Shoegaze heroes Slowdive are back. After their appearance at this year's Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona was revealed yesterday, the English dream pop outfit have announced their first show since they broke up in 1994: May 19 at the Village Underground in London. (It's almost 20 years to the day since their last show, which took place on May 21, 1994, at Lee's Palace in Toronto.)
In an interview with The Quietus, Neil Halstead discussed the reunion and hinted at the possibility of new material:
I'm super excited. We had our first rehearsal last week, which was fun. We were surprisingly good. Quite a few of the songs came back quickly. The initial impetus was the idea of doing some new music. It seemed easier to do that because it’s not so public. But then we thought it would be good if we could raise a bit of money to make the record, and doing a couple of gigs would enable us to do that. And that’s the way it shaped up – while we’re rehearsing we can see if we’ve got another record in us.
I’m not interested in any critical reappraisal. It’s more about the people who are into it and like the records rather than proving anything to anyone. We’re not getting paid enough for there to be any real financial incentive for doing it. But there are loads of artistic reasons, especially if we can get a new record together.
For more info about the reunion, go to Slowdive's site. They say more shows are in the works.
Slowdive formed in 1989 and released three albums between 1991 and 1995, the last being 1995's Pygmalion. They've been cited as an influence by M83, the Smashing Pumpkins, Mogwai, and many others. After the breakup, Halstead, Rachel Goswell, and Ian McCutcheon started Mojave 3.
Watch the band perform "Catch the Breeze":