So, we’ve mused the spark, we’ve considered the slights. That song was “You Made Me Realise.” And so a genre was born. Evaporating into a silken heat haze to rematerialize again out of the effervescence, stronger and more entrancing each time. Looming to unholy crescendos, then, devastatingly, snatching them away. A reverbed synchromesh of vocals, bass, drums, and guitar. The whole set was epic, faultless, but one song stood out in particular: a warped, staggering guitar voyage that seemed to encompass the quintessence of psychedelia. Sure, I’d seen them before at shows we’d played together, but something had changed. MBV, however, did, and I went to see their show and offer solidarity at one of the local black holes, the strangely named Roadmenders Centre in Northampton.
Spacemen 3 had been asked to support the Pixies on their first big UK tour in the fall of 1988. But, for my coin, it was My Bloody Valentine that held the alpha DNA.
Spacemen 3 have sometimes been referred to as “godfathers of shoegaze,” and that may be true in some small part I may not be the best judge of that. So while we’re looking down, let’s discuss the roots. Creating sounds you could actually taste and smell.
Effects that could take the meekest guitar and make it roar like a doorman on steroids, or soar like jet planes in an aerobatics display. The long bangs and fuzz pedal fever of the time made any downward-looking aim nigh impossible to pinpoint, and whilst I'm not saying these bands did not have the hippest footwear, I think it was what was underneath them that was key: the pedals. So who put the sole in shoegaze? Were the shoegaze bands solely looking to their suede for inspiration? I think not. The funny thing is, like most of these genre tag inventions of the media, such as “punk” or “grunge,” the term “shoegaze” stuck-and apparently, it stuck hard. And when the shoegazer moniker didn’t seem to irritate enough, the same wags started referring to these bands as “the scene that celebrates itself,” based apparently on the fact that these bands dug each others' music. The thought that this music might cut through cultures with such broad swathes had never occurred to me before, but now I could see this genre might have long legs, in between that gaze and those shoes.ĭrifting back further, my memory of the British hack who first coined the term “shoegaze” was that he was being derogatory. The support band, to my complete amazement, was a shoegaze band-a Mexican shoegaze band. I couldn’t see it.īut things change even by 1993, I was redressing my views. Few of these bands paid even the slightest, fleeting lip service to commerciality. If you had told me in 1991 that, 25 years later, I would be prefacing a list on shoegaze, I would probably have told you it would never happen. Offering another perspective on what it all means is Pete Kember/Sonic Boom, whose early band Spacemen 3 wielded a great deal of influence on the records that follow. From there, our story of shoegaze expands outward, stretching beyond its initial explosion in the early ’90s and incorporating more instrumental contexts and approaches to the style along the way. It’s music for dreaming.įor our purposes, we chose as a starting point for shoegaze the years following the release of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s landmark Psychocandy, when the many bands influenced by their approach to guitar integrated the noise into new pop contexts. The extreme noise eliminates the possibility of socializing while the music is playing, leaving each member of the audience alone with their thoughts. And emotionally, shoegaze turns its focus inward. This music is, above all else, a place to explore the outer limits of guitar texture. It’s a particularly unusual genre in that its name describes neither a sound nor a connection to music history. Every music genre has two things in common: 1) No two people agree on its precise boundaries 2) Artists dislike being labeled as such.
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