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Nov 05, 2015 Slowdive By Christopher Roberts

Legendary ‘90s shoegazers Slowdive reformed last year and have been playing shows. They have yet to release any new music, but they have just shared a live recording from 2014 of “Avalyn” in honor of the 25th anniversary of the release of their self-titled debut EP, which came out November 5, 1990 and featured “Avalyn” (separated into two parts). The band posted the live recording to Soundcloud and wrote about it on their Facebook page, you can check it out below. The recording comes from their North American tour last year and the band say they are also working on a live album. “We are currently working on releasing the entire live set from that tour as a collection, so look out for news of that soon,” they wrote on Facebook.

The band wrote in more detail about the creation of “Avalyn,” saying: “So what about ‘Avalyn’? We didn’t really have a structure for the song until we got to the studio. In fact, it was almost an afterthought. We had the bass part that was simply repeated all the way through, and Neil and Christian found that they could make weird noises with their guitars. One part almost sounds like a wind instrument. Otherwise it was really just composed on the spot, Rachel bringing the words and vocal melody - and we recorded it pretty much live, and possibly in a single take. We knew immediately that together with Slowdive, this was the direction the band was taking. Listening back to ‘Avalyn’ at that time, we couldn’t really believe that we’d come up with something that sounded like that when a few months earlier we were being talked about as ‘Reading’s answer to The Primitives.’ When the band reformed for 2014, it seemed obvious to us to start our live shows by playing the Slowdive EP at the top of the set list. It sets out where we originally came from, and sets the scene for where we were going. And to celebrate that, we’d like to present a free live recording of ‘Avalyn,’ performed during our USA / Canada tour last year.”

We interviewed Slowdive’s Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell last year about the reunion and posted various articles on the band. Read our print magazine article on Slowdive’s reunion. Read our separate interviews with Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell about the reunion. Finally read our interview with Halstead and Goswell about the bands that inspired Slowdive.