Where does shoegaze sound like?

A conversation with Simon Reynolds about cities and scenes at the reinvention of rock, 1984-1994

Simon Reynolds probably needs little introduction to Musical Urbanism readers. A prolific music writer who first surfaced at the British weekly Melody Maker in the mid-1980s, his work characteristically draws on big ideas and novel concepts (like “post-rock,” a term he coined in 1993 that still gets attached to musical sounds and artists over 30 years later) to understand the emblematic shifts in modern music and culture. No serious library of music literature is complete without at least one title by Simon Reynolds, to which you might want to add his latest book, Still in a Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984-1994. A follow-up to his essential Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 1978-1984, Reynolds’s new book traces the transatlantic threads of what followed in rock’s underground: the return of guitars, instinctive explorations into noise and sonic texture, and a new bohemian sensibility that soon resets the trajectory of overground rock.

Andrew Stevens, Musical Urbanism’s London correspondent, recently, um, corresponded with Simon Reynolds to ask how Still in a Dream relates to questions that interest this Substack: How do cities sustain creative scenes and musical innovation? How are cities and the urban condition represented in music? And, what’s ‘local’ to any given musical form or development? Reynolds brought a sharp, critical perspective to such geographical connections, which were plentiful in the post-punk era but (he argues) became less relevant as the underground’s musical and media circuits began to multiply and conjoin across the Atlantic. Note also his view of the journalistic tendency to assume and assert such a role for place and geography in musical changes, which occasions yet another cool concept: “areaism.” -LN

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Andrew Stevens: Still In A Dream is about shoegaze and adjacent noise. From a musical urbanism perspective we’re talking OX4 and the Thames Valley scene then?

Simon Reynolds: I don’t think I have much to say about the Thames Valley aspect of shoegaze. I had to look up OX4 — discovering it is the postcode for the Cowley Road end of Oxford. (I lived in Oxford between 1981 and 1985 but the other side of town — Jericho). And also it’s the title of a compilation by Ride.

This is one of the differences between my approach this time round and the postpunk book. Rip It Up and Start Again had a lot of chapters about city based scenes and sounds: Sheffield, Leeds, San Francisco, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and Edinburgh in Scotland, Akron and Cleveland in Ohio… Athens Georgia… the Lower East Side of New York. In all these places, to varying extents, peculiarities of the local environment condition the sound in some way, or there are [local] resources that enable the groups.

But in Still In A Dream this hardly comes up at all. A little bit with Athens and R.E.M. Sonic Youth are a post-No Wave, Lower East Side of New York band, and Daydream Nation is full of references to downtown Manhattan. Minneapolis comes in a little bit with Hüsker Dü and the Replacements. But then again in the relevant chapter I have them aligned aesthetically with Dinosaur Jr (Amherst, Massachusetts) and Band of Susans (New York). Big Black come from Chicago, but in what sense are they a Chicago band? And it’s not like I also go on about the other bands in Chicago at that time. For sure, there is something Texas in spirit about Butthole Surfers, but at the peak of their career, they are nomadic, settling briefly in Georgia in a little town near Athens.

In a way, this placelessness reflects something of the vagueness of shoegaze and slacker rock. The people in the bands mostly come originally from suburbia. The bands themselves often form out of post-college bohemia, but the specificity of that town doesn’t really feed into the band’s aesthetic. Aesthetic contours are determined along national and international lines. The genre formations cut across regions and countries. Bands want to escape where they are. Grangemouth is discernible in Cocteau Twins only as a negative imprint; their music negates their surroundings; every aspect of its aesthetics exists in an antithetical relation to their origins in an industrial town in Scotland that Robin Guthrie described as “not picturesque”.

AS: I remember Sonic Youth being put out on first meeting the Strokes that they’d never heard of DNA, thinking it a denial or dereliction of their urban lineage. I also remember discussing Thames Valley and the like with Cathi Unsworth a few years back and her deriding such things as “areaism”, lazy journalism to sell papers.

SR: I like Areaism as a term for it — it is sort of an ideological reflex (belief in the local, decentralisation, the grass roots) — but it’s also just a journalistic strategy: how do we create a story, build a buzz... There was a funny string of articles in the NME during postpunk, where they cover Sheffield and say “it’s the new Akron”, and then they do Leeds (”it’s the new Sheffield”) and so on. I might have the sequence wrong but Akron and Cleveland are the start of this thing of buzz-building around a city that isn’t a capital city.

The idea of regionalism and decentralization — shifting the focus from London or New York — is a big thing during this era. It seems to suit the egalitarian politics of postpunk and DIY. And it’s a push coming not just from the local scenes themselves but also from the London-based media. The music papers make a real effort to cover what’s going on in “the sticks”. Melody Maker started a series in late 1977 where reporters went to check out what was going on in places like Newcastle or Bristol. They called it Street Heat which sounds a bit naff now, but was in line with the idea of “street credibility” and “kids on the streets” that was so big during punk.

There was definitely a bit of a push from Melody Maker with the Thames Valley scene idea — Reading, Oxford, London — as a Southern counterweight to Madchester. Shift the attention away from what was going on up North, which had started to fade anyway.

But the thing with these scenes is that while they might have some basis around a local club or record label, or attitude to some extent (the Manchester “I’m God’s gift, adore me” cockiness syndrome), in any given city there’s always a load of activity going on simultaneously that doesn’t fit the media generated idea of the scene-sound. With London especially, it makes little sense because so many bands move there just because of all the places to play, the record industry being there.

AS: I think town planners should be taught music. I suppose if I took “place” to its logical conclusion I’d be writing about the Macc Lads, though plenty has been written on the “Medway scene” when really they’re talking about one man as either singer or producer. The era you’re writing about here though, there was a functioning ecosystem in Rugby with all the Spacemen 3 off-shoots, albeit a “fucked up” one.

SR: I think with Rugby it’s just Spacemen 3 and The Perfect Disaster, right? It’s not quite enough to rank on a par with Manchester as a real scene. The biographer of Spacemen 3, Erik Morse, went quite deep into the urban geography of Rugby, I seem to recall, and specifically how it was a town where a lot of drugs passed through it. But Spacemen 3 would probably have had the same “interests”, and musical touchstones, wherever they lived.

When my friends and I did the fanzine Monitor, we went as a group to an academic conference — this must be 1986 — and there was a musical anthropologist, Ruth Finnegan, who presented her work on the music scene in Milton Keynes. And it was an incredible cross-section of the variegated musical activity in a single town. But I don’t think an English town in the 1980s is really an ethnos where anthropology or ethnomusicology works in that locally focused way. As much as local bands encountered each other at the same venues in either fraternal or rivalrous manner, or shared other local amenities (rehearsal spaces, maybe studios), the bands in Milton Keynes would not likely see themselves as “local bands”. They would prefer to think of themselves as potentially figures of national and even international significance. And each band’s sound would be connected to larger formations of genre. The Goth band in Milton Keynes has way more in common with the Goth band in Leeds or Hastings than it does with a Milton Keynes reggae band. Or even with an Oi! band, notionally a part of punk like Goth — but very different in sound, preoccupations, stylistic look.

By the mid-Eighties, when Still In A Dream starts, the heroic age of indie labels, which were often city-based, is over. A national — and international — distribution infrastructure has been successfully established. To an increasing extent, it doesn’t matter where you are based or where you start out as a band.

But journalistically the reflex remained: it’s always one way you can organize a story. So you did still get things like the Madchester buzz, or the excitement about Seattle. But as Dean Wareham points out in my book, you had grunge-like sounds coming out all over the place in America and the UK during this period, based in the blending of hardcore punk, noise rock, and heavy rock of the 1970s. A group like Walkingseeds in England are signposting their debts to Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath and the Stooges. It’s pretty much the same mulch out of which spawned Green River and Tad and Mudhoney in the Pacific Northwest.

I think the thing is that everyone is reading the music papers and what they are doing is participating in and reacting to the conversations happening there, more than to local influences. These are national and even international publications.

Even something as geographically remote as the Australian and New Zealand scenes, where it takes two months for the music papers to arrive by ship, there is still the impact of the Fall or the New York groups like Television and Talking Heads. Where it becomes distinctive is how a taste for a certain kind of minimalist underground rock connects with Antipodean personality traits — reticence, dryness, diffidence, a distaste for theatrics. That is how you get the Chills and the Go-Betweens.