Joe Clay, for The Quietus:
The last time I saw Neil Halstead, back in October last year after his solo gig at Cecil Sharp House in Camden, I had just written a glowing review of his album as one-third of Black Hearted Brother for tQ, the gist of which was, "Hey losers, stop hankering after a Slowdive reunion and dig what’s going on now!"; a not unreasonable stance to take, seeing as the BHB album was brilliant, with Halstead busting out the effects pedals for the first time in almost two decades and making a “splendid freeform racket”. I joked with Halstead about this, and the fallacy of any imminent Slowdive reunion, sharing the story of how Steve Queralt [shoegaze namedrop clunk] once told me, apropos of a Ride reunion, that he hadn’t even picked up a bass guitar since the band split and it wasn’t as if he was just sat by the phone waiting for Andy and Mark to call. We laughed. Well, I laughed, but looking back, I can see that Halstead just grinned nervously and took a shifty pull on his roll-up. The sneaky bugger knew then what we all know now – Slowdive, the band at the vanguard of the shoegaze movement of the 1990s, the shoegazer’s shoegazers, the dreampop pioneers, have reformed.
In the early nineties the 'shoegaze' term was often used negatively. For the music press, grunge, the Manics, and latterly Suede and into Britpop were all more exciting and interesting to write about. Shoegaze bands, and Slowdive in particular, were always joked about, often contemptuously.
Two decades on and the longevity of the sound has been proven. It started with Kevin Shields but it was Slowdive that defined it, and which I continue to hear in a lot of dreampop music today from I Break Horses to Tamaryn.
As the Quietus article says, Slowdive are the shoegazer's shoegazers.
I've tried, but never really got into Mojave 3, so today's news about the reformation, a move back to the electric guitars and effects, with the possibility of new music is terrific. I've always enjoyed this sound.
I love that fact that there are now plenty of fans of the band who weren't even born when the band split, and who thought they would never get a chance to see them.
23 years ago (!) I did. Slowdive supported Ride at what was the Town & Country Club in London's Kentish Town. It was marvellous.
Halstead, Goswell, Gardener and Bell sharing a bill again remains a dream but today it became a little bit closer.