There was a time when shoegaze was not shoegaze but “noisy pop”.
When looking back at these 1990 – 1992 years, at the articles in the NME or Melody Maker, at the superb concerts we experienced starting with Ride’s wall of sound making us deaf for a few days, I measure how the word shoegaze is distorted and misused nowadays.
When we look at what “noisy pop” was, well, there was just a handful of bands creating it and deserving the shoegaze label.
First of all it all started with the beautiful The Jesus & Mary Chain “Psychocandy” in 1985, we owe them the guitar distortions of shoegaze, and were they not the first also to gaze at their shoes in the literal sense, thus creating the word shoegaze?
Then jumping in time My Bloody Valentine did revolutionise shoegaze again with “Isn’t anything” in 1988.
Another version more “noisy pop”, more melodic, less radical was Ride’s album “Nowhere” in 1990.
Strangely Ride in concert has perhaps been the most extreme in terms of wall of sound at the time, but still remaining so pop that Japan was welcoming them like if they were The Beatles, with overexcited fans waiting for them at the airport upon arrival!
Then a few other magnificent new bands created altogether a wave of different shoegaze sounds in 1991 & 1992, like Chapterhouse’s psychedelic shoegaze “Whirlpool”, Moose’s pure noisy pop “Sonny & Sam”, Slowdive’s darker and a bit gothic “Blue Day”, Lush’s girl power and a bit Cocteau Twins influenced “Spooky”, Catherine Wheel’s pop rock shoegaze “Ferment”.
I could add a few others like the beautiful “Everything’s alright forever” from The Boo Radleys, but shoegaze sound is definitively defined by these few cult bands from 1985 to 1992 indeed, that’s it.
The funny thing is that shoegaze started as a pejorative word and except My Bloody Valentine most of the bands were criticised and even destroyed by the press, starting with the NME and Melody Maker that were the music reference of the times.
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So when Slowdive came back twenty years later live at Primavera Festival Barcelona in front of tens of thousand persons liking and knowing their music what a revenge!
Perhaps the new generation is smarter, one of my daughters in London was telling me recently that when she asked “wow, you are playing Slowdive” her friend answered “well, everyone knows Slowdive”.
Perhaps the word shoegaze is misused or overused nowadays, but if this makes Slowdive live forever it’s ok!
