My Bloody Valentine Live in Manchester

Usually at gigs, you check you’ve got your tickets and keys; this one starts with checking you still want to keep your hearing. Manchester’s Aviva Studios: Security are pressing foam earplugs into people’s palms before they’ve even cleared the bag checks. Inside, the Warehouse is one vast space, more of a storage unit than a concert hall: bare concrete, exposed beams, nothing much in the way of décor. At the back of the stage, a tower of speaker cabs and amps rises almost to the ceiling, a visual reminder that whatever’s coming is going to be felt as much as heard.

By the time My Bloody Valentine walks on, the space is washed in a soft, synthetic pink, that Loveless shade bleeding onto faces and catching along the rim of the amp stacks. Kevin Shields, Bilinda Butcher, Debbie Googe and Colm O Ciosoig take their places, share a glance, and, after O Ciosoig counts them in, drop straight into the wailing swirl of ‘I Only Said’.

Behind them, a screen is in constant motion. Grainy close-ups smear into static, then everything drops to black before blooming again in washes of pink, violet and sickly green. Nothing syncs with the beat. The visuals drift at their own pace, like after-images on the back of your eyelids. Coupled with the sheer volume, it feels almost narcotic: songs bleed into each other, and you stop keeping track of where one ends and the next begins.

The opening stretch leans heavily on their second studio album, ‘Loveless’. ‘When you sleep’ arrives with barely a nod, guitar lines knitting together into a woozy lattice. ‘Only Shallow’ doesn’t so much start as detonate, serrating into riff rips out the speakers in short bursts, before collapsing into a blur of pitch-bent chords and ghosted harmonies. Three decades on, it’s still startling how successfully they reproduce those impossible studio textures on stage. Every queasy tremolo sweep, every nauseous bend is there but roughened up, less a hazy dream than a physical event lodging itself into your ribs.

Midway through the set, they slip into ‘Off Your Face’. It takes a moment for the penny to drop, a few heads snap around, the guitars bouncing off the back. ‘Only Tomorrow’ remains the strangest of the later songs. Googe digs in harder, the notes almost dragging behind the beat, so the whole thing feels like it’s lurching under its own weight. Every time that main riff comes in, it’s as if the amp is being choked, the guitar spluttering in and out between brute-force blasts.

They finish with ‘You Made Me Realise’. What’s left by the end of the song is one vast, mutating chord, held and twisted for minute after minute while the lights flare towards white and the screen behind the band dissolves. Since the late 80’s, they’ve used this passage as a live experiment in their wall of sound: an extended, deliberate overload in which the song, the venue and your nervous system are all reduced to a single, obliterating blast.

Shields has described this as a kind of induced sensory deprivation. In this overload, people “lose the sense of time” and are dragged into the present. He puts it into words, “when you hypnotise somebody, and nothing becomes something”. In Aviva Studios, some people look transported, arms stretched out, grinning into the strobes as if they’ve slipped the leash of ordinary perception. Others cling to the railings, faces screwed up, riding it out rather than giving in. Whatever you call it, it feels less like deprivation than extreme stimulation: sight, sound and balance all scrambled at once, what you get from it depending entirely on what you were carrying in.

Words by Christelle Al Abbasi