WHERE WERE YOU IN ’91?

By Pete Kember

If you had told me in 1991 that, 25 years later, I would be prefacing a list on shoegaze, I would probably have told you it would never happen. Few of these bands paid even the slightest, fleeting lip service to commerciality. I couldn’t see it.

But things change; even by 1993, I was redressing my views. I played a show that year in L.A. at Johnny Depp’s Viper Room. The support band, to my complete amazement, was a shoegaze band—a Mexican shoegaze band. The thought that this music might cut through cultures with such broad swathes had never occurred to me before, but now I could see this genre might have long legs, in between that gaze and those shoes.

Drifting back further, my memory of the British hack who first coined the term “shoegaze” was that he was being derogatory. It was a put-down, no question. And when the shoegazer moniker didn’t seem to irritate enough, the same wags started referring to these bands as “the scene that celebrates itself,” based apparently on the fact that these bands dug each others' music. Dear oh dear.

The funny thing is, like most of these genre tag inventions of the media, such as “punk” or “grunge,” the term “shoegaze” stuck—and apparently, it stuck hard.

So who put the sole in shoegaze? Were the shoegaze bands solely looking to their suede for inspiration? I think not. The long bangs and fuzz pedal fever of the time made any downward-looking aim nigh impossible to pinpoint, and whilst I'm not saying these bands did not have the hippest footwear, I think it was what was underneath them that was key: the pedals. It's a lot about the pedals. Effects that could take the meekest guitar and make it roar like a doorman on steroids, or soar like jet planes in an aerobatics display. Creating sounds you could actually taste and smell.

So while we’re looking down, let’s discuss the roots. Spacemen 3 have sometimes been referred to as “godfathers of shoegaze,” and that may be true in some small part; I may not be the best judge of that. But, for my coin, it was My Bloody Valentine that held the alpha DNA.