A few years ago someone on Twitter shared an old image of Rachel Goswell, of Slowdive, in a huge wig with a machine gun slung over her shoulder and an ammo belt dangling from her neck. She responded with a laughing/crying emoji.
“The photographer that did it, I can’t remember his name, but he was at that point a big fashion photographer,” says Goswell as the cult indie band prepare to release their fifth album, Everything Is Alive, and play their first headline Irish date this November. “They were very excited to have him do the picture. I was, like, ‘Well, just do whatever.’ It’s a weird photo: I have a massive black wig on – and the gun, which is not great. What can I say? I was 22.”
The 1990s are remembered as rock music’s last golden age: the era of Britpop, trip hop and rap going mainstream. But these were also the peak years of the British music press, when scruffy rock hacks often displayed a weird, seemingly hostile attitude towards women singers, as suggested by Goswell’s appearance in that bizarre spread in Select. (The machine gun was a nod towards the Slowdive song of that name.)
Slowdive had committed the sin of growing up in the Thames Valley, just outside London – the epitome, the media decided, of middle-class Englishness
Slowdive were luminaries in the “shoegaze” scene: elegant, gauzy contemporaries of Ride, Chapterhouse and the Irish-British quartet My Bloody Valentine. Yet, as a woman in the genre, Goswell was made to feel different. Imagine Select asking Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine to don a wig and pose with heavy weaponry.
“I did nod along with it,” says Goswell. “If I was to do a photo shoot now, I’d be all out for the wigs but maybe not the gun. And not the combat gear.”
Shoegaze is a genre in which introversion and ear-splitting volume orbit one another suspiciously. Songs are often built of bulldozing guitars paired with weightless vocals, a style the music press habitually termed “ethereal”. In the case of My Bloody Valentine, that blend of ferocity and tenderness brought acclaim. To this day there are middle-aged music journalists in Dublin who will break out in a boyish blush at the mention of Shields.
Slowdive received a different response. They had committed the sin of growing up in the Thames Valley, just outside London – the epitome, the media decided, of middle-class Englishness. Their rewards were reviews of eye-watering viciousness. “A major f**king letdown,” Melody Maker said in its assessment of their 1991 debut, Just for a Day. The magazine was even more damning of the 1992 follow-up, Souvlaki. “I would rather drown choking in a bath full of porridge than ever listen to it again,” went one notice.
“Those music papers for me growing up were my bible. Growing up in a small village, I read them from cover to cover,” says Goswell with a sigh. “I devoured everything – checked out the bands they liked, ignored the bands they didn’t like. Within about a year of being in the industry I became very disenchanted with the music industry, having met a lot of the journalists. There were some people who were very nice and some idiots, basically. It was the idiots who gave us bad reviews.”
Slowdive’s music remains intense and brooding, but Goswell and the group’s producer, guitarist and songwriter, Neil Halstead, appear fully aware they are having the last laugh. The influence of the music press has drained away to almost nothing. Slowdive have meanwhile staged a glorious return, first with a darkly lovely self-titled album in 2017 and now with the fuzzily emotive Everything Is Alive.
“When we put the band back together, in 2014, it was sort of, like, well, I don’t know what this is going to be like,” says Halstead. Re-forming hadn’t even been on the cards, he says, until a Spanish festival got in touch out of the blue.
“We got offered Primavera to come and play. It was weird: we hadn’t seen each other for a while. A couple of weeks before we got this offer I’d done a solo show in London and got Rachel to come and sing some stuff. The rest of the guys were at the gig. We had a few beers and were chatting. Our mate Matt, who runs Sonic Cathedral records, was saying, ‘You’re all here: you should do something.’”
When they stepped on stage at Primavera, in Barcelona, it dawned on them that a Slowdive reunion would be more than nostalgia. If plenty of crumbling Gen Xers were in the crowd, there was a sea of young fans up front. They had been embraced by a generation too young to have heard of Melody Maker, much less care what it thought of Souvlaki. In their absence, Slowdive had become bigger than they ever were in the 1990s.
“I don’t think we had any idea. It was such a surprise to see there were all these kids into the band,” Halstead says. “I don’t think we realised that. Initially we thought, Oh, it will be a few old shoegazers. In the time we’d been away the internet had spread the word a bit. Or at least allowed people to discover these records.”
There are two kinds of band reunions. The ones where musicians are in it, manically and unapologetically, for the dosh. And those where the guiding motivation is a feeling of unfinished business. Slowdive are in the second category. They didn’t just want to play the old songs. If they were going to return, it had to be as a living, breathing entity. “We never wanted to be a heritage act,” says Halstead. “It was important for us to do a new record.”
Their new album arrives amid an orgy of nostalgia for 1990s music. Or at least for a certain idea of 1990s music. We are living through the second summer of Britpop, with Blur touring to acclaim, Pulp selling out a streak of shows and Liam and Noel Gallagher putting out new records. What has been written out of history is the diversity and richness of 1990s music. We think it’s just Damon Albarn going “Oi”.
“The 1990s was a great time for early techno, for drum and bass. Warp were putting out some great records,” says Halstead. “Unfortunately, Britpop was a big brush of slightly bland music. A lot of it was very good. But you lost the nuance with a lot of that stuff.”
“That whole Britpop scene was huge at the time. Oasis were a massive band,” says Goswell. “I didn’t like any of that music. I did have a soft spot for Blur – I really like their new album. The first North American tour we did, way back in 1990-1991, was with Blur. We were on the same label in North America. But as far as the Britpop revival, it’s really eye-rolling. It’s, like, really? Do we need it again? There’s not many bands from that era that have stood the test of time with their records. A lot of it was pretty weak. That whole lad-culture thing was not on my radar. I’ll just ignore it again like I did the first time.”
The two bands we all obsessed over were The Cure and My Bloody Valentine
It’s hard to talk about Slowdive and shoegaze without circling back to My Bloody Valentine, a sort of Beatles to Slowdive’s Rolling Stones. The two outfits were label-mates, and Halstead says Kevin Shields hugely influenced his songwriting. He still sounds slightly in awe of the Dubliner.
“When we were kids we were huge, huge My Bloody Valentine fans,” says Halstead. “We all have slightly different musical tastes. The two bands we all obsessed over were The Cure and My Bloody Valentine ... When we met [the Creation supremo] Alan McGee and were signing to Creation it was, like, ‘Oh my God.’ We met them – it was very awkward. We were too awestruck to be able to talk to them. I still feel that way about the Valentines. It’s hard not to revert to my teenage self.”
Slowdive were recording their debut, Just for a Day, while My Bloody Valentine were deep in the making of their epic, Loveless. The album was iconic and notorious long before it saw the light of day. On the one hand, everyone in the MBV orbit knew that the obsessive Shields, who grew up in New York and later Cabinteely, was creating a masterpiece. On the other, the pace at which he was working was glacial – and the studio costs he racked up threatened to bankrupt Creation.
“Every so often we’d see McGee and he’d be tearing his hair out with the amount of money they were spending and how little progress appeared to be happening,” says Halstead. “You’d go into studios in London and people would talk in hushed tones about how Kevin had been in recording a snare drum for three days. Loveless was a legend before it even came out. Being part of that in a small way was really gratifying for us – to be on the same label.”
Their memories of Creation itself are less warm. When McGee signed them, Creation was an indie powerhouse, home to My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream and The Jesus and Mary Chain. Then Creation discovered Oasis, Britpop was born, and McGee had a drug-induced breakdown.
There was pressure within Creation for Slowdive to “go pop”. Instead they released the aggressively avant-garde Pygmalion in 1995 and parted from the label on not-very-friendly terms. Those bridges have never been mended. Goswell recalls struggling to get through Danny O’Connor’s 2010 documentary about the rise and fall of Creation. It made her angry.
“McGee was in rehab for a lot of it. I started watching that film they made about Creation. I had to turn it off halfway through. I was just getting irritated thinking back to being on that label at that time. Even when we delivered Souvlaki there were maybe two or three people there who actually liked it. Whenever we visited there we knew nobody ever really cared. As a 22-, 23-year-old whose entire life was about music, that was quite soul-destroying. I couldn’t finish watching that film. I was, like, ‘This is pissing me off.’”
We tried to FaceTime my mother. She didn’t have any understanding. They called me and my dad in the day before she passed away. She was unconscious anyway. I said my goodbyes. She died the next day
Everything Is Alive came together during the pandemic when the individual members of Slowdive were dealing with their own challenges. Two of the band lost family members, including Goswell. “My mother was in a care home around the corner from where I lived. I bought a house with my parents about the year before Covid to help look after her, because she had Lewy body dementia,” she says.
“She was poorly for some time before she passed. They actually closed the doors at the care home two weeks before the official lockdown happened. I didn’t get to see her. We tried to FaceTime her; she didn’t have any understanding. It was very sad. They called me and my dad in the day before she passed away. She was unconscious anyway. I said my goodbyes. She died the next day.”
Against that stark background you might expect Everything Is Alive to be a downer. It’s undoubtedly heavy in places, including on the throbbingly heartbreaking single The Slab. But the overall sense is of optimism. Life has thrown its worse at Slowdive. But they’re still here – still kicking up a quiet but powerful storm on tracks such as the gliding Kisses (everything starts anew/ Tell mе what you need, what’s right).
“There’s always that slight anxiety whenever you release a record: how is it going to be received? Inevitably some people don’t like it,” says Goswell. “Hopefully the majority will. On a personal level, I feel in my prime as a human being. If you have all that success in your 20s, achieve everything you want to, where do you go? A lot of people end up getting quite lost. Fifty-odd years of growth – a lot happens. I feel more comfortable now with everything. We’re very grateful we’re still making music and enjoying it.”
Everything Is Alive is released on Dead Oceans on September 1st. Slowdive are due to play the National Stadium, Dublin 8, on November 6th
