The seismic needles twitching in Chinese military bunkers can only mean one of two things. Either the UK has resumed nuclear testing or My Bloody Valentine are touring again. The Irish-English noiseniks materialising on the Wembley stage in washes of womb colours – pinks, purples, sunrise oranges – for their first London show in seven years are probably most famous for crystalising the shoegaze sound with their 1988 debut album Isn’t Anything, then killing the genre stone dead with their unmatchable 1991 masterpiece Loveless, a record now being ranked – not unreasonably – amongst the best ever made. But they’re also widely renowned as being one of the loudest bands on the planet. There were angle-saw metalworkers who ran screaming from their aircraft-volume Roundhouse shows in 2008.
Armed from the sackfuls of free earplugs at every entrance, Wembley noticeably braces itself for the first chord from mainman Kevin Shields’ godlike guitar. But, take it from a veteran of many of their half-hour hell-chord finales, MBV go relatively easy on us tonight. As I Only Said hits like a velvet tsunami, drenched in hazy butterfly visuals and resembling birdsong over Chernobyl, the volume is enough to make Bastille soil themselves but nothing the average noise rock fanatic who lives near a steelworks can’t handle.
