Slowdive
Just For A Day (sleeve notes)
December 1990: Neil Halstead, then a mere two months into his twentieth
year on the planet, is talking about the legacy of Slowdive, a group
who at that point had released just one single. “The best thing
for Slowdive would be, in 10 or 20 years time, loads of reviewers saying,
'Rock' n' roll would never be what it is without Slowdive',” he
decides, modestly. “That's my ambition."
Fifteen years later and while the world isn’t exactly overrun
with Slowdive clones, echoes of their celestial majesty can be traced
throughout the more innovative fringes of rock and electronica. From
2002’s laptop-driven Morr Music compilation, which featured the
likes of Mum, Ulrich Schauss and Lali Puna covering their favourite
Slowdive moments, onto post rock outfits such as The Emerald Down and
Readymade (and even, arguably, the epiphanies of Sigur Ros), Halstead
and company’s influence has been a quietly benevolent one - encouraging
artists towards ambition and poetry rather than the casual thrash of
rock’n’roll, offering proof that gentle drama can be just
as hypnotic as raging noise.
No mean feat for a group whose core members - singer/guitarist/songwriter
Neil Halstead and singer/guitarist Rachel Goswell - met when they were
both six years old and first starting making music at a Sunday youth
club in Reading in an indie pop band called The Pumpkin Fairies. Slowdive
themselves formed in October 1989. Original drummer Adrian Sell, who’d
played with The Pumpkin Fairies, brought in his friend Nick Chaplin
on bass, while Christian Savill was the only person to respond to a
music press advert for a female guitarist. Savill had seen the fledging
Slowdive play live a few times while hawking his My Bloody Valentine
fanzine and was so enamoured that he offered to wear a dress if needs
be. The band’s response? “We said, ‘Fuck it. Come
on in!’” remembers Halstead.
After that things started happening very quickly. Influenced by The
Jesus And Mary Chain, The House Of Love and My Bloody Valentine, the
five piece immediately recorded a demo. A few months later, the band
supported proto Britpop trio 5:30 and after the show Savill was approached
by Steve Walters, the head of A&R at EMI Music, who asked for a
tape. He passed the demo onto Alan McGee and within a couple of weeks
the band were signed to Creation (they’d be jokingly referred
to years afterwards as the “My Bloody Valentine Alan McGee could
afford”). At which point Sell decided that things were happening
just a little too quickly and left to go to university. His eventual
replacement was Simon Scott, who’d already toured with Ride as
the drummer of The Charlottes.
Slowdive’s self-titled debut EP, which came out on Bonfire night
(November 5th) 1990, kickstarted an avalanche of wildly poetic praise
for the group. “In a word, Slowdive's sound is lovely,”
sighed Simon Williiams in the NME. “In a heart-palpitating paragraph,
Slowdive have banished the barriers restricting creativity. They've
sloped out of Reading to peddle an otherworldly noise which thrives
on trembling shapes and tumbling dimensions, where atmosphere-drenched
dramatics coerce with shimmering distortion to induce sublime, elegant
swirls. When they really relax, Slowdive can make Cocteau Twins resemble
Mudhoney.”
Over at Melody Maker, one writer had dismissed Slowdive as “Cocteau
Twins’ demos” (rather presciently perhaps, as the Slowdive
EP was in fact the band’s original demo, which they’d returned
to after feeling dissatisfied with studio rerecordings of the songs).
But as the paper’s Paul Lester noted: “I take this to be
a compliment: the music on ‘Slowdive’ has a gorgeous, ‘unfinished’
quality that makes you go back to it again and again. There are no hooks,
just slips and slides, and the kind of melodic shifts that cause heart
pangs in the listener.”
All three of Slowdive’s early EPs (“Slowdive”; “Morningrise”,
which came out in February 1991; and "Holding Our Breath",
which was released in June 1991) were awarded Single Of The Week in
Melody Maker. Just one snared the same accolade in NME, but only after
a writer felt that the previous week’s review had been unfair.
Both papers, meanwhile, were desperately trying to impose meaning on
Slowdive’s music. MM decided, quite rightly, that they were “closer
to leftfield film soundtracks than Lush or The Boo Radleys”, while
NME had a more elaborate explanation. Slowdive, posited Simon Williams,
“potentially represent the post-rave comedown, the withdrawal
symptoms after the E-guzzling, floor-shuddering, farmyard-rutting fandango
which, like virtually everything else in the history of entertainment,
was corrupted by its own corruptive instincts.”
All of this before the term shoegazing - coined by former Sounds journalist
and Food records supremo Andy Ross - had even been mentioned. What intrigued
and confused the critics about Slowdive, it seemed, was their apparent
disinterest in the traditional musical forms of the day. They rejected
rock and punk in much the same way the punks had rejected everything
that came before them, a tough concept for the NME in particular to
come to terms with. “I've listened to a lot of classical music,
and think that's been the biggest influence on me,” said Halstead
at the time. “Most rock music is really bland - just a reaction
to a beat. It's the kind of thing that you don't really listen to when
it comes on. You just sort of move to it when you're drunk. I wanted
to create music that you can really listen to and be moved by".
Create, they did. With perhaps a little more desperation than their
fans might have guessed. Halstead originally told McGee that Slowdive
had an entire album’s worth of material ready to go, but he’d
been bluffing. As a result, songs were written on the hoof in the studio,
with Goswell free-associating words and the entire group jamming and
experimenting with sounds. Often they got lost in a stoned haze to ease
the creative process along a little. And, thanks to confidence, talent,
and a clearly attentive muse, it all worked beautifully. “The
first Slowdive record,” relates Halstead, “we went into
a studio for six weeks and had no songs at the start and at the end
we had a album.”
Lyrically, Slowdive were helped by the inherently abstract nature of
the music they were creating. Although Halstead told interviewers that
his lyrics were “tales of personal experience purposely abstracted
to the point of incomprehensibility”, sometimes they were just
random words which popped into his head. “Some of it was ad-libbed
at the time,” admits Goswell. “Some of it was just nonsensical.
Like 'Celia's Dream' was about a rabbit. It was about a film we watched
about a rabbit.”
It all made sense at the time, obviously. Or if it didn’t, it
didn’t really matter. Cast iron meaning was a rockist concern
after all, like a distinct chorus, verse or middle eight. Possibly Slowdive’s
sole concession to tradition was admitting that, on one level, what
they played could be seen as drug music - and therefore didn’t
have to have a meaning as long as the feeling was right. “Slowdive
music is quite suitable for drugtaking,” Halstead told St Etienne’s
Bob Stanley, then a Melody Maker journalist. “The records are
laid-back. But it's a drug in itself. I think it has hypnotic qualities.”
Years later, Goswell was more candid. “Certain drugs can be very
creative and certain drugs can be very damaging,” she told Nick
Hyman. “Myself and Neil dabbled in most things. Experimented I
would say but not to the extent to where it was damaging. The staple
really has been smoking dope and that’s it.”
Whatever the influences and motivations, “Just For A Day”
(named after a line in “Celia’s Dream” - “She
told me she loved me/Love, just for a day”), is a deeply ornate
record. Far from being vague and unfocussed, the album runs on a subtle
yet distinct sense of drama, progressing from the brooding loss of “Spanish
Air” to the pristine last waltz of “Ballad Of Sister Sue”
and drifting to what appears to be a landing of sorts with the luxurious
sweep of “Primal” - a song which becomes darker and darker
with every cello sweep and distant vocal cry from Goswell.
It is, declared the NME, a record you could lose yourself within. “Recorded
through a few layers of gauze and, I should imagine, a morning mist,
'Just For A Day' is no record to listen to if you want to get anything
done,” declared Andrew Collins. “It's an ordinary, nondescript
Thursday morning. Bus stop. Cashpoint. Tube. Work. Except you've got
Slowdive on your earphones. and suddenly you're Patrick Swayze in ‘Ghost’,
moving amongst the oblivious mortals, unnoticed, separate, parallel,
there but not all there. With a cornflower blue aura. Just count how
many trains you miss. They thunder into the station, and they thunder
out again, while you melt through the slats of a bench. Only Slowdive
can do this.”
But even then, the tide was beginning to turn against Slowdive and the
shoegazing movement as a whole. With grunge mere weeks away from devastating
the British charts, the music press was already moving on. Paul Lester
in Melody Maker decided the album was a “major fucking letdown”,
and that the band had been ruined by “too much attention, too
soon”. Tellingly, it would be two years before the band returned
with their masterpiece.
Listening today, free from the constraints of fashion, “Just For
A Day” is a bold, mesmeric album. Not quite the triumph that was
to follow with “Souvlaki”, but hardly a letdown either.
It’s the sound of a young band feeling their way through a new
form and style, the sound of a personal exploration in both music and
emotion. Or as a certain Icelandic band might have put it, it’s
a good start.
December 1990: Christian Savill, bright-eyed with ambition, is looking
ahead. “'We wanna be timeless. We're still really young, and we're
going to get better. We haven't got a masterplan, but soon people are
going to start comparing other bands to Slowdive." Time to lose
yourself all over again.
.
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Ian Watson
Music,
film, comedy and travel journalist based in London
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