The Return Of My Bloody Valentine

Must have been.

That comes from my grandfather. If I’d been a guy I would have been named Bill, but since I was a girl it became Bilinda. John Peel once said on his show that I was being pretentious and tried to be special by spelling my name differently. That bugged me. That’s the name I was given, it’s in my passport! But I didn’t have the energy to write in and complain.

The song titles were really twee, like Sunny Sundae Smile and Paint a Rainbow. It sounds very innocent but the lyrics were very dirty. Paint a Rainbow is about necrophilia and there’s some really disturbing images in that song.

o_0 HOW DID I NOT REALISE THIS WTF.

What about the Shield's mix of Mogwai Fear Satan?

its fun to revisit the lyrics of Paint a Rainbow when you find out what the song is about

conway was a hell of creepy lyricist

Well he chose the name of the band

They were totally gothabilly when they first started tbrh. I mean "Moonlight", gah. "you wear a stone/for each of your hairpins".

So who is playing the drums on Isn't Anything? From the sound of that interview *everything* was recorded by Kevin.

it's obviously colm

Yeah, my understanding is that the band played on Isn't Anything, and Loveless is all Shields, but who really knows? I doubt the band do after all these years and all these drugs and so on.

(xp) That's what I thought, firstly because it's a distinctive style, but secondly because if it was Kevin there's no reason why he would have used programmed drums on Loveless. I assume it's Kevin on mbv, though?

In that most of the the drums on m b v are boring percussion sample loops, yes. My main irritation with the record.

isn't anything was the last record with conventional/linear studio recording origins, afaik; they booked out a place in wales & did it as a group. colm's drumming on that record - & the eps, like glider - is still so monumental. loveless is apparently all kevin apart from bilinda singing, & w/colm entirely responsible for touched. i was just listening to mbv on the subway, it's interesting how the drums are kinda indicative of the mode they're operating in, now; like they obviously aren't the propulsive crash of the live-drum IA/EP stuff, & yet they have this kind of live weight to them. some of the new songs have an almost tropical feel to me. like they're very clearly coming from a pretty standard band line up but they're floating a little along with that.

Kevin doesn't like Colm's drumming because he says it's out of time.

fwiw, I prefer the drums on mbv to loveless

there are drums on loveless? somehow thinking of loveless i don't hear drums in my mind, except on "soon" but that is drum programming, i suppose. even if there are drums on loveless, it is definitely not for the drums that i love that album.

Only Shallow begins with some pretty iconic snare hits! I guess they're programmed, though.

+ : my record (and some smaller, metallic-looking coaster companion?) finally arrived in the mail today.
- : it looked like this:

http://i.imgur.com/LC05wEj.jpg

it's true that i have no intentions on selling it or anything and the record itself sounds great, but i still wish someone would have put any thought whatsoever into the shipping, especially when this thing cost me $40.

I thought Kevin played, rather than necessarily programmed, a lot of the drums on Loveless.

I believe it was samples of Colm's drums, which were then chopped into hits a rolls and sequenced.

Hits and rolls.

Maybe I'm in a minority, but Colm's clattering rush adds a whole new level of thrill and complexity to the Valentines. He should be live on EVERY TRACK. Imagine how dull "Nothing Much to Lose" would be without him. And with him, it's one of my all time favourite songs.

Colm - if you're reading this, I was the fortyish guy whose mouth dropped open when he spotted you outside the barbecue tent in the roasting heat of Altona.

matt's bbq valentine

Aw man what they were wandering round in the food court at ATP? Just my luck.

Well - I saw Colm wander around, being a smallish guy with greying hair in a grey t-shirt he was easy to miss, in fact I don't think anyone else twigged!
Kev walked through the inside foyer later but had a small retinue with him as you might expect. Apparently a very approachable guy though.

I'm embarrased to realise/admit I would not have twigged it was Colm in a million years anyway which is sad cos hes kind of my fave part of the MBV thing. I love his drumming.

THen again I didnt go outside that often, it was too brutally hot.

In my nerdy attention to detail, it sounds to me like there are four songs with live drums on loveless - only shallow, when you sleep, come in alone and what you want - and the rest is programmed. I could be wrong though. I don't think Debbie Googe played on either Isn't Anything or Loveless.

If you read one of the interviews with Shields around that time (early nineties) he explains the drumming thing. Can't really remember but I've got it somewhere. Something like the drums on Loveless are programmed on anAtari but with Colm's 'feel', because his drumming is out of time.

With regards to Debbie I think he said she only played on one album and an ep, but don't quote me on that.

The 33 1/3 book on it goes over this. It's drum-machine exclusively, but Shields claims that he made them human enough to resemble Colm. Admittedly, I didn't deduce them as 'machine'd from the get-go, I just thought it was a subtle and maybe a bit weak approach to the new sound post-Isn't Anything. Subdued drumming, minimal flair.

Wasn't Colm too ill to play on Loveless?

Ó Cíosóig recovered enough to play live on two of the albums' songs, "Only Shallow" and "Touched", the latter of which was composed and performed entirely by the drummer.
wikipedia citing the 33 1/3 book.

i realised that i quite love the sluggish drumming on the countrified version of loveless by japancakes. but of course the pedal steel is even more remarkable because it fits so well with the warped sound of loveless. maybe the best cover album ever.

Ok found the bit about Deb:
"Debbie has been in the band for years, but she stopped playing on the records in '88. She only played on one song in 1988. To tell the truth, she only played on one whole record in 1985. She hated playing in the studio. She liked playing bass but only if she could attack it. Well, maybe she's changing now, but that's the way she wanted to do it. She didn't have anything to do with making the records."

That interview was from the nineties after Loveless had come out. Still trying to find the bit about Colm, but found this on a forum:
"I do know they sampled and retriggered Colm's drum (he was out of time)."

Sorry, bit in brackets should be: (he didn't keep the best time).

At fucking last. From FAQ on the To Here Knows Web site:

Most of the drum sounds on Loveless are triggered and sequenced; Colm played either electronic or natural drums triggered to electronic sound into a computer sequencer. The drum pattern was then quantised (each trigger was put to the nearest beat) and replayed. Colm's drumming is characteristic but usually off-time. The drums on Loveless have Colm's characteristic playing, but they are exactly on the beat, redone by a computer. From an interview with Kevin Shields:
"Actually we started the album with live drums, but Colm got very ill. So we sampled his drums and his rolls. So even when a track is programmed, it has his feel."

In 1991? No wonder it took so long / was so expensive.

Nah, wouldn’t take very long at all for someone who knows what they’re doing. Samplers were pretty advanced by that point.

I remember seeing them live in '92 and Colm was watching an LED metronome for some songs. I think he was also triggering the samples.

According to Shields the sequencer was only used by Colm when he was taking too long between dongs (needed a breather?) to fill the gap. Apparently he was just activating the passage that came between what you want and soon on loveless.

Songs lol omg

(needed a breather?)

was wondrin' 'bout the dongs..

new cd on amazon as an "import" - £19.39

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00BHUJ2XI/ref=s9_newr_gw_d63_g15_ir04

£11.99 + £1.50 p&p

http://www.normanrecords.com/records/138932-my-bloody-valentine-m-b

Having a giggling attack about dongs now

<i>taking too long between dongs ... just activating the passage that came between what you want and soon<i>
that's what she said

Enough about Colm and his dongs. How about we talk about some of the old 12"s?