Kevin Shields Hopes You Use His New Fender Pedal The Wrong Way
Portrait by Tessa Angus
What can be said about Kevin Shields that hasn’t already been said about the legendary musician in his 30+ year long career?
How can one say something new about a musician so well and passionately admired? There isn’t much that this writer could contribute to the massive pool of third-hand cultural commentary that has accumulated in enthusiastic praise of Kevin Shields and his band, My Bloody Valentine, and regards them as the single most important Shoegaze band, if not the very founders of the genre of music, which, it is worth noting, is arguably even more relevant in today's music scene than it was back in 1991, when My Bloody Valentine’s classic debut album, Loveless, was released.
That in mind, we will spare you an extended and glorified biography. We will also spare you the inclusion of any excerpts from the diary I kept when I was 17-years-old, much of which is scored and footnoted by Loveless, but we did want you to know that it exists because it drives home the point of exactly how close Kevin, that band, and that sound is commonly held.
Kevin Shields is working in collaboration with our favourite musical manufacturer, Fender, to create a unique and limited-edition (only 700 produced and all signed by the My Bloody Valentine front man himself, so very limited, indeed) blender pedal. Launching on Tuesday, June 13, the Limited Edition Kevin Shields Blender Pedal celebrates Shields’ seminal guitar tone and penchant for effects. This pedal represents the revival of a classic Fender fuzz circuit from the 1970s, which has been reimagined through a collaborative four-year development process with Kevin Shields. It is a pedal that, through this interview, we have discovered is meant, if not asking, to be used wrongly, and we are very excited to have been able to ask Mr. Shields all about it.
I’m really interested in your legacy and how you view your impact on music today, so in very general terms, how do you see your legacy and view your impact on music today?
I don’t know, I really don’t. Um… it’s weird.
Would you say that you have had an impact?
I mean, I would say that every band has an impact. Personally, I see this continuum all the time throughout music of bands impacting each other. To my surprise, a lot of bands that I remember from the ‘80s, at the time, I really didn’t like them. That kind of music faded out as things go, and then twenty five years later, people are playing that kind of music and these kids are playing it. I hated it then and I don’t really like it now, but what’s really interesting is that anything that has some kind of life, certainly with music, it’s bigger than our opinions. You know what I mean? These things that I thought were horrible and died out just comes back in a different context, and the things that I hated about it are still there, but it turns out that my opinion doesn’t mean anything.
“ I was reading the instructions and was like, ‘I get this, that is correct, but I don’t use it like that.’ ”
Do you think that the sort of music that you make could have lived and thrived at any time? What role do you think context plays in the success of art?
What’s kind of weird is that a lot of what we did, as far as technology, we could have recorded in the ‘60s. It would have been interesting to see how people would have perceived it. For us, the main difference between when people heard us in the first ten-year period compared to now, it’s taken that long for our music to be kind of assimilated. For example, we used to use a lot of pitch bending. Back in those days, nobody was doing that at all. Electronic music caught on a few years later, but it wasn’t really a thing. Now, say in the last ten years, there’s so much popular electronic that is all over the place, pitch wise. As warped as you can imagine. When people were hearing our music back then, it was very unusual to them, whereas now, they’re used to that sort of sound.
I won’t try to assign you credit for any assimilation, but that’s why I’m asking you about your legacy. It’s also something that new bands strive to be, as challenging as you were. When you hear a contemporary band that draws from you, how do you deal with that?
Sometimes I hear stuff and I kind of recognize certain things - crazy melodic stuff that have sort of seeped into the ether and now are just there. It was our way of singing or doing things, and I hear it in other artists and can sort of recognize where that comes from, but often, the artist wouldn’t necessarily be thinking of us, those sounds are just sort of out there. I don’t know. We would get a hard time for the way we sang - singing softly and quietly - but now, from Hip-Hop to Billie Eilish, singing that way isn’t weird. The people who are doing things that remind of me us, they’re not doing it because of us, they’re doing it because music just evolved that way anyway. I think that that evolution happens whether we are here or not. If you took the Beatles out of history like that one movie, music would still kind of find its way.
You don’t seem very precious about your legacy or influence. You seem very welcome for others to borrow or use pieces of your style.
I do have an opinion about all of those things, though. The shoegaze thing, the effects pedals. There’s this philosopher’s saying that goes something like, if someone’s walking down a path and they see a rose, they see much less than if they had nothing in their head and had just absorbed that information. It’s like quantum physics- when you observe something, it collapses into a light wave. What I’m saying is that when someone has a preconceived notion of something, it affects how they hear it. Someone was making a documentary about pedals, and they wanted to use ‘Only Shallow’ as an example of reverb, and I had to tell them that there’s no reverb on that song at all. It’s not even ambient, it’s as dry as I could make it. That was really confusing to the person because they had an idea of what we do, they heard that song and assumed that it was reverse reverb.
With that in mind, when you’re designing this pedal for Fender, are you making that for others to imitate that sound more accurately, or are you designing it as a tool for yourself?
Not exactly either, it’s more like this: everything I do - even when I use reverse reverb because that’s the only digital effect that I use - the way that you play it, the hardness, the intensity, that’s a huge part of the effect. The wave-like effect, that comes from touch sensitivity. It comes from how you play. This pedal is very much in that spirit. It’s a crazy fuzz type thing in one way, but very much unlike a crazy fuzz pedal, because how you play really affects the sound. You can become very encouraged to be very subtle in your playing which makes it interesting. The way that all the effects work together and depend on how you play makes it very dynamic. It’s not so much that the pedal makes you sound like me- it doesn’t. What it does is it makes you think about sound like me.
So instead of just making a sound, you’re trying to encourage the player to change or consider more strongly how they are playing?
Yeah, very much so.
When I think about or consider effects pedals, I find myself seeking out consistency in sound - like, this pedal will make exactly this sound - whereas your pedal provides a sort of side angle to think through. How did you come to that approach?
It’s because of the side thing, it works a bit like a compressor or a gate. If you hit the threshold, it kicks in. You can set it up in a way where the threshold is quite hard to reach, so if you’re strumming away in medium, and if you strum a bit harder, it kicks in, but you can also adjust the amount that it kicks in. It’s very subtle. A bit like when you drive an amplifier when you play harder, it’s that kind of effect. Say I had an amp set up and it was just on the edge of break up, and if you play harder, it fully breaks up. It’s like that, but with distortion. It depends on the strum. Or at least, it can be. You could set it up where it completely disappears and then kicks back in again. I love the subtle part.
I don’t mean to flatter, but you’re quite an accomplished musician and hold an important place. What are your ambitions now? What do you want to be doing?
I’m wanting to do what I’m doing, which is finish recording, go on tour before we get too old. We are getting to that age where if we go on tour now, will we ever want to do it again? I’m really focused on that. I feel time has suddenly shortened. I think Covid also had some impact on that in the sense that you realize you take things for granted. Get things done when they’re doable. Not incredibly impressive sounding but it is for me because I’m probably one of the least productive people in the industry.
Do you consider yourself to be unproductive?
Yeah, I think so. It’s always been my weak point. With Loveless, within a very short period of time I had the template of the songs, I had the vocals and half of the lyrics, and I imagined where all of the overdub parts would be. It was there in my head more or less, but it still took a year and ten months to make. I seem to have changed or something’s happened, I feel like I want to be doing something new all the time, so I tend to not finish stuff. I want to finish it because it’s good, but it sounds too old all of a sudden because I take too long. Anyway.
If you could say something to the people buying your new pedal, what would it be?
Hmm.. just mess around with it. What I mean by that is: don’t think that there is a right way to use it. Keep on pressing buttons and messing around. Use it kind of wrong, you know what I mean? I was reading the instructions and was like, ‘I get this, that is correct, but I don’t use it like that.’ I do know what I’m doing, but I do like just kind of turning something to see what happens. Definitely try it out in different ways than you normally would. When you first mess around with it, you will find that it can be very extreme, but it doesn’t need to be. That’s what’s special about it. It’s not a one trick pony, it’s not just a chaos pedal. When you discover the really subtle things that it can do, I think people will be very excited about it.
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