When My Bloody Valentine step on their effects pedals shortly after 9pm on a Tuesday night at Wembley Arena, it activates vestigial senses. Arm hairs turn into radio receivers. This band’s music is full of tactile effects: like a fan heater unexpectedly aimed at the face, it contains heat and force. It can suck the moisture from your eyeballs.
Tonight’s opening track is I Only Said, from the band’s 1991 album Loveless. Like a number of their songs, it pairs a gliding loop-the-loop melody with eddies of overdriven guitar, the latter sent feral by an electronics shop’s worth of pedals arrayed at the feet of Kevin Shields (guitar, vocals) and Bilinda Butcher (also guitar and vocals). Bassist Debbie Googe lays down the band’s foundational judder.
Drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig is the unsung hero, the anchor around which the chaos can swirl; his frequent fills are a trademark of My Bloody Valentine’s sound. Often, a fifth touring member, Jen Macro, joins in on keyboard or guitar.
Beating people’s eardrums up has made this niche Anglo-Irish foursome one of the most rhapsodised outfits around. Notorious for nearly bankrupting their former label Creation Records because of their perfectionist tendencies, they are heroes of noise as an art form.
They are also a dance act: the loops and baggy beats of the magnificent Soon loosens limbs as well as dandruff. Echoes of the band’s gentler beginnings can be heard behind the raging decibels tonight, thanks to an exceptional sound mix that allows subtler details to emerge. In the late 1980s, My Bloody Valentine were a male-female indie band with gossamer shared vocals. So often drowned out, Butcher’s swoons are one of the delights of the night.
The last year has not been lacking in ecstatically received reunion tours, from Oasis (who replaced My Bloody Valentine as Creation Records’ most volatile act), Suede, Pulp and Radiohead to more recherche groups such as Tortoise and Stereolab. Loyalists and converts have had the chance to hear old favourites blasted through state-of-the-art 21st-century sound rigs.
Arguably, though, My Bloody Valentine’s arena tour is the biggest achievement: they are, after all, a wilful, sometimes truculent outfit, not designed with a mass audience in mind. Their song Slow is typical of their layered intricacy: a gliding overtone melody with a malevolent undercarriage, plus downright carnal lyrics when you can make them out.
The band’s detailing is audible tonight; you can feel the pull of the eddies as well as the riptides
And yet they have grown big enough to fill a short run of large venues, 40-odd years since their inception. For a long time, a series of absences and lack of a digital footprint probably only enhanced the band’s mystique.
Twenty-two years separated Loveless from their excellent comeback album of 2013, m b v; gradually, the band’s music has been made available on streaming services. The current popularity of Irish music may be at play as well. In 2023, the Irish Independent voted Loveless as the greatest Irish album of all time – above anything by Van Morrison, Sinéad O’Connor, the Pogues, Thin Lizzy, Christy Moore, U2 and the Dubliners.
So this tour – a victory for the defiantly marginal – is both surprising and apt. Like Radiohead and Oasis, My Bloody Valentine have no new album to promote and – to the disappointment of many fans – no new songs to play, despite the promise (circa 2021, when the band signed to the British independent label Domino) of new music after a series of remastered reissues.
But the beatific overwhelm they produce deserves giant speaker systems, not the ramshackle rigs that that they once played through in their 80s and 90s heyday.
Obviously, they mess up. For all the band’s reputation as live behemoths, their music has long collapsed under its own weight on stage, and the night’s set includes a few false starts. New You, a track from m b v, is one of those.
A few songs later, Shields quips: “Age thing, you know,” as they misfire again. There are longueurs mid-set, when the fiddling about between songs becomes painful. Ó Cíosóig plays to fill the time, to cheers from the crowd.
Yet this must count as one of the greatest My Bloody Valentine sets, certainly of their latter-day era. The band’s detailing is audible tonight; you can feel the pull of the eddies as well as the riptides. This is not a flat wall of sound: it is experienced in three dimensions.
When the climax arrives – the six-minute midsection of You Made Me Realise – it’s not so much the tsunami of noise you remember; it’s the way Shields and Butcher sigh tenderly on one of the choruses. And how this occasionally very tight band slip straight back into the song, right on cue.