Backstage With Slowdive
Portrait by Ingrid Pop, Live photos by Nolan Gawron
Time changes everything.
When Slowdive called it quits in 1995, the band was broke— so broke that bassist Nick Chaplin and guitarist Christian Savill had already left the band to get steady jobs before the release of their final album. The record in question, Pygmalion, came out about a year later than they’d hoped, by the then-struggling Creation Records, who would go on to drop the band from their roster just a week after its release. But then again, all of this seemed inevitable at the time. After all, shoegaze— that dreamy, psychedelic, guitar pedal-driven genre that Slowdive helped define over their 6-year career—was on the way out. Ultimately decimated by Britpop and the importation of grunge, the genre was little more than the target of colorful ridicule by the British press.
Now, fast forward nearly three decades and Slowdive are headed into the tenth year of their unexpected second act. The rebirth, which began in earnest by agreeing to play a single show at the Primavera Festival, has led to a succession of sold-out world tours and two critically acclaimed albums. Early records, once famously and scathingly panned by the British press, have been reevaluated, and are now considered masterpieces and influential points of reference for a new generation of shoegaze-inspired bands and music aficionados. It really just gives you hope that things can work out in time.
We caught up with Slowdive’s Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell backstage at the House of Blues before their sold-out show in Boston.
In recent years there have been a lot of bands from the 1990s that have reformed, gotten their due recognition, and continued on. But did you ever have the faintest idea that Slowdive would reform?
Neil Halstead: No, and if you would have asked me a year before we got back together, I would have still said ‘no.’ It was weird. The question about seriously getting the band back together seemed to happen at a time when everyone was prepared to take it seriously. For some reason, everyone’s lives were in a place where we said, ‘Oh yeah, I could do that.’ And it was literally going to be the one show for the Primavera Festival.
I read that the songs on the new record (Everything Is Alive) started out as solo recordings? An electronic record solo record seems like a new direction for you.
I’ve always been interested in messing around with electronics— ever since the Pygmalion days. I’ve always been messing around with it in my spare time, but it never comes out onto the records or anything. I kind of went down an electronic rabbit hole in 2014, 2015, and for the last eight or nine years, I’ve just been working on music at the studio that’s all been electronic. I spent a lot of time just doing stuff and recording it, and I guess I had a whole cache of that stuff. When we talked about doing a record, I wasn’t really in the mood to sit down say ‘well okay, I have to write some Slowdive songs.’ I thought, let’s see if we can repurpose some of these things that I’ve been doing. So I threw the tracks over to everyone and some of them became the basis for the record. We built off of those.
There seems to be an element of darkness to this new record whereas the last record seemed to have an inherent sense of hope. Was this a conscious decision? Did the state of the world add to the heaviness?
Well, I wrote some of the instrumentation before COVID. I hadn’t written any of the lyrics or anything. Once everyone else got involved, the record just started going in its own direction. We did a lot of different material and there was a lot of fine tuning and adding to the shape of the record. But yeah, there’s some darkness there. I think this one had a different starting point. You always want to make a different record than the one before. For me, personally, just coming from working on minimal electronic sketches and see where they go was a different starting point and an interesting starting point. There wasn’t really any direction, there wasn’t any real plan. It was more about seeing what develops.
Compared to your two post-reunion records, the albums from your early years seem to have a certain a spareness to the sound, a fragility almost. To what degree would you say this the bigger sound today is the result of experience and growth as a songwriter versus the availability of technology and innovation?
It’s a little bit of everything, isn’t it? I think there is definitely a desire to make something different. How we react together as musicians, friends, and collaborators— I mean if the record was left to me, it would be a totally different record, but it’s a Slowdive record. And it was really interesting to see it spinning back to a Slowdive sound. Nick’s probably the least equipped to deal with electronic music. He’s like ‘I don’t know it just sounds like a video game. Maybe we could use it between the songs.’ Creating stuff—you can see it with kids—it’s just playing. That’s really what is fun about working in studios. I don’t think you should go in with a massive plan. You shouldn’t really know, I don’t think. I mean some people do. I don’t think we have as a band. It takes a while to find our way through.
Shoegaze is largely about pedals. What does your pedalboard look like now versus then?
I’ve actually got less pedals now. We used to use the old multi-effects big rack units, but we don’t use them anymore. When we started out, you couldn’t find a pedal that just did reverb, that was why you had to go to a big unit. Now there are just so many bespoke pedals. It’s an exciting world out there. When we first got back together, that was an interesting part of it— just trying to figure out how to create the sounds using the pedals that are available.
I was— as I bet a lot of people still are —unaware of just how big and nasty the backlash was against shoegaze bands in the mid-90s.
I mean, it was what it was. I think it was only in the UK. We weren’t a big band, so it wasn’t like they were tearing down some giant in the music industry. When we started off, we got some pretty good reviews, and then after every album they would get worse. I don’t really know what it was like here. I mean we did a couple tours in America. But for us you are much more aware of the Melody Maker, or the NME.
What do you think attributed to that sentiment?
Just boredom, I think. The music press at that time had quite a high turnover. Plus, there were pretty big scenes that came in around that time. We weren’t grunge and we weren’t Britpop. But it wasn’t just us, there were a bunch of bands that didn’t get any coverage once grunge hit the UK.
So, the reviews start getting worse, the audiences start to dwindle. What ultimately made you say, ‘Ok that’s it’?
Rachel Goswell: Well, we got dumped by our record label the week that Pygmalion came out. And we had already waited a year for that record to be released. They didn’t have money; we didn’t have any money. Nobody had any money.
NH: I think Pygmalion was destructive for the band as well. Nick and Christian and Simon had already left. It was a new direction that they weren’t really keen on. [laughs] Yeah, I think we were just trying to get Pygmalion out, and then move on.
So, despite all of the bad reviews and negative experiences with labels, you guys don’t give up on the music industry, you just change your sound…drastically. And you quickly reformed as the dreamy folk rock band, Mojave 3.
NH: I got into country music, so I wanted to write country music. I got into folk songs, so I wanted to write folk songs. I was getting into 60’s stuff as well. So, for me as a songwriter, that became the inspiration. I don’t know, we did a demo, which basically became the first Mojave 3 album. Ivo (founder of 4AD) was a massive Slowdive fan. We probably should have been on 4AD from the start. But we loved Creation in terms of all the bands.
RG: 4AD was more of an artsy label. 4AD actually had a proper business plan and a proper office. Much more professional.
NH: 4AD was a great home for Mojave. Creation was always a bit of a mess, but a shambolic mess. It’s an interesting story though. The two labels were run by two very charismatic guys who had their own vision. In the end, I think Ivo got into dogs, and Alan got into drugs.
Do you see a difference in the way you write for Slowdive versus how you wrote for Mojave 3? Do you view lyrics and instrumentation differently between the two?
NH: The lyric thing is interesting because the lyrics always come last for Slowdive, generally. There are a few exceptions. But it was always the other way around with Mojave. For me, the whole point of Mojave was to try to write a song that I could just play on an acoustic guitar and i would feel complete. That was the challenge. When Slowdive finished, I remember just traveling around and staying in hostels. You tell someone you’re a musician, so someone hands you a guitar and asks you to play a song. Well I couldn’t play any Slowdive songs, really. They’re all in weird tunings, and they’re not written in a traditional way, so you can’t just sit down with an acoustic guitar. You have to rethink it, you know? So for me, Mojave was an attempt to be a proper musician and be able to be that dude, you know, who can bust out the acoustic guitar and sing songs.
As far as old songs go, is there anything off limits? Anything that doesn’t fit in the framework anymore?
NH: It’s interesting because we have tried a lot of the old ones and some of them work, and some of them don’t. It’s kind of survival of the fittest when you play live. Some of them are great, some no matter how many times you play it, it never really hits the spot. So you just land up with a setlist of what you enjoy playing most I suppose. It’s interesting because where we’ve reached that point with the new record where the setlist is starting to get longer than we’d like.
What is it like to see people in the audience that are the same age as when you started?
NH: Yeah, that’s the trippy part, how intergenerational it has become. All of the gigs have a big contingency of young kids.
RG: It’s great. It’s a really nice energy.
NH: I kinda noticed it in 2014, but it seems to have really grown. It’s really cool. You will meet a guy who is our age, and he’ll say ‘I saw you in ’92, and meet my daughter, she’s 15, she loves you.’
Have you ever come across any of the critics who were so negative in the mid 90s?
NH: No, and I don’t care to be honest. People make a big deal out of it, but I don’t think any of us really cared about it. Actually, it’s interesting because when the new record first came out a few weeks ago, there was a review in The Times. Someone read the review out to me, and it was a good review, and I asked, ‘well who wrote that review.’ And I was like ‘Fuck, I think I recognize that name.’ I think he was the one who wrote that line— it was a good line. It was like ‘I’d rather bathe, no drown, in a bath of lukewarm porridge than listen to this record.’ I’m sure he wrote that line.
RG: And someone on twitter was like, ‘I hope you’re going to apologize to the band.’
NH: In the review he wrote, ‘they were much maligned at the time’ or something. I was like ‘he won’t even fess up that he was one of the ones who gave us a shit review.’
RG: That line has followed us everywhere. It comes up in every interview we do.
NH: Honestly, we don’t really care. It was funny.
The Breeders played last night at this same spot. For an encore they played a Pixies song and it made me wonder if you have merged the worlds of Slowdive and Mojave— especially since you were both in both projects.
NH: No, but we used to get a lot more ‘play Slowdive songs’ when we were doing Mojave 3.
RG: That is true. Lately I’ve seen people online saying, “BRING BACK MOJAVE 3, and I’m like, ‘For fucks sake.
Is that’s what’s next? Would you ever do that?
RG: Well we did it for 10 years and 5 albums.
NH: I love playing Mojave 3. I would be good to do it. Just for fun. Just for kicks. Everybody’s at a different point in their lives.
So what’s next?
RG: Well we just released a record, so we’ll start here. It’s a nice place to be actually. It’s nice to be back together and to be back out on the road.