Important Gigs in My Life # 5 My Bloody Valentine - Norwich Arts Centre - February 13th 1990

 

Really to get an idea of what this was like you just have to listen to the album My Bloody Valentine were still touring at the time, their breakthrough, Isn't Anything which had come out well over a year previously. But play it very, very loud and imagine yourself locked in a mass of bodies of teens and early twenties that feels as if it is genuinely becoming a sea. Or else just go the whole hog and listen to it underwater.

Because, whenever I think of that gig, I think of being not an individual in a crowd but molecular in structure, more jellyfish than man, part of a swaying liquid mass. With this enveloping blaze of colour and noise pulsing off the stage where the band was playing, like some lighthouse flooding the rocks of a stormy sea.

The music and vibe given off by My Bloody Valentine at that point in time had an incredible essence. They were doing something genuinely new but strangely indefinable, from the moment they released the You Made Me Realise EP on Creation in 1988. They actually seemed on the cusp of an extraordinary breakthrough.

The band obviously thought as much themselves. They took an extraordinarily length of time to complete the follow up to  Isn't Anything, Loveless, almost bankrupting their record label in the process. They also were an astonishing live proposition, having a tendency at the time and thereafter of holding a chord in You Made Me Realise for minutes on end onstage til the audiences ears were on the point of bleeding. In general for playing their gigs at health threatening volumes. For making some kind of record breaking attempt every time they went onstage. Just play the album like I said. It's all there.

Mundane gig details. The ticket cost £3.50. I went during the last year of my time at university, with Andy who has been the gig going friend of my life. I remember nothing specific about the evening except that the band barely spoke to the audience if at all and there was an inexpressible suppressed sexual aura  about the whole evening. I've never associated a gig with such sheer claustrophobic energy. I've seen My Bloody Valentine since but didn't really need to . 1988-1992 was their moment.