988 who sampled it. 

To Here Knows When

A few weekends ago No Badger Required posted about My Bloody Valentine's 1988 album Isn't Anything as part of the weekly Almost Perfect Albums series. Isn't Anything is indeed almost perfect, the band finding their way towards the noise and sound that existed inside Kevin Shields' head- walls of guitar noise, half asleep vocals, loud guitars, distorted guitars, hazy, gauze- like guitars, woozy guitars that lurch sounding like a tape that's been stretched and is spooling out of control, a swooning, out of body trance inducing set of songs that was like little else in 1988. Noise as beauty. 

Despite all of this, Isn't Anything isn't the follow up, 1991's Loveless. The recording of Loveless is legendary. It was recorded almost entirely by Shields with drummer Colm O'Ciosoig recording drum loops for Shields to work with and Debbie Googe and Bilinda Butcher largely leaving it up to Kevin after realising they were going to spend a lot of time waiting around in recording studios (Bilinda contributed vocals and lyrics). At first Creation were confident that the album would be recorded in five days. It soon became clear that wouldn't happen. 

Shields worked his way through nineteen studios and a slew of engineers, circumnavigating London's various recording studios for two years. Alan McGee claimed it cost £250, 000 and almost bankrupted Creation. Loveless is an amazing piece of work, a record that stands in a field of its own. Desperate to get some product out and to give Shields the nudge McGee believed he required to complete the album, McGee got MBV to release four songs as the Glider EP in April 1990. The lead track was Soon, a highlight of late 20th century guitar music, a track Brian Eno said reinvented pop music. 

Soon

There's a story that by 1990 Shields was giving his songs titles that were actually gnomic answers to Alan McGee's increasingly desperate questions about the album's readiness- Soon, Don't Ask Why, To Here Knows When, Sometimes, What You Want... 

In February 1991 My Bloody Valentine released another four track EP, Tremolo. In reality Tremolo is a seven track EP, with three extra, untitled pieces of music but chart rules prevented EPs from counting for the singles chart if they had more than four songs. Shields added the three extras in between the other songs, untitled. The first track on Tremolo, which would also turn up on Loveless later in 1991, was To Here Knows When, surely the strangest song to ever enter the UK Top 30 singles chart.

To Here Knows When (EP Version)

Woozy ambient guitar music from the middle of the night, a gentle noise that is both soothing and a little unsettling. Play it loud, really loud, and it engulfs you completely. Loop it round and round on a tape and it becomes the centre of everything for the time its playing. The guitars were Shields' self- named 'glide guitar' technique, playing chords while bending the strings using the tremolo bar. Kevin said that despite what it sounds like, there's actually little in the way of FX pedals. Bilinda's vocal is barely there, sunk in among the layers of guitar sounds. It's as if they recorded a song and then took the song away, leaving just its shadow, the remains of the guitars and vocals. The ghost of a song. 

The coda section, an untitled extra piece of music on the EP version but not the album version, is a different but similarly ethereal thing, lops of guitar and reverb. To Here Knows When wasn't just guitars- there are samples from a BBC sound effects album that created the track's bottom end and there may be a tambourine in there too. 

On Tremelo this segues into Swallow, a song constructed around a sample from a Turkish belly dancing cassette, four minutes of the prettiest, most magical distortion over a drum break. A song that suggests a million things and creates something entirely new, the samples and drums providing some ballast for Bilinda's voice and Kevin's layers of glide guitars. It also sounds like Shields had been touched by acid house, had taken on board what Andrew Weatherall had given Soon with his remix in 1990. This also has one of Shields' extra tracks attached to its ending, a coda that shifts and spins, that has no centre and is all swirling, loose edges. 

Swallow

There were three more tracks on the other side of the 12", Honey Power, a third untitled coda and then Moon Song, each one an essential part of Tremolo, all linked but different. The Glider and Tremolo EPs and Loveless are the My Bloody Valentine legend, the result of Shields's obsessive pursuit to record what he could hear in his head alone late at night. Whatever it cost Creation, however long it took, whatever it did to the relationship between the band and the record company, it was worth it. 

Fifty Minutes Of Soundtrack Saturday

2025's year long Saturday series Soundtrack Saturday has reached the final reel but before the credits roll it seemed that a Sunday mix of various songs and scores from the various film soundtracks I've written about would make a good Sunday mix. This is the result, seventeen tracks from sixteen films, sequenced with something approaching a narrative arc- it starts out in the desert with Harry Dean Stanton tramping round the dust, stays out west for while and then shifts to Tokyo, sleeplessness and jet lag. We jump around some other locations- Long Island, France, Memphis- and have visions of a post- apocalyptic USA before the climax, a death, some levity and then Rutger Hauer in the rain. 

The photo at the top is of Stretford Essoldo, a former cinema just up the road from me, a beautiful 1930s building that has been sadly empty and unused for decades. 

Fifty Minutes Of Soundtrack Saturday

• Ry Cooder: Cancion Mixteca
• Ennio Morricone: Watch Chimes
• Bob Dylan: Billy 7
• Joe Strummer: Tennessee Rain
• Tom Waits: Jockey Full Of Bourbon
• Kevin Shields: Intro- Tokyo
• Kevin Shields: City Girl
• Mick Jones: Long Island
• David Holmes: I Think You Flooded It
• John Lurie: Tuesday Night In Memphis
• Gabriel Yared: 37 Degrees 2 Le Matin
• Nick Cave and Warren Ellis: The Road
• John Barry: Theme From Midnight Cowboy
• Brian Eno: Deep Blue Day
• Son House: Death Letter Blues
• B.J. Thomas: Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head
• Vangelis: Tears In Rain

Cancion Mixteca is from Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders' 1984 film, a Ry Cooder soundtrack with some dialogue from the film that stands up as an album in its own right.  

Watch Chimes is from Sergio Leone's For A Few Dollars More, the second installment of the Dollars trilogy, released in 1967. 

Billy is from Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid, Sam Peckinpah's 1973 Western, Bob Dylan contributing the soundtrack and appearing in the film. 

Joe Strummer did the soundtrack for Walker, Alex Cox's 1987 Western- one of Joe's best 'wilderness years' songs. 

A Jockey Full Of Bourbon appears in Down By Law, Jim Jarmusch's 1986 film- Tom Waits is one of the three stars of the film as well as being a key part of the soundtrack. 

Intro- Tokyo and City Girl are from Lost In Translation, Sofia Coppola's 2003 film, Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson lost in Tokyo. 

Mick Jones provided three tracks for the 1993 film Amongst Friends- Long Island is the most complete, a Jones solo song. 

I Think You Flooded It is from Out Of Sight, the first of many David Holmes- Steven Soderbergh soundtrack collaborations, released in 1998. 

John Lurie's score for Mystery Train had to compete with some big hitters- Elvis' Mystery Train for one, Roy Orbison's Domino for another. A second Jim Jarmusch film in this mix- the use of music is central to Jarmusch's films. 

Gabriel Yared's guitar playing is from the soundtrack to Betty Blue, another late 80s film that made a deep impression on me- Beatrice Dalle made quite an impression too. 

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' soundtrack work spans all sorts of movies and documentaries. They began with the soundtrack to 2009 film The Road, a harrowing version of Cormac McCarthy's equally harrowing novel. 

Theme From Midnight Cowboy is gorgeous, a John Barry highpoint from a composer who recorded dozens of soundtracks. That harmonica. Stunning. 

Brian Eno's soundtrack work is wide and varied and an Eno only soundtrack mix would definitely work- Deep Blue Day is from the 1996 film Trainspotting but originally on Another Green World, Eno's 1975 album. 

Son House's Death Letter Blues is from 1965, just Son and a metal bodied resonator guitar. It's a stunning song and performance, Son's lyrics and performance can chill to the bone. It appeared on the soundtrack to On The Road, the  2012 version of Jack Kerouac's novel. 

B.J. Thomas' Raindrops Keep falling On My Head was a worldwide smash following its appearance in the 1969 film Butch Cassady And The Sundance Kid. The song is probably what the film is best known for, along with the two stars- Robert Redford and Paul Newman- and the famous shoot out ending. 

At the end of Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's 1982 sci fi/ film noir version of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, Rutger Hauer sits on top of a crumbling building in the rain, holding a dove and improvises a farewell speech as Harrison Ford slumps in front of him, his life saved. 'All these moments will be lost in time', Hauer says as Vangelis' synth score plays. But they're not are they- they replay endlessly, equally moving each time. 

Saturday Soundtrack

Sofia Coppola's film Lost In Translation came out in 2003 and felt like an instant classic, a film in the lineage of late night, word of mouth movies that gain cult followings. In fact, Lost In Translation went way beyond cult and was a major commercial success as well as a critical one. The film's stars- Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson- are the atypical odd couple thrown together by circumstance, both disenchanted with their lot and adrift and at sea. Coppola wanted the film to depict the jetlagged, disconnected state people feel when they arrive in Japan, westerners who have flown half way round the world and are bewildered by Tokyo and deprived of sleep. Both are alienated form their partners, both lost and looking for a connection. There is little in the way of plot or narrative, Coppola wasn't sure Murray would actually turn up to film and it was largely shot in a less than a month on location using natural light as far as possible. Many of the street scenes were shot on the streets without extras-- Tokyo's citizens are the extras. It also has an ambiguous ending, something that adds rather than takes away. What did Bill Murray whisper to Scarlett Johansson?

The soundtrack was a success too. It was supervised by Brian Reitzell who was told by Coppola that rather than a score she wanted what sounded like a mixtape, similar to the ones Reitzell sent her while she was writing the film, tapes filled with dream pop and shoegaze bands. The soundtrack ended up being exactly that- after the opening thirty seconds of ambient Tokyo street sounds there are songs by Death In Vegas, Air, My Bloody Valentine, Phoenix, Sebastien Tellier and The Jesus And Mary Chain (since the release of Lost In Translation Just Like Honey has become by some distance their most streamed song). Squarepusher is there too, along with a couple of Brian Reitzell tracks. For many people, me included however, the real pull of the Lost In Translation soundtrack was the four new pieces of music from MBV main man Kevin Shields.

City Girl

Shields hadn't been seen out much since Loveless in 1991 apart from his period providing extremely noisy guitar for Primal Scream (the Shields, Mani, Throb, Innes frontline of the band from around the same time is possibly the band's finest live incarnation). For Lost In Translation, he turned the noise down (although City Girl carries plenty of MBV's noisy disorientation). Goodbye is ambient guitar, the sound of a hotel room late at night, high rise, black sky through glass...

Goodbye

Coppola convinced Kevin to provide some sounds for the film- she was after melancholy and 'floating, jetlagged weirdness'. Reitzell wanted 'a droning, swaying, beautiful feeling'. Shields delivers on all counts. 

Ikebana

For his last piece of music for the film Shields put down the guitar and plugged in the drum machine and synths, the arpeggios dancing across a hissy rhythm before coming to an abrupt end. 

Are You Awake?

Forty Minutes Of My Bloody Valentine

The other night I was about to go upstairs. Lou was halfway down, a quizzical look on her face.  

Her: 'There's a horrible, whining, drilling sound coming out of the computer... what is it?'

Me: 'Dunno'.

I rushed upstairs to see what was happening. I'd left my mp3 player plugged in to the USB slot to charge it. When it's fully charged it switches itself on and starts playing random songs, through it's own tiny, tinny speaker. The 'horrible, whining, drilling sound' was You Made Me Realise by My Bloody Valentine. 

Me: 'That's not a horrible, whining, drilling sound. That's You Made Me Realise by My Bloody Valentine.'

A My Bloody Valentine Sunday mix had occurred to me a while back and this seemed like an ideal opportunity to put it together. They are an acquired taste I think it's fair to say and there are times when if the mp3 player is in shuffle mode in the car, they can jar and disrupt a good flow of songs like few other groups. The string bending, feedback, tremelo, full on assault of Kevin Shields and Belinda Butcher against the sometimes raging rhythms of Colm O' Ciosoig's drums and Debbie Googe's river dredging bass can be a heavy jolt to the senses. Equally, the same noise can be uplifting and life affirming in a way all of their own. They also do a beautiful line in a sort of head- spinning, post- coital comedown wooze, something Sofia Coppola knew when she put the soundtrack for Lost In Translation together. 

The music below is almost entirely from their 1988- 1991 heyday. There's nothing from the 2013 mbv album- not deliberately as such, I just didn't have it to hand and couldn't remember anything about it, so if nothing else I will go back to that record and see what it sounds like now. When it came out in 2013 it was their first album since Loveless in '91 and was recorded in bursts up between 1991 and 1997, then resumed by Shields in 2006 and then again in 2011. Instead I've gone for songs from Isn't Anything, Loveless and the EP releases around those albums apart from a cover version they recorded in 1996. 

Forty Minutes Of My Bloody Valentine

• Don't Ask Why
• Slow
• Feed Me With Your Kiss
• Loomer
• Drive It All Over Me
• Map Ref 41°N 93°W
• You Made Me Realise
• Soon 
• Soon (Andy Weatherall Mix)

Don't Ask Why is my favourite MBV song, a gorgeous, swooning tripped out song, gently strummed, chiming, slightly off kilter guitar and Kevin's voice, very clear and upfront. Belinda coos in the background and a shimmering reverb covers everything until the moment at three minutes six seconds where a second guitar comes in like a weather system. It was on the Glider EP released in 1990 in the run up to Loveless, which kept getting pushed back. In his book on Creation Records David Cavanagh speculates that many of the song titles from this period were coded messages to Alan McGee- Soon, Don't Ask Why, Off Your Face. 

Slow was a B-side from the You Made Me Realise 12" in 1988, an indie rock (with the emphasis on weird, disorientating rock) about oral sex. You Made Me Realise is from a point in time when indie guitar music, as made by this band and a handful of others, was going somewhere it hadn't been before. Drive It All over Me is from the same EP, effortless, late 80s brilliance. 

Feed Me With Your Kiss was a single in 1988 and appeared on Isn't Anything. A friend of mine bought Isn't Anything on cassette, played it and took it back, assuming there was something wrong with it. 'The guitars keep slipping out of tune and time, the tape must be too slack or stretched or something', was the gist of his complaint. 'That's what they sound like', he was told.

Loomer and Soon are both from Loveless, released in 1991, a year not sure of groundbreaking, high quality albums. It sounds as breathtaking now as it did then. Soon is Brian Eno's favourite MBV song, the song which sounds like the six minutes where everything Shields was searching for came together- it is both very vague and sharply in focus, guitars hinted at and right in your ears, a blur of memories and feelings worked into something approaching a song. Belinda's vocals sighs and Colm's drums provide the top and the bottom. Everything in between is like the ghost of indie guitar rock, recorded onto tape and then faded, blurred, bleached. Loveless is according to legend the record that nearly bankrupted Creation and McGee's relationship with Shields and the group broke down as a result. He went from My Bloody Valentine to Oasis (you can probably insert your own sentence here depending on your point of view).

Andrew Weatherall's remix is a groundbreaking record too, the acid house dancefloor dynamics and samples taking Soon into another place. Hugo Nicolson, Weatherall's production partner at the time, was presented with the records Andrew wanted to sample and the pair (with the band in the studio wanting to check what was happening to their music and apparently wanting also to see what remix culture was all about and what the process was) went about inventing indie dance and then destroying it at the same time. I wrote about this remix here and the various samples Weatherall and Nicolson used- West Bam, Gang Of Four, Claire Hamill, The Dynamic Corvettes, Rich Nice and as Hugo told us, the voices from a Volvic television advert. 

Map Ref 41°N 93°W is a cover of a Wire song, recorded for an album of Wire covers that came out in 1996 called Whore- Various Artists Play Wire. Lush, Band Of Susans, Bark Psychosis. Lee Ranaldo, Mike Watt and Godflesh are among the other contributors.

Soon

My Bloody Valentine made the four piece indie guitar band sound like something else entirely with their 1988 album Isn't Anything. There were other bands in a similar area- Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth for two- but they don't really sound like what Kevin Shields, Colm O' Ciosoig, Belinda Butcher and Debbie Googe were doing.  MBV's 1990 single (and a year later Loveless album closer) Soon is another thing again.

Soon

Shields found a new way of playing and most people assumed it involved tons of pedals but apparently not. Shields mainly just used open strings and tunings and the tremelo bar. In the studio (or multiple studios in the case of Loveless) Shields sent his guitar through one amp, his and Belinda's vocals split through different amps and mics and made a huge sound. The drums on Soon sound sampled, played by Colm but in pieces and then sampled to make drum tracks. Shields got into sampling while recording Loveless but says he was mainly sampling the guitars, feedback and distortion mostly, while the vocals were often done early in the morning after being up all night recording. In 2007 Shields said that what you can hear on much of Loveless is 'the sound of the guitar bending. What you hear is the sound between sound.'

Soon is a stunning song. The video, a little dated now perhaps, manages to do it some kind of justice, a low budget hazy and washed out approximation of what Soon sounds like.

Fear

Flaming June eh? How come it's nearly half way through 2016 already? Today's offering is a treat for noiseniks from 1998, Kevin Shields remixing Mogwai and their already fearsome Mogwai Fear Satan song. Shields goes for broke with this sixteen minutes long song, adding flute and what at one point sounds like bagpipes to the guitar feakery. The first play of this on 12" when it came out made me wonder if the stylus or stereo were broken and although the breakdown section at around nine fifty is pretty beautiful it's probably not best served at a family barbeque. Credit where it's due, thanks to DH for his photo of a forest in the Lake District taken at the weekend.

Mogwai Fear Satan (My Bloody Valentine Remix)

Slow

Just a year or so after making (yesterday's) Strawberry Wine single MBV were going further and deeper, as this beauty from the You Made Me Realise ep shows- the bass riff is like, erm, trippy sex. The picture shows Kevin Shields' guitar pedal board. I saw him when he played with Primal Scream once and on some of the songs his hand movements had no obvious relation at all to the sound his guitar and amp were making.

Just plug that in there, stamp on that knob and off you go...

Slow

Strawberry Wine

Oh dear, back to work. It's only when you have time off and actually relax that you realise how consuming your worklife is.

It's funny that My Bloody Valentine sounded like this in 1987- sing song and 60s and lightweight.

Strawberry Wine

More Light

On reflection I think the new Primal Scream song, in it's full nine minute version, is rather good. I mean, they've gone back to the sound of their XCLTR and Evil Heat albums in order to move forward, and this is good right ? Because their last two lps have been at best average, at worst poor. The siren/sax part is great, Kevin Shields is on guitar, the rhythm rocks, Holmes is in the production chair, the remixers should have a ball. The lyrics- well I know we should be applauding because no-one really addresses anything 'political' anymore do they? (but they're a bit silly too, constant rhyming on words ending in tion leads to cliche in my book, and we all know TV talent shows are shit but are they really 'the subjugation of the rock 'n' roll nation'?).

So, on balance... good I think. You may disagree (as Drew and Ctel will I suspect).

Don't Ask Why

I'm not saying that Don't Ask Why is necessarily any better than Soon or You Made Me Realise but recently when I've listened to this year's remastered version off the My Bloody Valentine ep's 1988-1991 compilation it seems like the perfect blend of narcotic, post-coital wooze, melody, distortion and noise. It is total MBV perfection.

Don't Ask Why

Yo La Remix

I found this recently and was going to wait for autumn but frankly that involves planning- Yo la Tengo put out a career spanning double disc about a decade ago. Limited quantities came with a third disc, the main highlight of which was this- Autumn Sweater remixed by MBV's Kevin Shields. Autumn Sweater is a beautiful, slow burning song of lost love, shyness, leaves turning brown and the need for an extra layer of clothing. Kevin Shields sidesteps that for a drum loop, a repeated organ part, an isolated and distorted vocal, an overloaded bass riff. Then he begins to add some other loops, all running on and on for just shy of nine minutes. Stunning.

Autumn Sweater (Kevin Shields Remix)

City Girl

A return to recent postee Kevin Shields and a song from the soundtrack of Lost In Translation (which came out in 2003. It really doesn't seem that long ago). Lost In Translation starred Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray as a pair of Americans marooned in Tokyo. The soundtrack was pretty good, featuring two other Shields songs, Death In Vegas, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Phoenix, Air and Squarepusher. This song is full of overdriven and distorted guitar, sleepy vocals and the sense of waking up very slowly, disorientated, while an amp overloads in a nearby room.

City Girl

Living Room

Apparently the remastered versions of My Bloody Valentine's albums are imminent. At least four years after they were first mentioned I think I'll believe it when I can actually pick up physical versions in a record shop. My vinyl copy of Loveless sounds pretty good but the cd versions of Loveless and Isn't Anything don't sound so good, so while I'm not always a fan of re-mastering maybe the MBV stuff will benefit from Kevin Shields tinkering and twiddling. There's also a cd gathering the e.p.s, B-sides and extra tracks which should be good. If it exists outside record company promo releases.

Kevin Shields has done numerous remixes. I've posted some of them. Here he remixes David Holmes and his track Living Room, first available on the David Holmes 'best of' from a couple of years back. Living Room was on Holmes' 2000 lp Bow Down To The Exit Sign, which I loved back then and looking at it now, reads like 2000 in a capsule- guest appearances from Bobby Gillespie, Martina Topley-Bird and Jon Spencer, found-sound clips from the streets of New York, funky instrumentals (69 Police), fuzzed-up Stooges style punk, and a mixed up stew of hip-hop, soul, rock and funk and little of the techno he made his name with. It's good and very of it's time. This remix, as you'd expect, is noisy.

Living Room (Kevin Shields remix)

We Need Nothing More

As far as I'm aware, since they delivered Loveless in 1991, My Bloody Valentine have recorded only two songs- one was a cover of a Wire song Map Ref 41n 93w (posted here some time ago) and the other was this cover version of Louis Armstrong's Bond theme We Have All The Time In The World. This is very swirly and dreamy and has Bilinda Butcher's vocals to the fore (by MBV's standards) but it's also a pretty straight cover with Kevin Shields keeping the melody and strings intact. It hasn't got that totally disorientating, weightless, headswimming effect that Loveless or Isn't Anything had. Well worth a listen as a starter, especially if you stick Soon on afterwards for the main course.

We Have All The Time In The World

You Better Run, Run, Run

A Primal Scream song for Monday from their sonic terrorist, war against vowels phase. When The Kingdom Comes was the second B-side on the 12" of the Accelerator single, the last record Creation released. It features Paul Weller on 'auto-destructive 12 string Rickenbacker' and Kevin Shields 'sonically speaking' (both quotes from the back of the sleeve). You can probably guess who was responsible for which bits when you listen to it. The song sounds a bit like they made it up on the spot at the end of the night when they'd dragged Weller out of the pub and into the studio, Bobby Gillespie's lyrics probably took longer to sing than they did to write, and it's a fairly derivitive piece of pop-art, rock 'n' roll- despite all of this, I like it.

When_The_Kingdom_Comes.mp3

Wired

My Bloody Valentine cover Wire's Map Ref 41N 93W for a Wire tribute album released in 1996. Wire's original has an instantly recognisable guitar part, and a sing-song vocal. Kevin Shield's noisy bunch manage to keep the essence of the Wire tune while drenching it in their own distinctive noise, adding the boy-girl MBV vocal.

My Bloody Valentine - Map Ref 41N 93W.mp3

4AD #3

Three 4AD posts in a row, this time from Lush, the Camden Abba. Lush had a few good moments, although their drinking often seemed to overshadow their music in the press. Of which they got plenty, partly due to their female front two Emma and Miki. This track Sweetness And Light was one of their best known, and I think turned up selling cars at some point. They split up in 1998, after drummer Chris committed suicide, and went their seperate ways. Bassist Phil plays with The Jesus And Mary Chain, not sure about Miki and Emma- I think one of them resurfaced in a band some time ago. This version of Sweetness And Light (Orange Squash) is a My Bloody Valentine remix (which essentially means Kevin Shields), done for a film called Splendor.

Me either.

Sweetness and Light_MBV remix.mp3 - 4shared.com - online file sharing and storage - download

Bow Wow Wow 'I Want Candy' (Kevin Shield's Remix)

Malcolm McClaren has died aged 64. Lydon hasn't spoken good of him since about 1978 but without Malcolm, no Pistols, no.... anything really. This lot were a second attempt to subvert popular culture and made some good records. This is the Kevin Shields remix, done a few years ago for that Marie Antoinette film. Don't be expecting MBV-style sonic cathedrals though- this is the Bow Wow Wow cover of The Strangeloves' song with slightly different drums.

No picture I'm afraid- my computer currently thinks almost everything internet-based is 'unsafe'. You're lucky I've managed to get it to publish this.

I Want Candy (Kevin Shield's Remix).mp3