The Untold Story of My Bloody Valentine

After recording four songs for the soundtrack to Lost in Translation, Shields reconvened the group. Their first step was revisiting the music of their years as a live act. The year 2003 saw two MBV box sets: the dodgy three-disc 1984-1987 and the mammoth 1987-1992, which contained three hours of live material, a pile of outtakes and five newly recorded versions of unreleased songs from the Loveless era. Sadly, the mastering didn’t go as planned. A device Shields had invented to give his old guitar tracks a three-dimensional effect caused an electromagnetic pulse, shorted out the entire studio and briefly blacked out London. In the process, Shields discovered to his horror that he’d accidentally fried all the tapes for Neil Young’s decades-in-the-making, eight-disc Archives, Vol. 1 retrospective, which was being mastered down the hall.

After an unfortunate chinchilla-related incident, Shields and Butcher found themselves broke again. Only Shields’ iron will—and a fatefully timed death in the art world—got the band through the difficult recording of their next disc, Shudder. Shields was reduced to picking up whatever commissions he could find, including playing “effects guitar” on tour with Justin Guarini and providing the final mixdown for a series of ringtones featuring the Aflac duck. Then, just as the band was about to start hawking its equipment to pay for studio time, an anonymous art collector’s will bequeathed a million pounds to The KLF’s Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, on the condition that they burn it as a reprise of their famous 1994 art project. When Drummond and Cauty refused, the will earmarked the bequest as “the next best thing”: a recording budget for My Bloody Valentine.

That brush with disaster brought MBV closer together than ever; since then, they’ve been single-mindedly dedicated to cranking out a torrent of albums. (Sometimes at the cost of other work: Dr. Dre recently explained that his Detox album still hasn’t appeared because he’s been trying to get Butcher to deliver a promised backing-vocal session since 2004.) But technology had one more cruel surprise in store.

In response to Radiohead’s In Rainbows initiative, Shields decided to make a genuinely radical move: My Bloody Valentine, he declared, would be the first major band to leave physical releases behind. All of their CDs and LPs were withdrawn from record stores, henceforth to be available solely in digital form; the hundreds of thousands of fans who returned their old discs to the band for destruction were rewarded with high-bit-rate copies and bonus material.

And then, on Christmas Day, the “Love” virus hit: a computer worm as ingenious as My Bloody Valentine’s early records, attributed to a disgruntled member of the corps of engineers who’d worked on Loveless. Within hours, every sound file attributed to post-1991 MBV on every Internet-capable computer was erased, and the few physical copies remaining from their latter-day catalog instantly became impossible-to-find collector’s items.

The band has once again been knocked off its feet, and is now returning to live performances out of necessity, concerts being the only way for its music to be heard now that “Love” erases everything they try to record. Shields remains hopeful that he’ll find a way to overcome his digital troubles, but it’s possible that My Bloody Valentine’s recording drought may have only just begun.

FACT
Since 1991’s Loveless, My Bloody Valentine has released only two tracks, both of which appeared on compilations.