Although its release in 1991 barely caused a ripple, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless has since become regarded as the great lost Irish treasure, a sort of shadowy twin sister to Nirvana’s Nevermind. Due in no small part to bandleader Kevin Shields’ relentless manipulation of layers of treated guitars, the album still sounds utterly contemporary and rich in melody – most notably the nagging hooks of ‘When You Sleep’ and ‘Sometimes’. Shields himself came to regard it as a simple record, whose complexities derived from guitar tunings rather than the material itself.
MBV’s sound had already coalesced on the highly regarded Isn’t Anything a couple of years before, and was honed at the live shows through the freeform brinkmanship of songs like ‘You Made Me Realise’, but Loveless glowed with a new hallucinatory beauty, its sensual, claustrophobic textures exerting an influence on everyone from U2 on down.
The album sessions went on for three years (18 engineers!), cost a quarter of a million pounds and all but bankrupted Creation. After Loveless reached number 24 in the British album charts, Alan McGee dropped the band. They lived off their own money, until they ran out of funding and somewhat reluctantly signed with Island Records in 1992. After wasting the best part of a year trying to build their own studio, Shields found himself paralysed by the prospect of equalling Loveless. Stymied by logistical problems, and stuck in record company limbo, MBV finally split in the mid-90s, with Shields going on to win further acclaim for his work with Primal Scream and, more recently, the Lost In Translation soundtrack.