Pete: Something wrong with the soundcheck?
Kevin: The programme's gone really,
really mad and has been replaced by another which means that it's
gone - really scary 'cos if it happens again it could ruin everything.
P: Apparently last nights gig in Bristol
was a pile of shit!
K: I didn't like it - all the people
came over the monitors and they pulled out all the leads - everything
was cutting out. Our past few gigs have been terrible, last night
"destroy" was a fitting word for a lot of the songs. If
I can't hear what I'm singing or playing I can't enjoy it. I haven't
stopped drinking. Tension and stress.
P: Peel session, how did that go?
K: Pretty unenjoyable, I don't like
doing things like that.
P: It sounded it, I think he plays
you for the sake of playing you.
K: He didn't used to like us. Media
is media, I don't take anything personally.
P: What about the
Catalogue's (music mag of the day) free flexi,
"Sugar"?
K: We did that in a
cheap studio, I quite like it.
P: More of your vocals
or Belinda's?
K:
It's mine, a few good bits.... a bit of a weird song, experimental
in a way - no bass, an artificial drum effect. We like to mess about,
try something new all the time. There are a few things we've done
that we can call our own, if any band does that they usually try
to capitalise on it by doing it a lot and go downhill. The Mary
Chain got famous basically because of the feedback - they had to
kill that by changing - it also meant that anyone who did that were
"Jesus and Mary Chain" just like us, for example.
P: I'm tempted
to leave the valentines as a sound, leave the voice as an instrument...
K: Personally I don't
like lyrics shoved down my throat. Most people when
they try to listen to music, they try to keep it as a
whole. If you hear every word you spoil it. I can't
stand it, some bands force the words out so you can
hear them properly. The LP follows this point, if you
listen to the second side it's more traditional but
there's much more fooling around on side one. It
turned out like that, it's not friendly listening.
there's full frequency, and engineers like to be in
control, feel the sound from the top to tamper with
anything, we have a tendency to record it flat. It
goes through nothing, mix to tape, and then I
engineer it myself. The engineer is used as a piece
of information to tell us what we don't know.
P: Have you
changed in the last year from an "indie band"?
K: That's sort of
right and wrong.... we used to be heavier, more from
the Birthday Party/Cramps area. All ther songs are
approached differently, I like 'em when we do 'em but
then I forget 'em. One of the shit things about
playing live is that we have to keep playing the
things we've done, that's not because I don't think
it's good, but when the record it it's the most
important time, often the production doesn't do it
justice, it can be completely destroyed by millions
of things.
P: What about the
combined vocals? Were you listening to The
Sugarcubes?
K: It's tradtional,
long before The Sugarcubes. "Feed me with your
kiss is like Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra, a guy
sings a bit. It sounds stronger when Belinda sings
with me.
I'm just a scruffy
bastard really, I get asked to leave shops where I
live. - Kevin Shields
P: Do you wish to make it big?
K: Friends follow us and are honest
with us - face value - it puts everything into prespective. I'm
just a scruffy bastard really, I get asked to leave shops where
I live. It would be great to be in a really famous band and have
no-one know what you look like, like say Pink Floyd. Walk through
the audience to the stage, ha! But this is undermined by the press,
depressingly.
P: What about the touting of Belinda
as a sex symbol?
K: People think the only reason we
got well known was Belinda, but we had already released a couple
of singles. If Belinda was ugly it wouldn't matter. Peel said that
"You made me realise" was interesting because we put her
on the cover, being stupidly sexist, and it wasn't Belinda at all!
It was a genuine suicide case we knew.
This interview is taken from the Avanti fanzine by Pete Melon
published in 1989. It was held at the ULU show in November 1988 and
this gig is seen by many as the peak of the Valentines career. Merely
weeks after the release of 'Isn't Anything', as you'll read not everyone
agrees this was a good time for the band. This gig was also attended
by the newly formed Ride who had still to play their first gig at
this time.