My Bloody Valentine went on tour and played a load of gigs, including here in Dublin. They also played a notionally secret warm-up gig a few days before the real one here. And I didn't go to any of them. My reasoning was two-fold. Firstly, the not-secret gig was in the Point (known to bootlickers as the 3Arena), Dublin's largest indoor venue, and not somewhere I generally like to see my kind of music, as it is just too big. The other reason was that when I saw MBV some years back at All Tomorrow's Parties I thought they were a bit dull: too static onstage and playing in a rather formulaic manner, the 'You Made Me Realise' holocaust now just coming across as a box-ticking exercise and not something even remotely transgressive or challenging. I still love them on record though, so I did feel a slight twinge of FOMO jealousy as people were heading off to the secret warm-up gig.
It is strange though how popular MBV have become in the years since they were originally active. They never played venues as large as they do now in their heyday. So who is going to see them? Have they picked up loads of fans from the young people in the thirty years or so since they first went on hiatus? Or have loads of people my age who never liked them back then now been converted to shoegaze distortion? And are MBV attendees concert-goers attending their one gig of the year, making this a nostalgia-fest akin to an ageing hipsters' version of those Oasis reunion gigs? Or are MBV attendees keeping up with the latest shoegaze developments to the extent that we can see a surge of interest in attending in February? We'll see.
If you're interested, there's a pretty good recording of the main Dublin gig on the Internet Archive.
images
Live image (Internet Archive)
m b v (Wikipedia)
On a separate note, I find myself thinking about the 2013 My Bloody Valentine album m b v.With the passage of time, is it seen as a core part of the oeuvre or has it been memory-holed as one those completely inessential albums bands sometimes feel obliged to release when they reform for some cash-in gigs? I struggle to remember much about it and it's not something that calls me to listen to it.
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