The Thames Valley Scene That Named Itself Last

Shoegaze had been happening for two years before anyone called it that. The name came in 1991, when music executive Andy Ross used the word "shoegazing" to describe Moose, and the British press picked it up immediately as a way to mock bands for standing still onstage and staring at their pedalboards. The press had a name; what they didn't have was a theory. The actual conditions that made the scene possible had been assembling quietly since 1983, in a post-industrial Scottish new town, a Dublin rehearsal room, a Thames Valley art college, and the offices of one small London label that seemed to attract damaged, beautiful guitar noise the way a magnet attracts iron filings.

The structural precondition for everything was Alan McGee's Creation Records. The Jesus and Mary Chain's demo tape was passed to Bobby Gillespie, who loved it and connected them with McGee. After seeing them live, McGee signed them and they released their first single, "Upside Down," in 1984. The Jesus and Mary Chain were formed by brothers Jim and William Reid in East Kilbride, Scotland. Psychocandy was released on 18 November 1985 and its combination of guitar feedback and noise with traditional pop melody proved influential on the forthcoming shoegaze genre. The Reid brothers were doing something that seemed almost contradictory: the album fused the guitar noise of the Stooges and the Velvet Underground with the pop songwriting and melodies of the Beach Boys and Phil Spector. That tension, beauty wearing a mask of noise, is the genetic code of everything that followed. Meanwhile, My Bloody Valentine signed to Creation Records in 1988, released their breakthrough third EP, You Made Me Realise, which showcased frontman Kevin Shields' newfound approach to guitar playing, known as "glide guitar." Their debut album Isn't Anything, recorded in rural Wales, peaked at number 1 on the UK Indie Chart and influenced a number of "shoegazing" bands who, according to AllMusic, "worked off the template My Bloody Valentine established with the album." Creation now had two blueprints on its roster, and a third of the scene had effectively been drawn up before the Thames Valley bands had formed.

The geography matters more than it might seem. One common thread the British music press used to group shoegaze bands together was that many of them came from the Thames Valley, a region including Oxford, home to Ride and Swervedriver, and Reading, home to Slowdive and Chapterhouse. These groups, along with Lush and Moose, both formed in London, constituted the core acts of the original shoegaze scene. These weren't cities with famous music scenes. They were provincial towns with art colleges, record shops, and just enough boredom to push young people toward noise. Ride formed in Oxford in the summer of 1988. Guitarists and vocalists Mark Gardener and Andy Bell met as students at art school, and they recruited bassist Steve Queralt through their local record shop. The demo they made in Queralt's bedroom and hallway circulated through informal channels until it reached Jim Reid of The Jesus and Mary Chain. Jim Reid heard a copy of the demo that was in the possession of the DJ Gary Crowley, and this led to interest from Alan McGee. After the band supported The Soup Dragons in 1989, McGee signed them to Creation Records. Ride's first three EPs, released in 1990 under the titles Ride, Play, and Fall, achieved a top-75 UK chart placing that was a first for Creation Records. The scene was building its own infrastructure from inside out, band by band, demo tape by demo tape, one accidental recommendation at a time.

Lush had a different origin but the same connective tissue. In 1987, vocalists and guitarists Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson, along with bassist Steve Rippon and drummer Chris Acland, formed the Baby Machines, merging the insurgent sound of garage rock with the contemplativeness of Siouxsie and the Banshees and Cocteau Twins. After a name change and the release of a critically acclaimed EP, Scar, in 1989, Lush found themselves celebrated as early pioneers of the shoegaze scene. Lush issued the Mad Love EP, produced by Cocteau Twins' Robin Guthrie, whose mentorship refined the band's once-chaotic sound into a polished, "beautiful, primitive" record, according to a Melody Maker review. Guthrie's fingerprints are all over the early scene: he was the sonic bridge between the 4AD dream-pop lineage and the noisier Thames Valley bands, lending the whole thing a kind of inherited legitimacy. Chapterhouse, meanwhile, were formed in Reading in 1987 by teenagers Andrew Sherriff, Jon Curtis, Stephen Patman, Simon Rowe, and Ashley Bates, inspired by a mutual love of The Jesus and Mary Chain and Cocteau Twins. By the time the notion of shoegazing as a distinct scene started to solidify in 1990, several of the bands who would become the genre's leading lights had released their first records: Ride's eponymous EP in January, Swervedriver's Son of Mustang Ford in July, Chapterhouse's Freefall in September, and Slowdive's Slowdive EP in November. The whole thing cohered within a single calendar year, which is either a remarkable coincidence or evidence that the conditions had been ready for a while and were simply waiting for someone to step into them.

What sealed the scene as a scene, rather than a loose collection of like-minded bands, was the culture of mutual support. The British press dubbed it "the scene that celebrates itself," because the bands were highly supportive of each other and commonly attended each other's shows or joined each other onstage. This interconnected network fostered collaboration through shared gigs at venues like London's ULU and Oxford's Jericho Tavern, where acts such as Ride, Slowdive, and Lush frequently performed together. The press meant it as a slight, implying insularity, but the bands were doing something the press couldn't quite see: they were building a world. By the end of 1990, John Peel had included three Ride songs on his year-end Festive Fifty list, while My Bloody Valentine's Glider placed at number 5 in Melody Maker's year-end singles poll, Ride's Fall at number 7, and Lush's Mad Love at number 19. That's three different bands from the same incubating scene landing in the same end-of-year accounting, before a single one of them had released a full album. Then Loveless arrived in 1991, and Brian Eno described MBV's closing track "Soon" as "the vaguest music ever to have been a hit." The press had a name for the scene by then. The scene, characteristically, didn't seem to care what they called it.

The fall came fast, as it tends to when the press builds something up specifically to knock it down. In 1992, the year of Lush's debut album and Ride's Going Blank Again, Melody Maker ran a cover feature asking "Whatever Happened to Shoegazing?" while Slowdive's second album Souvlaki, released in May 1993, was slated in the British press. When Slowdive released Pygmalion in 1995, Creation Records' Alan McGee dropped the band one week after its release. The same label that had quietly assembled the conditions for the scene, by signing The Jesus and Mary Chain, by putting out Ride's first EPs, by giving My Bloody Valentine the runway to make Loveless, ultimately couldn't sustain what it had built. But the scene had already done its work. The bands had spent three years making music that treated distortion as a form of tenderness, and that particular idea turned out to be more durable than any of the press cycles around it.