(Pop Lifer’s trademark “live at the show” art photography. Contact us to buy exclusive print.)

On the way to the Electric tonight we get assailed in the street by a middle aged hippie with a Scandinavian accent and a trembling youth in a scruffy parka. As long term Brixton residents we know this is nothing out of the ordinary, but what is different is what they were after – tickets to see My Bloody Valentine.

Its mind boggling that these two people had anything in common, let alone a desperation to see a band whose last album came out 22 years ago and whose biggest hit single reached the glittering peak of number 29. But that illustrates the power of My Bloody Valentine’s last two albums. They were like uranium: there wasn’t a lot of material, but it had a megatonne impact and an extraordinary, lingering half life.

Why do My Bloody Valentine still cast such a long shadow over music when so many of their peers are barely remembered footnotes to eccentric blogs? Anyone who tries to answer this question usually talks about how influential they are, but very few bands have actually sounded much like them. There was the early 90s shoegaze movement, but that swiftly withered in the absence of its chief architects and is now chiefly notable – in the form of Andy Bell – for enabling Liam Gallagher in his eternal quest to eradicate all modernity from pop music. A few bands have incorporated elements of MBV’s white noise and shimmering FX into their music – Smashing Pumpkins being the most commercially successful – but none have been quite so fearless in their disregard for traditional song structure or bold in their pursuit of beautiful, mind bending, ear shredding noise. And perhaps that’s why they are still so revered: their sound was so distinctive that nobody has been able to recreate it.

Including, for much of tonight, My Bloody Valentine. The band were, of course, never a vocally driven outfit but tonight’s mix buries most of the singing under a blanket of heavy, shrieking noise. The effect can be deeply frustrating: only the cooing “ooohs” in the chorus confirm the identity of “When You Sleep”. In fact, the first scraps of real melody have to wait until the sixth song, “Cigarette In Your Bed”, and even then they emerge only briefly, like frightened rabbits, before the sheer shrieking squall of Kevin Shields’ guitar sends them scurrying back into their burrows. Only insanely good drumming holds together “Only Shallow”, which has its chainsaw guitars replaced by a rusty axe. Continue reading →

The London Underground – copyright Transport for London

The London Underground is 150 years old today. For tens of millions of people across the UK and abroad the tube is a living symbol of the vitality and scale of London. It can be evoked instantly in the gorgeous iconography, from the London Underground symbol – that neatly bisected circle – to the feverish, evolving, insectile beauty of Harry Beck’s map.

The very names of the stations evoke either London’s grand age (Bow Church, Bank) or its constant re-inventions (Canary Wharf, Hoxton). The names can be mythic (Angel, All Saints) or eccentric (Elephant & Castle, King’s Cross), speak of alluring wealth (Knightsbridge, Maida Vale) or gritty reality (Stockwell, Archway). It’s a beacon of metropolitan glamour and, still – after 150 years – bustling modernity.

All feelings which last for approximately 1 week of living in London, when the endless delays, the Kafkaesque nightmare of engineering works, the rusty decrepitude blighting swathes of the network, the endless push’n’shove of drunks’n’tourists and the sheer stressy hell of rush hour can permanently tarnish the brightest enthusiasm. And yet, and yet…

There are still moments where the London Underground briefly feels like a thing of wonder and beauty again. When the Victoria Line, the network’s unsung hero, swoops you from the deepest South of Brixton to the far North East of Walthamstow in less than 40 minutes. The sheer beauty of Clapham Common and Clapham North’s single platform stations, sleek cylindrical monuments to urbanity – when not filled by thousands of frothing commuters at 8.13 on a Tuesday morning. The long, steep elevator of Angel tube station, lifting you slowly towards the genteel bustle of Islington. The way that Canary Wharf’s vast cathedral interior prepares you for the looming sci-fi surrounds of Canary Wharf itself.

And then there’s pop music, where the Underground has continued to exert an alluring influence beyond what it actually has to offer. Hundreds of great pop songs have referred to the London tube, or places evoked by tube station names, from rusty old classics like “Baker Street” to modern gems like Duffy’s heartbreak lullaby, “Warwick Avenue.”

Pulp used “Mile End” as a symbol of bedsit London, teeming with seedy energy, while The Jam captured the menace of late 70s Britain in “Down In The Tube Station At Midnight”. Even Fergie (the pop singer and crystal meth bore, not the ex-Royal) had a clumsy crack at evoking capital class on “London Bridge”. Rather more memorably, it was the aggressive artificiality of Canary Wharf that inspired Radiohead’s sublime “Fake Plastic Trees”

Continue reading →