7. My Bloody ValentineYou Made Me Realise
I was buying a lot of records now, a lot of singles… by The Wedding Present, The Soup Dragons, The Brilliant Corners, The Vaselines, Primal Scream, The Mighty Lemon Drops, Biff Bang Pow!, The Primitives, The Weather Prophets – all that stuff. I liked all of it, especially if it had a bit of feedback on. But then it started going a bit heavier, like Loop and Spacemen 3. I can remember going to see the Lemon Drops in Liverpool and third on the bill were The House Of Love. It was before ‘Christine’ when they still had a girl in the band and I’d never heard anything like that. Guitars sounded like post-apocalyptic sirens, filling the room. They didn’t sound like guitars. And I liked My Bloody Valentine – they were alright, y’know. I liked Ecstasy when that came out. There’s a track on that called ‘(Please) Lose Yourself in Me’ – it’s got this really heavy bass on it and I remember thinking, "Ooh yeah, that’s going somewhere else that is."
But I don’t think any of us expected ‘You Made Me Realise’. I got it home and I played it and I had to play it again, check the speed… I didn’t really know what I was hearing. I’d heard Daydream Nation and loved it, and you could see they were going for kind of like, ‘Silver Rocket’, where there’s that big noise bit in the middle. But the melody sounded like The Byrds, and it was just so HEAVY. The bass was so HEAVY. That’s what the Mary Chain were missing, any kind of bass presence. And any kind of rock action, really. My Bloody Valentine were much more of a rock band. I’d just got into Dinosaur Jr then as well and they were doing the same thing. It was rock, but it wasn’t really… I didn’t like rock music. I’m a sucker for melody, that’s just the way I am. We were in the band then and we’d done a couple of gigs, but we didn’t really have any style, we’d just write songs and play them really simply, until we heard ‘You Made Me Realise’ and You’re Living All Over Me [by Dinosaur Jr.] and then it switched overnight and I wrote our first album in a couple of weeks. I was so inspired by this stuff.
