I can’t believe I bought these tickets seven months ago.  So much has happened in that time: I’ve moved house, I’ve acquired a cat, the cat has gone feral, the cat has trashed the house…I’m pretty sure that when I bought them, Fidel Castro was still running Cuba, and Gordon Brown was still running Britain – that is how long ago it was.  Still, 7 months is nothing in the My Bloody Valentine lifecycle, a band that hasn’t played live in 16 years until this week.

With Spectrum in support it was almost, as ex-Spacemen 3 member Sonic Boom put it, “a class of ’88 reunion”.  He pumped us up with some pretty early-Kraftwerk keyboard pulses, before thoroughly deflating us with tedious runs through the likes of the funereally paced “Transparent Radiation”.  Thankfully, it picked up again at the end with their Mudhoney cover and the Spacemen 3 classic “Suicide”, during which he indulged in some Mark E Smith-like amp-fiddling.

It is surprising that, given that I hold their work in such esteem, I’ve never really been able to put names to many My Bloody Valentine songs.  Even the Loveless ones; I find it hard to think of them as anything other than “bits of Loveless”, all spilling into each other atop waves of distortion.    So the fact that tonight everything they play is clearly separated, primarily so that Shields and Bilinda Butcher can change guitars after every single one, is something that I find jarring.  Even applauding in those gaps between songs felt odd, as if somehow MBV were supposed to sit outside of rock group orthodoxies, even when they are playing on a huge stage with a gap between the guitarists so huge that it couldn’t possibly be traversed without a two-zone travelcard.

The second thing that surprised me was this: why is it that such a renowned perfectionist as Shields, who famously nearly bankrupted his record label trying to get Loveless to match the sound he had in his head, would insist on the band playing so loudly that you had to wear earplugs (handed out free!), thus muffling and distorting the sound?  The faster tracks all came out as sludgy, bass heavy rumbles, with any nuance in the guitars obliterated by the bottom-end.  It is only when they slowed the pace with like likes of “To Here Knows When” that the full majesty of their soundscapes emerged, it almost felt like the dappled lights on the screen behind were being produced by Shields’ instrument.  I’m sure he could do that, you know.

Another surprising and disappointing orthodoxy was that the thuddery of faster songs like “Feed Me With Your Kiss” brought out the thuggery in a certain element the crowd who thought it was still reasonable gig behaviour to jump into people and through throw their elbows around like it was in fact still 1988, and we were at a Carter USM concert or something.  And that anyone who complained about having a pint thrown over them or having had someone stamp on their Achilles tendon was a “wanker”.  By the end, the atmosphere down the front was getting hideous, and I found I couldn’t enjoy the music as I was having to concentrate on self-defence, so had to retreat a few rows back.

The night ended with the now traditional white noise sandwiched into a song that is “You Made Me Realise”.  When I say sandwich, imagine two pieces of bread with a double-decker bus in the middle, as after no more than a minute of song came twenty plus minutes of unrelenting guitar scrubbery, at unforgiving volume.  The over-prominence of the bass probably prevented this from ranking as a truly great noise piece, but it was a welcome (and unorthodox) contrast to what had gone before.  Looking around, people seemed to be loving and hating it in equal measure, although it felt like reactions to the gig as whole a were for the most part positive.  Am I the only one who thought that as great as it was to see them back playing together (and with rehearsed aplomb) after such an extended absence, that they did their reputation more harm than good here? 

Here, listen to a recording of “Soon” from their ICA rehearsal last Friday.  I particularly like this, as if you listen closely to the start, you can hear someone (and my money is on it being that Celtic charmer Roo*) hitting on Colm O’Ciosoig’s girlfriend. 

*just kidding, Roo.