Finally...

So six months (or even longer) after the announcement that My Bloody Valentine have returned and will be playing live, Goodnight London will be attending the Roundhouse on the Sunday. A full fifteen years ago (or whatever it is) after playing live, it should be interesting to see exactly how those studio creations are replicated in a live setting. Indeed, having never seen them live back in their heyday, it's almost impossible for me to imagine almost anything from Loveless played live (particularly To Here Knows When, with it's aural Universe of guitar haze and submerged, barely discernible drum loop). Given that there probably wasn't a huge amount of people who saw them live directly post the release of Loveless, the album has become almost a museum piece, immutable and non-changing in people's minds, so much a product of the studio that the thought of it actually being played live is still difficult to comprehend in some ways.
Both Isn't Anything and subsequently Loveless are so of their time - pre-Internet, pre-Britpop indie, pre-grunge even, when indie really was indie (despite the cross-over appeal of The Stone Roses) - that the prospect of MBV in 2008 is something of an anachronism. It can't even be compared to another performance that Goodnight London recently witnessed at the Roundhouse which harked back to a similar era, Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation played in it's chronological order, because of that band's constant output and activity. In contrast, MBV's disappearance from view has led to a cult mystique that's exacerbated in this comeback by the lack of any new pictures of the band (the one in the flyer above is from 1988 at least).
Just as with that concert, though, this MBV show will doubtless be a bizarre nostalgia trip for much of the audience (including me).
It'll also feature in the Metro and some other papers, no doubt - itself a strange thought. MBV have always represented a kind of outsider music that combined with their two guy-two girls androgynous appeal, along with the deliberate blurring of Kevin Shields and Belinda Butcher's voices on their records, so that often you didn't know which is which. MBV's image is, in it's own way, another factor that remains so rooted in that period, first with the shoegazing fringes and then with the effeminate posing of Suede. They never were the kind of band that featured in anything other than the indie publications despite their huge cult following. But then the same could be said about Spiritualized. How times move on...