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I lost it
In his first interview for 12 years, My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields talks to Paul Lester about his madness, making Alan McGee cry - and how his house got full of chinchillas
Friday March 12, 2004
The Guardian
My God. Can it be? .... Kevin Shields, reclusive leader of seminal British noise-pop band My Bloody Valentine, has agreed to an interview. It will be his first face-to-face encounter with the press for 12 years. His first, in fact, since just after the release of 1991's Loveless, along with Nirvana's Nevermind the most influential album of the 1990s.
Not surprisingly, the notoriously tardy musician is late. But then, what's half an hour for a man whose three year procrastination over the recording of Loveless drained Creation Records of its resources and sent the label boss, Alan McGee, over the edge, and who spent a decade keeping Island Records waiting for a follow-up that never came?
Since his withdrawal from the music scene, Shields has earned a reputation as the latter-day Brian Wilson, a tormented genius unable to produce a successor to Loveless, the Pet Sounds of UK avant-rock. He is, they say, a virtual hermit in his seven-bedroom north London home, a fearful wreck persecuted by his own perfectionism. Rare sightings of him suggest a depressed individual, bloated and forlorn.
But more recently he has collaborated with Brian Reitzell on the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola's Oscar-winning Lost in Translation. Reitzell, who drums with Air, warns me during my nail-biting wait that Shields tends to work all night and sleep all day and never answers his phone. So no matter how late he gets there will be no contacting him. "He's quite childlike," he says, in awe of the musician he met on the road in Japan in 2002. "Extremely sensitive. A pure artist."
How did people react when Reitzell announced he'd be attempting to coax brand-new performances and compositions from Shields? "They said I was crazy, that it wasn't going to happen." According to Reitzell, who monitors these things on the internet, the two most anticipated returns in all of rock'n'roll are those of Axl Rose and Kevin Shields. "The guy's an icon," he says.
The icon finally materialises around two. He might be mad - that remains to be seen - but he hasn't gone to seed. The eternal undergraduate, all rumpled shirt, baggy cords, student specs and unkempt hair, he looks as though he's just got out of bed - which he has.
"I couldn't wake up," he says by way of apology, ordering tea and orange juice, his soft Dublin accent barely audible above the hotel-bar hubbub. It isn't a voice you'd associate with such extreme music - one My Bloody Valentine track, No More Sorry, about domestic abuse, is blurry, hallucinatory and intense, unlike anything else in rock; another, You Made Me Realise, includes a section the band used to call "the holocaust".
I ask Shields whether he secretly relishes his near-mythic status. "No," he replies. He seems to change his mind. "It's hard to explain. I live so much in my imagination. My version of reality is so different ... I don't necessarily connect with things. Yes, it is nice."
Is he the 21st-century Syd Barrett, or a Brian Wilson? "I'm crazy," he says, "but I'm not mentally ill. There's a difference." Reitzell is quick to correct: "He's not clinically crazy." With a grin, Shields adds: "The doctors haven't got control over me."
But in 1997 he told a website his long absence was due to mental illness. "Ah," he says, "but I didn't say whose mental illness." He pauses. "The funniest bit was, my brothers' friends were all going: 'Sorry to hear about Kevin's mental illness.' At that time, we were going through a slightly estranged phase, like families do. So they'd go, 'Yeah ... ' And that confirmed it."
The only advantage to being
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