An interview with Chapterhouse

As their classic album 'Whirlpool' turns 35, Stephen Patman talks the band's anticipated return, "shoegaze" being a repugnant word, white fluffy cats, and how this reunion differs from the last one.

Shoegaze has no shortage of iconic bands, but Chapterhouse are unquestionably unsung heroes of the scene that celebrated itself. While the “Big Four” bands of shoegaze are generally considered My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Ride and Lush, Chapterhouse were one of the original bands to earn the distinction (or humiliation, depending on who you ask) of being labeled “shoegazers” by the UK press.

Formed in 1987, by a bunch of teenagers from Reading - Stephen Patman, Andrew Sherriff, Simon Rowe, Ashley Bates and Jon Curtis - the band was originally named Incest (yes, for real!) with a raucous, drone-y garage rock sound that screamed like it was the bastard child of The Stooges and Spacemen 3. But as they matured, so did their sound, which developed into something more melodic and beguiling. Some EPs - Freefall, Sunburst and Pearl - earned them a lot of ink in the music weeklies, with “Pearl” even cracking the UK singles charts, and earning airplay on both MTV’s 120 Minutes and MuchMusic.

Chumming around with local indie bands like Lush, Moose, Ride, Slowdive and Swervedriver caught the eye of journalists who quickly came up with a name for this new, hypnotic brand of psychedelic rock they were cooking up. But despite the insistence of the music press, Chapterhouse weren’t really part of shoegaze for long. While their debut album, 1991’s Whirlpool, definitely ranks as a stone-cold shoegaze classic, the band were constantly tinkering with their music, dipping their toes in everything from acid house to ‘60s-inspired psych-pop to ambient music. Their next single “Mesmerise” (one of my favourite tracks of the 1990s) saw them ditch the crescendoing guitars to masterfully build a vibe-y, Balearic tune with help from a pensive, John Barry piano sample. One could argue the track influenced a hundred chillwave artists, but shoegaze by definition it was not.

By the time their second album, Blood Music, dropped in 1993, Chapterhouse were a very different band, adding dub, baggy and club influences into their sound, resulting in a real mixed bag. After running into a hampering legal issue and failing to deliver a hit, the writing was on the wall. Even with an album’s worth of demos in the bag, Chapterhouse called it quits in 1995.

The band didn’t exactly fade away following their split. Even though they had next to no involvement, Chapterhouse fans were treated to multiple compilations and reissues in the following years, including 1996’s Rownderbowt, 2007’s The Best of Chapterhouse and 2018’s Whirlpool: The Original Recordings. An unexpected reunion tour in 2010 allowed them to have - seemingly - a victory lap, playing shows with nu-gazer and obvious fan Ulrich Schnauss. Eventually, members gathered in 2023 to have the final say with Chronology, the ultimate collection featuring the albums, singles, B-sides, remixes and those demos recorded towards the end.

But as 2024 arrived, Chapterhouse began talks of reuniting. Nat Cramp of Sonic Cathedral offered to release the band’s earliest recordings, the White House Demos EP, the following year, which then led to a full-on band reunion. Now Now Patman, Sherriff and Bates, together with Greg Moore and Joe Light on bass and guitar, have set sail on a UK and North American tour calledWhirlpool 35, celebrating their debut album’s 35th birthday by performing it in full. In addition, they will play multiple dates for this year’s Slide Away Festival, in the U.S., alongside dormant alt-rock gods Hum and the event’s organizers and shoegaze bad boys Nothing.

The band was first called Incest when it was formed. I’ve gotta ask - who thought Incest was a good name for a band?

Stephen Patman: We were teenagers at the time, mainly doing covers of Stooges and some tracks off the Nuggets compilations. And it was basically for our first two shows. The guy who ran the studio we rehearsed in said, “You guys should play a gig,” and then we basically booked a show in a pub a couple of doors down. We just came up with the name based on this whole gang of friends in Reading who had all gone out with each other. It was a bit of an incestuous, dating thing. So it wasn’t based on any family situation. But it was only for two gigs before we changed it to Chapterhouse.

Our third show was supporting The Jazz Butcher, and our fourth gig was opening for Spaceman 3. Sonic, or Pete, took our number and gave it to their manager, Gerald Palmer, who started representing us. So, it was a good move on our front [to change the name]. But yeah, that name was very short-lived and kind of tongue-in-cheek, really.

You mentioned starting out playing all these old garage songs. What led to the transition from this noisy, garage rock sound to the dreamier, more dance-influenced rock of Whirlpool?

Well, it was just a natural progression in the way that we just wrote more songs. We got better and wrote more nuanced material that was slightly more, um, I suppose intelligent and less juvenile. We were 18 when we recorded that early stuff, so in the process of the two or three years following on from that we were just writing more. I suppose we were less scared of not needing to hide behind a wall of noise as much.

As you improved as musicians and songwriters, was there anything going on around you that helped shape that sound?

Well, I think that all of those bands that we were listening to, like Cocteau Twins, The Jesus & Mary Chain, The Velvet Underground, Echo & The Bunnymen, and even Bauhaus and Siouxsie & The Banshees, more ethereal and psychedelic music, was really what we felt we were doing. We wanted to make psychedelic music, but in a more modern way. Otherworldly drug influence music was what drew us in. We always loved ’60s harmonies like The Byrds, Love and The Beatles. So trying to add those kinds of harmonies was also a big change for us. We were also really into Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr, which combined noise and melodies, along with that early Primal Scream, which was more jangly Byrds-y stuff.

Also that was when the Yamaha FX500 came out, which in itself inspired us in some new ways. You could plug into it and get these really lush sounds, which, we couldn’t get from pedals at the time. It was more just basic stuff, like distortion, fuzz, chorus, and whatever. But the FX500 was a big shift for us. It was almost what Robin [Guthrie] had been doing for years, but he was using studio equipment rather than pedals. And this processor combined all that studio equipment into one box for guitars. I remember Neil [Halstead] and Christian [Savill] from Slowdive bought one as well, and one of the settings on that effect unit was basically Slowdive.

A few years ago a comp of Whirlpool’s original recordings was released. Do you feel that captures that transitional period for the band?

We didn’t release it and we wouldn’t have wanted it released. The manager I mentioned - Gerald Palmer - funded the recordings, and he owns the copyrights and the unfinished recordings, which we then went on to finish as Whirlpool. And those are literally just monitor mixes. When we finished for the day, we just laid down a tape of the rough mix. That’s what that album is, and it was never meant to be heard. And we can’t do anything about it.

That’s Space Age Recordings, the label that releases all of the Spacemen 3 albums, right?

Yes, that’s right. Most of them are the same recordings, but we then moved to a better studio, and worked on it again and recorded them the way they were meant to sound.

I’ve always wanted to ask you about the John Bonham beat in “Pearl.” How hard was it to clear that sample from “When the Levee Breaks”?

It wasn’t hard at all because it’s not got any musical elements to it. So it’s not really infringing copyright. Back then the drum beats weren’t something that you would get sued over. The one track we did have an issue with was “Mesmerise,” where we sampled “This Way Mary” by John Barry and Don Black. Our managers thought that no one had heard that stuff and that we didn’t need to clear it. And we were like, “Really? It literally starts exactly the same as the original, the first four bars of the track.” So, of course it was going to be found out, but both John Barry and Don Black were really cool about it. They basically didn’t do anything except say we want half of the royalties, which we didn’t have any issue with. We were happy to do that. It was actually quite generous of them. As far as break beats go, I still think even now they’re not really considered to be something that’s worth suing over because they don’t have any musical content to them.

What can you tell me about the cat on the cover of Whirlpool? Where did the concept come from to use the cat?

We basically brought the artwork to the record label. They had a guy that they were using called Marc Pechart, who went under the name of Albert Tupelo. He was a graphic designer that worked for the music press at the time. And so, we took the marbling and the photo from the first EP, and he basically did the layout and the band logo. Then the next one moved on from there, where we picked an El Greco painting, because Andy was studying art history at the time and he was really influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites. And then with the third EP, we took the same marbling, turned it yellow, and Marc introduced the picture of the cat for the first time.

For the album, Marc came up with another picture of his cat. It was a nice picture, but we felt that it needed something more to it. Andy and I were really influenced by The Graduate, which has a scene where Dustin Hoffman’s lying on an air mattress in the pool. The camera pans up away from him and it’s this deep, unnatural blue coloured water. We thought that that would be a good colour to sink the cat into. So Andy and I went to an image bank, which was basically just drawers full of coloured slides, and found what we thought was the perfect rippling, blue water image. We reproduced the image of the cat, but because it was a black and white photo, the black of the photo is water and that’s why it feels like it’s sunk into the water. So that was a collaboration Marc bringing the cat and then us sort of taking it where we wanted it to go.

Did you ever meet the Whirlpool cat?

No, we didn’t, actually. Unfortunately, Marc passed away last year. We hadn’t actually seen him since then and when we went to our second album, Blood Music, the label employed a graphics company, a team of graphics people working within a company. They were a bit like lawyers. We didn’t really have any contact with Marc again after that.

Rownderbowt, the comp you released back in 1996 with the close-up of the cat’s face, has always been one of my favourite album covers. Was that cover an outtake or an extension of the cover for Whirlpool?

So that record was released after we split up, and without any consultation with us. I believe that Russell was still in contact with one of the label managers, they were good friends. So I’ve got a feeling he might have had some involvement in it. But the first I heard of it was from someone who said to me, “Oh, have you seen that record?” And I was like, “No.” So we had no involvement in the sleeve. But obviously it was derived from that concept.

Oh wow, that’s really unfortunate. I wanted to ask you about the Reading Festival in 1991 when you performed after Nirvana, in your hometown, no less. What do you remember about that moment?

Well, we hadn’t played Reading for quite a while because we’d been up in London and we’d been pretty much touring the rest of the country until then. So the Reading Festival was a hometown show, but in front of 45,000 faithful. So it was pretty intimidating. We’d never played in front of that many people. Nirvana, at that point, hadn’t released Nevermind yet, but we were aware of them because we both recorded Velvet Underground covers for a compilation album. And so we’d heard that cover and a couple of tracks off Bleach. But we were really into bands like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Mudhoney, Tad, and all of the Sub Pop stuff too, so we knew them a little. But they weren’t really high on our radar, to be honest.

One thing I do remember is that Kurt threw himself in the air and into the drum kit. I think he busted his arm because of it too. So they came off 20 minutes early and we were suddenly told that we had to go on earlier than we’d expected. That was a bit of a shocker because we were still very young and quite intimidated by the whole thing. I do remember it was quite windy, and the weather wasn’t particularly nice. It was all a bit of a blur, but we thought it went really well. I think a lot of people in retrospect look at it as us being overshadowed by Nirvana’s performance, but at the time we didn’t feel like that at all. And oddly enough, about a month later, we went on tour in the States and played with them again. It was us, Smashing pumpkins and Nirvana on a bill in Boston for a radio station’s [WFNX] birthday party. So we hung out and played with them that night, but it was also the night that Nevermind came out.

Then towards the end of the tour, we were in L.A., and our record label was driving me and Andy somewhere with the top down along the Sunset Strip and “Smells Like Team Spirit” came on the radio. We were like, “Oh fuck! That sounds really slick!” Our memories of them was that they sounded really raw and almost like a demo. So my first impression was that it sounded really commercial. But then from that moment on it all just went crazy for them. And that was in the span of a month, all of that happened. And then they played again next year and it was a very big moment. They were the headliners.

With your second album, Blood Music, Chapterhouse went in a very different direction. What led you to dig deeper into a more electronic, beat-heavy sound?

Well, we had already used break beats on our first record. “Falling Down” had [The Soul Searchers’] “Ashley’s Roachclip” break on it, and at some of those early shows when we were playing with Spaceman 3 we did a cover of “Theme From S’Express,” which was basically an early UK house track. Oddly enough, that track was produced by Pascal Gabriel, who produced some tracks on our second album. Plus, I think we were all children of disco. In the late ’70s when we were eight, nine and ten, disco was in full force, and we were really into stuff like Sly & The Family Stone and Funkadelic. Back then indie music was very white, but black music was a big influence on us. I remember every disco record, because at that point your brain is just a sponge. So having a groove was never a big issue for us.

Also, Andy got much more interested in house music. Living down in the west country with his girlfriend, there was a big dance music scene there with a lot of raves in the fields and illegal parties cropping up, where you’d be told the location that afternoon. So he was very much more into the electronic side of dance. I wasn’t so much, but I really liked the chill out stuff like The Orb and what The KLF were doing, that post-post-rave stuff. For me, it was psychedelia, but I was also on a more glammy rock trip as well. So at the time, Andy and I were trying to balance two very different inputs and make an album as cohesive as possible. Frankly, we weren’t particularly cohesive as a band at that point though. We had spent a year recording songs for that album that were rejected by the label, all of which appeared in our box set as the “Courtyard Recordings.”

During that time, Andy was bringing in more four on the floor-type stuff, which I think now he kind of regrets. We’re both regretful over most of the production on that album. We were teamed up with producers that weren’t really fit for us. There are great songs on it, but it was strangely executed.

I get it. But at the same time, you guys went even deeper into electronic music and had Global Communication “retranslate” the album as Pentamerous Metamorphosis. How involved were you in that project?

Andy was living near Exeter, which was near where Global Communication - Mark [Pritchard] and Tom [Middleton] - were located. They also had a band called the Jedi Knights, which was more of a techno, almost jungle project, and they were even working with Aphex Twin at the time. They had a band called Reload as well. So Andy got to know them down there and he suggested that they remix one of the tracks off Blood Music. Then the label manager Karen said, “Why don’t they mix the whole album?” We thought that was a great idea, and gave them stems of every track on the album, and just said, “Do whatever you want with it.” I think even now they’d say that it was an amazing opportunity and allowed them to really put a lot of stuff they had brewing in them into a record. And they just did an amazing job, making this beautiful piece of music that is like listening to Blood Music through a dream or something. We loved it because it became a thing in its own right. It’s a record that wouldn’t have happened without us making it happen. And we’re really glad we did.

We’ve actually been in touch with Mark and Tom recently because we had an issue with our box set. Dedicated reissued that album a few years later as a Global Communication record, and somehow in the midst of Sony taking over BMG, they had it recorded as a Global Communication release. So they said, “You don’t own it.” To which we said, Umm, yeah, we do! We paid for it. It was a remix.” We actually gave Tom and Mark writing credits on that album, which is pretty unheard of for a remix. But we just felt they’d contributed so much that we spread the royalties five ways between me, Andy, Simon and Mark and Tom. To resolve this issue, Warp decided to reissue Pentamerous Metamorphosis, as well as their other album, at the same time we were putting the box set together. So, we just said, “Look, how about we just give you half of that record’s ownership, so we both equally own it, and then we can both put out reissues, and then it solves all the problems?” So we effectively gave them half of the ownership just to sort it all out. Otherwise it would have just been a massive legal nightmare. Mark also had remastered it and gave us that remastered version for our compilation too.

Blood Music was the second and final Chapterhouse album. What caused you to split?

Basically it was a cruel twist of fate. When we were recording Blood Music we did an instrumental track called “Deli,” which Simon and Ashley had written. We went into Youth from Killing Joke’s studio, who was working with The Orb at the time, so we were working with one of his protégés. He said that that one of youth’s friends from New York was over and recorded some of his poetry, so he pulled out the DAT, and started throwing it into the mix. He put loads of delay and reverb on it, and we asked, “Are you sure this guy’s gonna be cool with this?” And they were like, “Yeah, he’s a mate of Youth’s!” Anyway, after the album was finished, we were halfway through an American tour, and Arista and Clive Davis were putting a lot of energy behind promoting it in America and Canada. Of course, midway through the tour we got a legal cease and desist, saying that this guy was suing us for using his work. I guess he had fallen out with Youth in the meantime. So he was using it as a way of getting back at Youth, but in the end it was really just getting us.

So what happened was the label had put hundreds of thousands of pounds behind Blood Music, and invested in the album and the tour and all that kind of stuff, and they were asked to withdraw the album from the shelves. But they said, “Rather than that, we’ll just stop promoting it.” So after that tour it was over. They weren’t going to cut those samples out and repress it. So we were left in this position where we basically had a massive debt going into writing the third album. We did that for about a year or so, writing songs and songs and songs. This was all at the time of Britpop and grunge rising up, where those bands were charting. And the label just said, “Unless you give us a hit record, we’re not gonna put out anything else.” So we just kept on writing until the fun was just gone from it. We all said, “Look, they’re not gonna drop us, but we’re not gonna get paid the next advance. So let’s just quit.” So we just broke up because we didn’t see any future, really.

And the stuff that you were working on is what made it onto Chronology?

Yeah, the last CD of Chronology is 25-30 of those songs, which came from lots of different sources. Some were 4-track demos, some were done in 24-track studios, some were done on an 8-track reel to reel. We did quite a lot of stuff. I mastered it all to give it some kind of cohesive, quality of sound. So that represents what we were doing; it’s this weird mix of us trying to write something the label would actually release, but still holding on to what we were feeling at the time. It got to the beginning of 1995 and we just split up. We were asked to do an Icelandic festival [Uxi] in the summer, which also featured Björk and The Prodigy. So we reformed just to do that. It sounded like such a gas. But that was it.

Blood Music wasn’t particularly well received in the UK, but in North America it was really taking off. So it might have gone in another direction and we might have continued, but we’d already been getting so much pressure to be more commercial than we really wanted to be. When they first heard “Pearl” it was like there were dollar signs in their eyes. And after that they were asking for another “Pearl” all the time. Andy just felt that song was an anomaly. He didn’t write it to be a hit. During that period of Blood Music they sort of turned to me, because Andy was sort of out to lunch, raving in the west country. After turning down all of those tracks, it took me writing “We Are The Beautiful” and “She’s A Vision” for them to actually agree to let us record the album. So they were the catalysts to allow us to record quite a lot of the songs that were refused. But it took them hearing what they thought might be a hit for it to happen. I think there was a growing sense, even through Blood Music, where we were going down a route we didn’t really feel comfortable with.

When was the first time you heard Chapterhouse described as shoegaze?

Well, it was quite early on. It started out with a journalist called Steve Sutherland calling it “the scene that celebrates itself” in Melody Maker. And it was basically because we shared the same manager as Moose and Lush [Howard Gough], so we would hang out a lot with them and go to each other’s shows. We also knew Ride and Swervedriver from Oxford, because it was pretty close to Reading. Prior to that, they called it the “Thames Valley scene,” which was us, Ride, Swervedriver and Slowdive. So it was called that, then “the scene that celebrates itself,” and then Andy Ross, who was the head of Food Records, was watching Moose play, and the four of them were just standing there looking down. So he was the one that came up with the term “shoegaze.” Polly [Birkbeck], Food’s press officer, probably mentioned it to someone or other, and it got to the music press, and then they started using the term. And when there was a sort of shift in the music press after the initial sort of 1991 euphoria around everything, they suddenly turned on us, and there was a whole year of press mocking us. And because we were out socializing as well, journalists would see us all hanging out, they’d do some gossip columns taking the piss in some way.

So that was when I first heard the term shoegaze, and it was a detrimental comment, it was a dig. But it’s kind of been reclaimed over the years to become this genre, which I find quite amusing. We never took on that role as being a shoegaze band. To be perfectly honest, we aren’t particularly fans of shoegaze music. We don’t listen to it. But mainly because most of it was by contemporaries, who you don’t really become fans of because you’re mates. So yeah, it was a derogatory term that made it through to the people in the press and they just started using it. And now it’s kind of been broadened, where so many bands that weren’t even remotely considered that, are now considered that, like The Verve, Kitchens of Distinction, and Catherine Wheel. They even call The Jesus & Mary Chain and Cocteau Twins shoegaze.

Yeah, it’s weird to try and rewrite history by including those bands that predated it by many years. I think one could argue that they were prototypes and influences, but they were definitely not shoegaze. But anything with some distortion and reverb, whether it’s new or old, is called “shoegaze” today.

Or dream pop, which is even more repugnant.

A lot of bands I’ve interviewed from the 1990s have said that while the UK press often mistreated them in North America they were received with much more positivity and appreciation. Why do you think that is?

Well, the difference is that America has quite a broad network of college radio and commercial alternative stations. Whereas in the UK, the only radio station that would play anything like that was John Peel at like 10 o’clock at night. That was it. So that was only where you heard those bands. Otherwise, it was from reading the music press, which was very big then. Like, the NME and Melody Maker back then were the gospel. That’s where you found out about music. So ultimately, your view of music came through the eyes of journalists. Whereas in the States, people heard you first and they decided for themselves whether they liked you. And they were loyal. They weren’t influenced by some cynical hack that is trying to make a name for themselves. Basically, everyone in America and Canada was a fan because they liked what they heard. And so all of that bullshit didn’t matter to them.

Chapterhouse first reunited in 2008 with a tour in 2010, and then came back last year. What would you say have been the biggest differences between the two reunions?

Well, the biggest difference then was that we were doing it for the last blow of having a craic as friends, just having a good time. We were asked to do it a lot by that time, and we weren’t that interested in it, other than if it would be fun for us. Me, Andy and Ashley were all working as composers, and we were doing really well. We didn’t need the money, because the three of us were in-house composers [at Adelphoi Music], and committing to touring was gonna be a real problem. The company would effectively have to shut down, whilst we were away. So when we were asked to do it, we were like, “We’ll do the fun bits. If we can do a tour of America and a tour of Japan, where our families can come along, it covers all the costs, and we can have a good time, let’s do it. We’re not promoting a record, so let’s just do it for fun.” So that’s what that really was. And it was kind of an inconvenience to fit it in because we had to do the U.S. tour within two weekends. The same with Japan.

This time around, Andy, Ash and I have all gone freelance, so we’ve got a lot more time on our hands. Plus we’ve been talking about writing again. The box set amalgamated that in for us. I spent a few months mastering all those tracks and going through everything. We requested that Sony send us all of the archive and it kind of felt like this was a bit of an untold story here. We felt that the box set readdressed what might be a misrepresentation of the band, from those two albums. By putting it in chronological order, it would fill in the gaps of what was really going on and what we were about, rather than just this hit single. So it felt like maybe we could do that live as well.

When we reformed and toured in 2010, we felt we were playing better than we ever had before. So this time around, we’re doing it because we’ve been asked. We were still humming and hahing about this last year, and it took being asked to do these Slide Away festival dates in the States, where we knew we had six really big guaranteed shows, guaranteed fees that would cover our visa costs, which are incredibly extortionate. I think that cost us about $15,000, just to get our U.S. visas. I had spoken to Adam [Franklin] from Swervedriver, because they did [Slide Away] last year. We turned it down last year because we weren’t going to be ready to do it so they offered it to Swervedriver. I asked Adam about it and how it went, before we agreed, and he said it was perfect because it paid for their visas and they could play some headline shows around them. And so we said, “Let’s do that.” And then Nat from Sonic Cathedral said he’d love to put on a show in London. And that’s when we realized that Whirlpool would be 35 in April. So we were like, “How about we do it on the album’s birthday?” And then we thought if we’re doing one UK show, we might as well do some more. So that kind of grew, and now it’s turned into a Whirlpool 35 tour, where we’re playing South America, doing the festivals, Japan and Australia next year. We will probably be back in North America in May next year too because we have got yearlong visas. So we can come back again next year and take it through till the end of next year, hopefully. For us, because we’re freelance, it doesn’t really matter where our income comes from. So if we can do it through this, then great!

Does it feel like there is more interest and fanfare with this reunion compared to the previous one?

I think so, just because social media helps a lot more now. We get an impression of what people are interested in, and we’ve been working on our social media to promote all these shows, and then the algorithm grows, so you kind of start seeing the actual figures of how many people are interested, even the demographic they are in to analyze for ages and stuff. My daughter’s going to be 15 next week and all her friends are into this stuff.

How has it felt to play Whirlpool in its entirety?

It’s been interesting. Before we would do the track listing of a set to have its ups and downs and lifts, its’ heavy ones and quiet ones. But in doing the album, we start with “Breather,” and then “Pearl,” “Autosleeper,” and then “Treasure” - which are maybe the four strongest tracks we play. And then the rest of the album’s been working really well, but it feels so weird. We are doing a second set afterwards though. That will allow us to readdress the balance. Because when we toured last time, it wasn’t about the greatest hits, it was about all the songs we wanted to play, all our favourites. There are probably songs that people will want to hear that maybe we just aren’t interested in playing, you know? But a lot of our favourite tracks from B-sides and EPs, those are the things we want to be playing. The album takes about 45 minutes, and then we’re gonna do another set around the same length, which will encompass all the tracks that we really like to play. Also, we haven’t played “Mesmerise” since the early ‘90s. We didn’t play it last time around. But it’s going to be tricky for us to do the Slide Away shows because we’re going to have to compress everything into a shorter set. We can’t play Whirlpool in full at those shows. We’ll only be dropping maybe two tracks from it, and the rest will be intermingled into other stuff.

What do you think of this new generation of artists that are paying tribute to the bands of your generation?

I have done a bit of research for support bands on the North American tour. I was only searching for local bands in those specific towns, but we’ve also been sent requests from support bands, and Spotify will suggest stuff after I play something. My first impressions are that a lot of it sounds quite generic, like they’re trying to basically sound like Slowdive. Another side of it is that it doesn’t have a great deal of anything to grasp. Like, it doesn’t have an intent, other than to sound like shoegaze. I think we were a little outside that because we did challenge the boundaries of what might be considered shoegaze. I suppose Slowdive are so popular at the moment because they’re the essential oil of shoegaze. If you listen to any of their records, you know what you will get. I can see why it’s easier. You’re not challenged as much to bring in other elements. And I think a lot of the modern stuff I’m hearing isn’t anything that’s really triggering my intellect. I think music has to have something that’s challenging about it that somehow triggers your brain to think a little and not just be wallpaper. A lot of the modern shoegaze I’m hearing is just some sort of a wash, it doesn’t seem to have a mission.